Black Box World (41)

When we are knocked unconscious, the nature of seeing, hearing, knowing, and perceiving is gone; we can no longer see, hear, smell, taste, touch, or discriminate, and thus cannot know all dharmas. But the flower is still there, and others can see it. The sounds of wind and rain outside are still there, and others can hear them; others can smell the fragrance of flowers outside, taste the delicious food outside, and feel the warm sunshine outside. Others can each perceive their own inner object-aspect (nimitta), and it is the same in death, in meditative absorption, and in sleep. When we look at a flower, the beautiful flower itself has no mind intending to make us infatuated with it; it is our own seven consciousnesses that go to discriminate it, think about it, judge it, and admire it, thereby giving rise to feelings of liking and aversion. Likewise, the myriad dharmas of heaven and earth have no mind to make us feel joy, anger, sorrow, or happiness; it is our own deluded mind that gives rise to attachment to all things. Wine has no mind to intoxicate people; it is the drinker who cannot hold his liquor and simply gets drunk by himself.

The external sense objects have no mind to confuse us; when sense objects manifest in our mind, they are like shadows. It is our own seven consciousnesses stirring, insisting on discriminating them, giving rise to all kinds of thoughts and emotions, making our own mind unsettled and generating afflictions by ourselves. And these consciousnesses—if the eighth consciousness did not supply them with consciousness-seeds, they could not exist either. Once the seeds are supplied, these minds become lively and active, with all kinds of discriminations, all kinds of views, all kinds of emotions, producing all kinds of bodily, verbal, and mental actions. It is like a shadow-puppet show: as soon as someone pulls the string, the puppet can perform. The several consciousness-minds are just like this—utterly unreal. From this we can see how illusory our consciousness-minds are, how illusory and unreal our five aggregates (pañca-skandha) are; they merely toss about on the surface of the eighth consciousness. Therefore, when we perceive marks, the marks are illusory, and the seeing is also illusory; there is no such thing as perceiving marks—it is merely a diseased eye gazing at flowers in the sky. I urge my fellow beings to recognize the true and the false, no longer be deluded and attached, return to self-nature (svabhāva), and attain great liberation soon!