In Buddhism, the human personality is considered to
be made up of five groups (skandhas)``, namely, Form, Feeling,
Perception, Mental Formation and Consciousness. In the grouping of
Consciousness, six kinds are classified. They are the consciousness
of Sight, Hearing, Smell, Taste, sense of Touch and Mental or
Intellectual consciousness.
Thus the object of the seventh class of
consciousness (manas) is not the sense world, but the ever flowing
stream of becoming or our depth consciousness, which is neither
limited by birth and death nor by individual form of appearance.
Birth and death are only the doors between one life and another
with the continuous stream of consciousness flowing through them.
This consciousness contained on its surface the causally
conditioned state of existence and also the sum total of all
experiences of a beginningless past. To the Vijnanavadins, this is
the eighth, the Universal or Storehouse Consciousness
(alaya-vijnana). The sixth consciousness which is term the
Intellectual or Empirical consciousness (mano-vijnana), sort and judges the result of the five
kind of sense consciousness, followed by attraction or repulsion
and the illusion of our objective world.
The eighth, the Universal Consciousness is compared
to the ocean, which on the surface, current and wave forms, while
its depth remains motionless, pure and clear. It transcends all
limits, it is pure, unchanging, undisturbed by our ego, without
distinctions, desires and aversions.
Between the Universal Consciousness and the
individual Intellectual Consciousness is the Spiritual
Consciousness (manas), which takes part in both sides. It is the
centre of balance and reference for these two consciousnesses and
is of double characteristic. It is the cause for the conception of
egohood in the unenlightened individual being who mistake this
relative point for the real and permanent centre of his
personality. It is our intellect, our mental consciousness
(mano-vijnana) which conceives our seventh consciousness (manas) as
our Ego. In this state, it is termed the ‘defiled mind’, the nature
of which consists in an uninterrupted process of ego creating
thoughts and discrimination. On the positive side, the intuitive
side of manas is one with the Universal Consciousness participating
in Transcendental Intelligence. When manas is directed from the
Universal Consciousness towards the individual or self
consciousness, it becomes a source of error. When directed from the
Empirical towards the Universal Consciousness, it becomes a source
of highest knowledge.
This can be compared to the vision of a man, who
observes the different forms and colors of a landscape and feel
himself different from it. There is the ‘I’ and the object
observed. The other, is a vision of another who gazes into the vast
expense of space or heaven, which free him of all object perception
and thus from the awareness of his own self as he is only conscious
of the infinity of space. The ‘I’ here loses its position through a
lack of contrast or opposite with nothing to grasp or differentiate
itself.
Selfhood and Universe are only the inside and
outside of the same illusion. The realization of oneness and
completeness has the characteristics of universality and has all
the characteristic of individual experience without presuming an
ego entity. It also escaped the dualistic concept of unity and
plurality of ‘I’ and ‘not I’
Manas is that which either binds us to the world of
the senses or which liberates us from it. It is the principle through which the Universal
consciousness experiences itself and through which it descends into
the multiplicity of things, into the differentiation of senses and
the sense objects, out of which arises the experience of the
material world, the process of becoming, the progressive limitation
of the unlimited. Liberation hence consists in the reversal of this
process, in the progressive annihilation of these limitations.
Annihilation here does not mean the suppression of sense
consciousness, but a new attitude towards them, consisting in the
removal of arbitrary discriminations, attachments and prejudices,
i.e., the elimination of karmic formations which create the
illusion of samsara, of birth and death. When there is a turning
away from the outside world of objects to the inner world of
oneness and completeness we have enter into the stream of
liberation.
A bridge is shown here which leads from the ordinary
world of the sense perception to the realm of timeless knowledge.
In the process of enlightenment the five groups of form, feeling,
perception, mental formation and consciousness are transformed into
the corresponding qualities of Enlightenment consciousness
(bodhicitta).
With the knowledge and realization of the teaching
(dharma), the narrow ego bound individual consciousness grow into
the state of cosmic consciousness, represented by the figure of
Vairocana, the Radiating One, the Illuminator. Form is converted
into the universal body in which the forms of all things are
potentially present, according to their true nature, as the
exponents of Sunyata or egolessness, by the consciousness of the
Mirror like Wisdom, which reflects the forms of all things without
clinging, without being touched or moved by them. It is represented
by the figure of Aksobhya. Here, one destroyed the subject and the
subjective conception of the world in favor of the
object.
Similarly, self centre feeling is converted into the
feeling for others, into compassion for all that lives,
essentially, looking at all beings as identical to oneself through
the Wisdom of Equality, as embodied in the figure of Ratnasambhava.
We destroy the object, the separating differentiation of the outer
world of appearance in favor of the subject.
Perception and Intellectual discrimination are
converted into transcendental faculty of inner vision in the
practice of meditation. It is the special function of Amitabha, the
Dhyani Buddha of Infinite Light, the Wisdom of Discriminating Clear
Vision. Clear Vision here is not concerned with intellectual
analysis, but with Intuitive clear vision, uninfluenced by logical
or conceptual discriminations. It is a direct state of spiritual
awareness. We destroy the subject and the object in the final
experience of Emptiness.
On the basis of such visions, the ego-bound karma
creating mental formation is converted into the karma free activity
of the saint, whose life is no more motivated by desire or
attachment but by universal compassion, embodied in the figure of
Amoghasiddhi, the Lord of the All Accomplishing Wisdom.
We neither destroy the subject nor the
object. We have reached the ultimate freedom and return to this
world for the benefit of all living being.
As one Zen master said: Before one studies Zen the
mountains are mountains and the water are water. If one get an
insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a master,
then to him the mountains are no more mountains and the water are
no more water; but later when he have attained satori, the
mountains are again mountains and the water are again
water.