Can Enlightenment Regress?

Regarding whether one can regress after enlightenment, this involves two issues. The first issue is whether the enlightenment is genuine or false, how enlightenment is attained, and the process of enlightenment. The second issue is what constitutes regression, where one regresses to, and what one turns toward.

The first issue concerns the concept of enlightenment, which means opening one’s own mind and realizing the true self-nature, the Tathagatagarbha. Opening one’s own mind is extremely difficult. Since beginningless time, we have continuously regarded the five aggregates (form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness) as a real and substantial self, clinging to them incessantly with deep attachment and fixation. To reverse this mindset—to make the sixth and seventh consciousnesses deny the five aggregates and instead recognize a true mind, the Tathagatagarbha, which they have never encountered before and which feels utterly unfamiliar and ungraspable—is an immense challenge. This task is beyond the reach of anyone but a person of great resolve. It requires considerable good roots and merit, as well as immense courage and perseverance, to gradually subdue the mind’s inherent erroneous views, continuously negate the cognitive habits accumulated over countless eons, and persistently battle against ingrained biases and prejudices. Only when one has completely denied the five aggregates as the self and established the correct view that within the body resides the true, deathless mind—the Tathagatagarbha—as the real self, and only when the mind has been tamed to attain pliant acquiescence toward the true self-nature, can one have the conditions to find and realize the true mind, the Tathagatagarbha.

Before realizing the Tathagatagarbha, one must contemplate the illusory and insubstantial nature of the five aggregates, continuously negating them and overthrowing them until the perverted view that the five aggregates constitute the self is severed. Only then can one genuinely recognize the true self-nature. In other words, the five aggregates must fall and die before one can find within the “corpse” that vibrant, lively self-nature, the Tathagatagarbha. There must be a “death” before one can realize that “vigorous life.” Otherwise, mistaking a corpse for a living person, one will never recognize the true living being. Therefore, before enlightenment, one must sever the view of self. Whether one realizes the true mind, the Tathagatagarbha, an hour, a day, or several days after severing the view of self, the sequence remains: first sever the view of self, let the five aggregates “die,” and only then realize the true Tathagatagarbha mind. Without this process of severing the view of self, true enlightenment is impossible; it would be a false enlightenment, and the mind would remain unopened.

The other issue is that ordinary beings, since beginningless time, have never been enlightened. The first enlightenment must involve a prolonged process of investigation. During this process, the seven factors of enlightenment must all arise and be fully developed; the eightfold noble path must be cultivated to completion; the thirty-seven aids to enlightenment must all be perfected and achieved; and the conditions of the six paramitas of a bodhisattva must all be fulfilled. Only when the mind has been tamed to become gentle and pliant, and one has preliminarily developed the qualities and mindset of a Mahayana bodhisattva, can one attain enlightenment of the mind and become a true, worthy bodhisattva. Only those who become enlightened in this way have genuine enlightenment, not false enlightenment. Those who are genuinely enlightened, having attained the fruit through long and arduous investigation, will cherish and value this hard-won fruit deeply and will not regress from the true self-nature, the Tathagatagarbha.

The second issue concerns regression. Regression means retreating from the true mind, the Tathagatagarbha, no longer recognizing it as the true, deathless mind, and instead reverting to the previous view that regards the functions and activities of the five aggregates as real and deathless, as the self. It means turning from the true mind back to the deluded mind of the seventh consciousness, continuing to mistake the false for the true.

The primary reason for this regression is that the enlightenment was not genuine, and the understanding was not firm. One reason is the lack of the process of severing the view of self: the view that the five aggregates constitute the self was not eliminated; the five aggregates did not “die,” or at least did not “die” thoroughly.

Another reason is the absence of a prolonged investigation into the Tathagatagarbha. Without an increasingly clear and thorough understanding of the Tathagatagarbha, without acquiescing to its selfless nature, and without acquiescing to its formless, featureless, and inconspicuous mode of operation, one’s perception of the Tathagatagarbha remains hazy, like viewing flowers through fog. At best, it is merely an intellectual understanding; one has never truly found or realized the Tathagatagarbha. Nor can one observe the Tathagatagarbha’s operation within the five aggregates, its purity, selflessness, and true reality in the functioning of the five aggregates.

Therefore, this vague, indistinct understanding of the Tathagatagarbha lacks substance and fails to deeply shake one’s inner being. Consequently, one cannot treasure and cherish the true self-nature, the Tathagatagarbha, and can only cling again to the seemingly real functions and activities of the five aggregates as the self. This is regression and its cause. Genuine, solid enlightenment of the mind, where the five aggregates have “died” thoroughly and the realization is profoundly real, enables one to observe the true mind’s operation directly and no longer cling to the functions of the five aggregates. Thus, no matter who tries to persuade or mislead, one will never regress from the unsurpassed bodhi of the Tathagatagarbha.