How to Contemplate the Falsity of the Aggregate of Volitional Formations

The most foundational of the Buddhadharma is the Small Vehicle teaching, which requires cultivating the principle of the Four Noble Truths of suffering, origin, cessation, and path: contemplating the suffering and peril of the five aggregates (pañcaskandha), understanding the truth of the origin of the aggregates' suffering, knowing the truth of the cessation of the aggregates' suffering, and cultivating the truth of the path that extinguishes the suffering of the five aggregates. Then, one by one, contemplate the suffering, emptiness, impermanence, and selflessness of the five aggregates; when this is genuinely acknowledged in the depths of the mind, self-view (ātma-dṛṣṭi) is eliminated and the first fruit is realized, and the karma of the three evil paths is thereby extinguished. Carrying out contemplative practice (vipaśyanā-caryā) with wisdom in accordance with the Buddha's teachings does not depart from the practice of the precepts, nor from the practice of meditative concentration (samādhi), nor from merit and favorable conditions.

In contemplative practice, the main difficulty is that the delusiveness of the aggregate of consciousness (vijñāna) is not easy to contemplate. In particular, the mind consciousness is extremely deep and subtle, and also very extensive. It is already no easy task to identify all the functions of the mind consciousness in full and then negate them one by one, and to acknowledge the delusiveness of the functions of these consciousness-minds. If one can gain a deep and subtle understanding of the nature of the consciousness mind, then locate all the places where the consciousness mind operates, and further contemplate its arising-ceasing, delusive nature, one can be confident of thoroughly eliminating self-view. The realms of the mind consciousness are very extensive. People can generally easily recognize that the distracted mind consciousness that gives rise to afflictions is impermanent and delusive, yet they often fail to realize that when the mind consciousness enters samādhi, becoming deep, subtle, and pure, free of delusive thoughts and without mental activity, that state is also impermanent and delusive. This is the mind consciousness's state of concentration, not the unchanging realm of the true mind.

Since it is a state, a state is a realm of mental sense-objects; the mental sense-object realm is the object discerned by the mind consciousness. Then the one who knows one has entered samādhi and entered the state of concentration—the one knowing that state of concentration is the mind consciousness, a conditioned, impermanent dharma, not the self, not real. Because after emerging from samādhi the state of concentration no longer exists, and thoughts arise once again—such a dharma, subject to change, to arising and ceasing, is a delusive dharma, not a real and unchanging dharma. The Sixth Patriarch said: 那伽常在定，无有不定时。The true mind is forever in samādhi; there is no emerging from samādhi and no entering samādhi, no increase, decrease, or change.

The Buddha said in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra: 内守悠闲，犹是法尘分别影事。 What the Buddha spoke of is precisely this situation of entering samādhi. He, the World-Honored One, long ago foresaw that sentient beings would find it difficult to distinguish the true from the false, especially in the Dharma-ending age, when sentient beings have meager merit (alpa-puṇya) and blazing wrong views (mithyā-dṛṣṭi) and cannot clearly recognize and discern the genuine from the false. For this reason the World-Honored One specially gave this pointer in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, as a warning to later generations.