Does the manas possess the power of judgment?

Where there is wisdom, there is judgment. Deliberation (manana) is judgment; the process of deliberation is the process of judgment, and the result of deliberation is making a choice—without judgment, no choice can be made. Because the manas is the consciousness that takes charge, governing the operation of the entire five-aggregate body, without the power of judgment it could not govern the bodily, verbal, and mental actions of the five-aggregate body, and thus it could not be the consciousness that takes charge. Then who would take charge? The manas's power of judgment is indispensable; the only questions are whether its judgment is great or small, and whether it is accurate or not.

There are such differences as: on which dharmas the manas has great judgment and on which it has little; when its judgment is great and accurate, and when it is small and less accurate; and under what circumstances it relies on the discernment of the six consciousnesses to make judgments, and under what circumstances it can judge without relying on the discernment of the six consciousnesses. On dharmas that the manas discerns clearly, its power of judgment is great, because clear discernment makes judgment easy, enabling quick and accurate judgment; if the manas's discernment is unclear, it cannot judge, or cannot judge quickly and accurately. With dharmas the manas cannot comprehend, it is either hesitant or inaccurate in judgment, and thus the decisions made by the manas are blind and mistaken. When the manas's choices are mistaken, the six consciousnesses' execution will also be mistaken.

But we can observe: in worldly affairs, are sentient beings' choices all mistaken and blind? Clearly not—there are many times when they are correct, and in fact most of the time they should be reasonable and appropriate. This shows that the manas does possess the power of judgment, and it is not a small one. There do exist cases where it cannot judge, cases of indecision, and even more so, cases of misjudgment. This is related to the manas's own wisdom and to its power of determination (adhimokṣa).

In the manas's judgment, on the one hand, it judges directly based on the dharmas themselves: the more familiar the dharma is to the manas, and the more experience it has had with it, the easier it is for the manas to judge on its own; the more momentous and urgent the dharma, the easier it is for the manas to judge on its own and quickly, after which it makes a choice, and the six consciousnesses arise to carry it out. If the manas cannot comprehend the objective dharmas it encounters, it will be unable to make quick and accurate judgments. On the other hand, the manas's discernment is coarse; if it wishes to discern in detail, it must rely on the discernment of the six consciousnesses, relying on the mind consciousness's thinking, analysis, study, inference, and judgment, and then, based on the information transmitted by the six consciousnesses, it makes its own independent deliberation and judgment, and the six consciousnesses arise to execute it. If the manas cannot comprehend what the six consciousnesses discern, or cannot comprehend what the mind consciousness has thought through, analyzed, understood, and judged, it likewise cannot make judgments and choices—or its judgments and choices are mistaken, and the six consciousnesses then execute them mistakenly.