No Distinction of Inner and Outer Marks in the Mind-Consciousness

When a doctor treats a patient and restores the patient's physical health, is it the doctor's external object-aspect (nimitta) or internal object-aspect that is changed? The patient's physical body is an external object-aspect to the doctor; when the patient's body becomes healthy, it is the doctor's external object-aspect that has changed, and the internal object-aspect changes in accordance with the change in the external object-aspect.

Changing another person's mind, however, belongs to changing someone else's mind, causing the views, thoughts, concepts, attitudes, and so forth in that mind to change. Consciousness is only distinguished by which sentient being it belongs to; it is not divided into internal and external. Consciousness is formless and without marks; it does not enter another person's supreme faculty (indriya) through transmission, and therefore, unlike material form, it is not divided into internal and external object-aspects. Consciousness is not jointly manifested by many tathāgatagarbhas; it is born individually by each sentient being's own tathāgatagarbha, and is not something shared in common; hence there is no notion of internal and external. For consciousness to change means that its cognition, feelings, intentions, attitudes, thoughts, decisions, mental states, mental factors (caittas), and so forth have undergone change.