by Ben Connelly
Initial thought and analysis can be similarly afflictive or not. If you wake up and think, “I will offer myself today to the possibility of universal well-being,” I think that’s beneficial. If you are singing a soothing sleepytime song for your baby and you suddenly, anxiously think, “I have way too much work to do tomorrow,” that initial thought is probably not helping anyone. Analysis is tricky. My advice is to pay attention, learn to discern whether the way you are analyzing is helpful or not. For instance, we often use analysis to try and mask the pain of experience. Instead of feeling the emotional sting of another’s comment, we spend a lot of time thinking about what we should have said in response, trying to judge the other person’s motivations, or figure out how to control him or her. This is very rarely helpful. However, if two organizations want to partner to provide food for people with very low incomes, if you want to organize a party for a loved one’s birthday, and if this book is to reach your hands, analysis is beneficial and necessary.
It is common and reasonable for people to argue that some, many, or even all of the mental factors listed by Vasubandhu as beneficial or afflictive can actually, like the four in this verse, be both, depending on the circumstance. As I’ve said, I’m not going to give an explanation of each of the fifty-five factors in this text. However, I will briefly address those that seem to create the most debate: faith and doubt.
Faith is listed by Vasubandhu as beneficial. But it seems to me that if faith means believing ideas or ideologies for which there is no evidence and holding fast to those beliefs, it is harmful. Unquestioning faith in an ideology is what we would call “wrong view”—Mahayana Buddhism emphasizes this, over and over again—and wrong view is indeed one of the afflictive factors in this text. Instead, let me suggest that faith here means trusting that the alleviation of suffering is possible and a feeling of trust in things, as they are, beyond any ideas, conceptions, or ideology you may have. This faith is about trusting what is, and also believing that it is worthwhile to make your best effort in this moment for the benefit of everything.
Doubt, an afflictive factor, refers to a kind of hopelessness and anxiety: a loss of the sense that your effort has any value for the promotion of well-being, and an underlying fear or unease with the way things are. It is an underlying doubt that leaves so many people glued to their computer screens playing games, or constantly refreshing the same pages, trying to distract themselves from a vague unconscious disquiet, and squandering the amazing opportunity of this moment. Of course, doubt, if it means questioning things, can be very helpful. It’s clear that Vasubandhu believed this; he devoted his life to questioning, investigating, and refining the ways of thinking about things that he deemed most beneficial. In his later years, he left his commitment to pure Abhidharma thought, of which he was a great and recognized master, and found a way to bring it together with the unknowability of the Mahayana view of wisdom. But this kind of doubt is actually faith; imagine the kind of faith it would take for the pope to become a Unitarian, or for the great cellist Yo-Yo Ma to start singing for a punk rock band—this is the kind of “doubt” that Vasubandhu embodied.
We will see as we enter the second half of Vasubandhu’s work that all these dualities are not ultimately true, that faith and doubt, remorse, anger, and nonviolence are all just names we create that don’t really show us reality. Whether we call what’s in your mind this moment afflictive or beneficial, it is always an inseparable part of the vast, unknowable unfolding, beyond good and bad, just-as-it-is-ness. However, Vasubandhu and the Early Buddhist texts we have agree that these names and distinctions can help us shed the patterns that keep us bound in suffering. So think about them and use them, but hold them with some lightness.
15
The Water and the Waves
The five sense consciousnesses arise on the root consciousness together or separately,
Depending on conditions, like waves arise on water. || 15 ||
For the last several verses Vasubandhu has been teaching about the six sense consciousnesses; here and in the next verse he divides these six into mind and the remaining five senses: eye, ears, nose, tongue, and touch. This verse is about the relationship between this moment of sensory data and the store consciousness, which he calls here the root consciousness. What Vasubandhu points to here, and expands upon in verse 17, is the notion that what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch, and what we generally believe to be the raw, inarguable facts of existence are, in fact, deeply conditioned by our karma. He gives us a classic metaphor to apply to our sensory experiences: they are individual waves and are simply manifestations of the ocean. The Lankavatara Sutra states, in Francis Cook’s translation:
Just as the ocean encounters the condition of wind and produces many waves, but rolls on uninterrupted, so it is with the ocean of alaya battered by the wind of objects and perpetually producing the waves of various consciousnesses . . . rolling on uninterrupted just as it is.
Shunryu Suzuki uses a metaphor of a movie and a screen to beautifully relate the idea that the five senses arise on the root consciousness. What we take to be reality is like a movie, but we are generally unaware that there is a screen. He says, “If you want to enjoy the movie, you should know that it is the combination of film and light and white screen, and that the most important thing is to have a plain, white screen.” If your screen is smudged, the movie will be colored as well. The path laid forth by Vasubandhu is one where the karmic processes in the storehouse are overturned at their root, where they create no obscurations, where the root consciousness is made into a plain white screen. This verse is about knowing that there is a screen—an important step.
Have you ever been in a lengthy, heated argument and been able to distinctly recall someone saying something that they now categorically deny they said? We can perhaps chalk such disagreements up to people being disingenuous or to failures of memory, but even in the moment, our senses are not giving us facts but conditioned impressions. In a celebrated recent experiment, subjects were invited to test their concentration by counting the number of passes made by a group of people throwing a basketball in a short film. Many people were able to accurately count the number of passes, but, amazingly, large numbers of them did not notice a person moonwalking across the middle of the screen in a bear suit. When asked afterward about it, they’d deny it ever occurred! Their concentration on the ball completely obscured a moonwalking bear. Surfers see variations in water I can’t even see when they explain them to me. Americans briefly shown a series of photographs of people of holding either a wallet or a gun are often mistaken about what is in the person’s hands, and they are much more likely to think black people are holding guns when they are not. We do not see the world; we see a projection of the interaction of our senses, our mental conditioning, and, perhaps, some ultimately unknowable external conditions.
Remember though, that Vasubandhu and Buddhism in general are pragmatic. This teaching is not about denying that external reality exists. It is about understanding what and how we know for the purpose of helping us to cultivate and manifest the intention to alleviate suffering. Vasubandhu says the five senses arise like waves on the water of the root consciousness. A sailor who ignores the waves is going to be in deep trouble. It’s good to attend to the waves and engage in discernment. If you see charcoal clouds massing on the horizon and the wind is starting to whip up from the East, get inside, or get a raincoat. If you see a red flush forming on your colleague’s cheeks and her voice is rising in tone, volume, and pace, attend to what she is saying, how she feels, and your own emotions and thoughts arising. These waves are here in the moment and they are a part of what we are encouraged to attend to mindfully in these verses.
We are also encouraged to attend to the ocean, to the fact that the waves are part of a vast, unfolding interdependence, deeply manifesting our past conditioning by creating our present-moment way of seeing. If you see a coconut falling out of a tree toward your head, of cour
se, there’s no need or time to direct your attention to the ocean—just get out of the way! However when you feel anxious or threatened at work or at home, it can be very helpful to remember that what you believe to be real, true sensory information about a threat is also a manifestation of your habits of seeing. This awareness—of the screen, the ocean, the storehouse—is here to help us lighten up a little bit, to soften, to have some compassion for ourselves, conditioned beings, to help us see the vast power our conditioning, and find compassion and openness about everything. This is a common thread in Buddhist teaching. Here we are encouraged to see that even at the very most raw and apparently “real” level of our experience—sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch—what we experience is deeply, karmically conditioned. Ultimately, we do not know what is.
16
On Thinking
Thought consciousness always manifests except in the realm of no-thought,
The two thought-free meditation states, unconsciousness, and thought-free sleep. || 16 ||
This verse marks the end of Vasubandhu’s explication of the eight-consciousnesses model. As he did with his teachings on the store consciousness and manas, he ends his description of the six sense consciousnesses by explaining the conditions in which they are not found.
This verse deals with some technical aspects of Abhidharma thought. Since my purpose in this book is to focus on how these verses show us a way to practice, I will give a brief explanation and move on.
We have translated the term mano as “thought consciousness” here, which in this case is not used to describe a series of words in the mind. It is often called “mind,” “awareness,” or “knowing.” Vasubandhu’s understanding is partly based on the Early Buddhist model of the eighteen dhatus, or realms, in which there are six sense organs, each accompanied by a sense consciousness and a sense object. This makes six sets of three, a total of eighteen dhatus. There is eye, eye consciousness, and object of sight; then ear, ear consciousness, and sound, etc. Where things get confusing is with mind.
Our old friend manas, in this case, is the mind, the sense base. Mano is thought consciousness, and the sense objects are what we usually think of as thoughts—and the objects of the other five senses. Recall that in verse 5, manas is defined as “consisting of thinking.” Mano, thought consciousness, functions as a kind of aggregator of what appears in the six consciousnesses. When you are practicing meditation and you are aware of light flickering on the wall, the sound of wind, and thoughts about needing to mow the lawn, each of those things you are aware of is a mind object, though the light and the sound are also simultaneously objects of their respective sense organs. Mano is that which is aware of the light and wind and thoughts, and manas is the “sense organ” on which that awareness is based. So when we say “thought consciousness,” here we’re talking about awareness, or what is known in some Buddhist texts as “knowing.”
EIGHTEEN DHATUS
Organ /
Sense Base
Consciousness
Sense Object
Eye
Eye Consciousness
Sight
Ear
Ear Consciousness
Sound
Nose
Nose Consciousness
Smell
Tongue
Tongue Consciousness
Taste
Body
Body Consciousness
Touch
Manas
Mano / Thought Consciousness
Thought—and all the other sense objects
This verse tells us that this awareness, knowing, mind, or thought consciousness always manifests except in a few circumstances: the realm of no thought, the two thought-free meditation states, unconsciousness, and thought-free sleep. Sometimes when we sleep, we dream, which means thought consciousness manifests, but sometimes there is no thought consciousness; this is thought-free sleep. It is also sometimes true that there is no awareness when one is in a coma, under the influence of powerful drugs, or unconscious for some other reason. There are also states of deep meditation where no awareness appears. These are the two specific meditation states that Vasubandhu references here. To be clear, this not does describe a state of meditation where there are no words moving through your mind, but there is awareness. Only when there is no awareness at all is one in thought-free meditation.
The reference to “the realm of no-thought” is the only thing in the “Thirty Verses” that sits outside of the realm of twenty-first-century rational thought. This is a plane of existence occupied by beings who have no thought at any time. In Buddhist literature, there are many realms: hells, heavens, the realms of fighting spirits and animals, of humans, as well as the realm of no-thought. It is popular in the modern world to explain these as psychological realms or archetypal realms. If one reads ancient Indian texts, however, it seems quite clear that people understood these as literal realms in which one could be reborn. Although a great deal of the “Thirty Verses” is devoted to working with karma, at no other point do they present anything explicitly pertaining to rebirth. All the teachings in this work, so far, have been perfectly understandable and applicable to practicing to be well and promote wellness in this very life. Yet, there is this mention of the realm of no-thought. I’ll leave the subject of rebirth to others and just ask this: If what we’re seeing is a projection of our karma and we cannot ultimately know what the “external” world is, as Vasubandhu states, does it really matter whether the realm of no-thought is a separate plane of existence or merely a psychological realm? Either way, this moment is our opportunity to practice for the well-being of the world. If we find ourselves in the realm of no-thought, we may just have to take a break from this noble work and resume when we are reborn where thought manifests. If we don’t find ourselves in the realm of no-thought, let’s take care of what is here in our awareness.
17
Projection Only
This transformation of consciousness is conceptualization,
What is conceptualized does not exist, thus everything is projection only. || 17 ||
Now Vasubandhu begins the second half of the “Thirty Verses,” and so also begins his teachings on the means to overcome the barrier of delusion. Just as his teachings in the first half on overcoming the barrier of afflictive emotion centered on being intimately aware of afflictions, these teachings on delusion begin by directing us to realize the depth and completeness of our delusions.
As we move through these verses, we will see that central to this process is overcoming the delusion that there is a self separate from other things, the delusion of alienation. Recall that in the first verses, Vasubandhu taught that everything conceived as “self” or “other” occurs in the transformation of consciousness, and that this transformation has three aspects, upon which he elaborates in verses 3–15. He opens this seventeenth verse by saying that everything he has described in the previous verses, “this transformation of consciousness,” is conceptualization. The Sanskrit word we translate as conceptualization, vikalpa, can be taken to mean either the process of conceptualizing or the state of being conceptualized. So here he is saying that this transformation we’ve been discussing and working with is both itself a process of conceptualization and a thing that is conceptualized. The latter should be apparent; this book has been so far a proliferation of concepts about this transformation of consciousness. The former is evident, if we consider that this transformation of consciousness is the process by which we come to conceptualize things as self or other. It revolves on this central conceptualization: there is a self and there are other things. We could say that what consciousness does is discriminate—another common translation of the word vikalpa—but Vasubandhu wants to make this clear: consciousness is discrimination. If you look through the previous verses and chapters, you will see that every aspect of consciousness is conditioned by karma to interpret things in a way that is colored by conceptualization.
In
the second line of this verse, Vasubandhu makes a bold move. He refutes the existence of everything he spent the previous half of his text explaining. “What is conceptualized does not exist.” Since he just used a lot of concepts to explain his model of consciousness, it is conceptualized, therefore it does not exist. For Mahayana Buddhists this type of statement and this rhetorical approach is not surprising. The Heart Sutra, perhaps the most central text in Mahayana Buddhism, focuses, as does this line of verse under discussion, on pointing out that the dharmas of Early Buddhist and Abhidharma practice do not fundamentally exist. Often this type of teaching is explained as a means of helping us to not get stuck on the ideas and practices of our tradition and instead stay mentally flexible. The Buddha famously stated regarding his teaching that it is like a raft; when we make it across the river to the other shore, we should not carry the raft around on our backs, but instead we should leave it behind. This is how Vasubandhu begins the section of his work oriented toward letting go of delusion, by reminding us that the eight consciousnesses model is a useful tool, but it is not to be carried around and made into a burden.
When we say that what is conceptualized does not exist, what does this really mean? A common image in contemporaneous Buddhist texts dealing with this subject is “the horns of a rabbit.” We can have a concept of horns on a rabbit. Can you picture them? However the horns of a rabbit are not ultimately real. We can imagine things using the power of our conceptual capacity of mind, but they are not really existing things. Here Vasubandhu is saying that since the entire process of consciousness is conceptualization, it never reaches real things. Everything is the horns of a rabbit. This teaching does not deny your direct experience; it points out that it’s just experience, it’s not the ultimate truth.
