Will One Still Regress After Enlightenment?

Regarding whether one can regress after enlightenment, two questions are involved here. One question is whether the enlightenment is genuine or false, how the enlightenment occurred, and what the process of enlightenment was like. The other question is what is meant by "regression"—regressing to where, and turning toward what.

As for the first question, the concept of enlightenment means opening one's own mind and awakening to the true mind, the self-nature, the tathāgatagarbha. Opening one's own mind is extremely difficult. Since beginningless kalpas, we have always taken the five aggregates of body and mind to be a real self, grasping at them incessantly, with intense craving and attachment. To turn around such a mind of craving and attachment, to have the sixth and seventh consciousnesses deny the five aggregates of body and mind and instead acknowledge a true mind, the tathāgatagarbha—something one has never met before, utterly unfamiliar and beyond one's grasp—this difficulty is enormous. This is something only a great man of resolve can accomplish. It requires considerable good roots and merit, considerable courage and perseverance, to step by step subdue the mind's ingrained wrong views and constantly negate the cognitive habits accumulated over beginningless kalpas. One must continually struggle against old ideological biases until one has completely denied one's own five aggregates of body and mind, and established the correct view that within the body there is an unborn, real true mind, the tathāgatagarbha, as the self. Only when the mind's nature has been subdued and one has attained the compliant acquiescence regarding the true mind and self-nature can the conditions arise for finding and realizing the true mind, the tathāgatagarbha.

Before finding and realizing the tathāgatagarbha, one needs to engage in contemplative practice (vipaśyanā-caryā) on the illusory, unreal nature of the five aggregates of body and mind, constantly negating them and constantly striking them down, until the false view (mithyā-dṛṣṭi) of taking the five aggregates of body and mind as self is eliminated. Only then can one truly recognize the true mind and self-nature. In other words, the five aggregates of body and mind must fall down and die, so that within the corpse one can find that lively, vibrant self-nature, the tathāgatagarbha. There must be a death in order to realize that full-of-life one; otherwise, if one still takes a dead person for a living person, it is impossible to recognize the truly great living one. Therefore, before enlightenment one must eliminate self-view (ātma-dṛṣṭi). Even if one finds the true mind, the tathāgatagarbha, an hour, a day, or a few days after eliminating self-view, it is still a matter of first eliminating self-view, letting the five aggregates of body and mind die, and only then realizing the true mind of the genuine tathāgatagarbha. Without this process of eliminating self-view, true awakening to the true mind is impossible—that would be a false enlightenment, with the mind never having been opened.

As for the other question: ordinary beings have never awakened since beginningless kalpas, so the first awakening must be preceded by a long process of investigation. In this process, the seven factors of enlightenment must all be aroused and be complete; the eightfold noble path must also be cultivated to completion; all thirty-seven aids to the path must be well cultivated and all accomplished; and the conditions for the bodhisattva's six pāramitās must also all be fulfilled, with the mind's nature softened and tamed, initially possessing the quality and disposition of a Mahāyāna bodhisattva—only then can one awaken to the true mind and become a genuine,名副其实 bodhisattva in the true sense of the word. Only such an enlightened person has a true awakening, not a false one. A person with true awakening, one who obtained the fruit through a long and arduous process of investigation, will cherish and value this hard-won fruit immensely, and will not regress from the true mind, the self-nature, the tathāgatagarbha.

As for the second question, concerning regression: regression means withdrawing from the true mind, the tathāgatagarbha—no longer acknowledging the tathāgatagarbha as the true, unborn and unceasing mind—and returning to one's former view of taking the functions and activities of the five aggregates as real, as an imperishable self. One turns from the true mind back to the deluded mind of the seven consciousnesses, continuing to take the deluded as true.

The main reason this situation arises is that what was awakened to was not genuine, and the views are not firmly established. One reason is that the process of eliminating self-view was never gone through: the self-view of taking the five aggregates as self was not eliminated, the five aggregates did not die, or did not die thoroughly.

Another reason is the absence of a long process of investigating the tathāgatagarbha, so that one never gained an increasingly clear and thorough understanding of it, never attained acquiescence in the tathāgatagarbha's selfless nature, never attained acquiescence in the tathāgatagarbha's formless, signless, silent mechanism of operation. Regarding the tathāgatagarbha, it is like looking at flowers through fog—at most it is a mere intellectual understanding; there has been no genuine finding and realization of the tathāgatagarbha at all. Nor can one observe the tathāgatagarbha's operation upon the five aggregates of body and mind, nor observe its purity, selflessness, and reality within the functioning of the five aggregates of body and mind.

Therefore, this hazy, vague cognition of the tathāgatagarbha is not solid; it cannot shake one's inner being, and so one cannot treasure the true mind, the self-nature, the tathāgatagarbha, and one goes back to grasping the seemingly real functions and activities of the five aggregates as self. This is regression, and the cause of regression. With a genuine, solid awakening to the true mind, where the five aggregates have died thoroughly and what was awakened to is utterly real, one can observe directly the operation of the true mind and will no longer grasp at the functions and activities of the five aggregates. Thus no matter who tries to persuade or mislead, one will not regress from the tathāgatagarbha and unsurpassed bodhi.