Transforming the Seeds
At the most basic level, everything we experience is the transformation of consciousness. The mind is a kind of soup of phenomena arising and subsiding. That flux itself is classified as transformation of mode: seeds are ripening into dharmas (experienced phenomena) and at the same time phenomena are being resown as seeds. There is nothing much to say about this kind of transformation for the moment.
The second kind of transformation is the qualitative changes in the seeds. This is what people are talking about when they say, “I want to transform!” In fact, you are always transforming. Whatever happens in this particular spoonful of present-moment soup is going to influence the rest of the meal. The issue is whether it’s going in a tasty direction or not. And while Bodhicitta may be the parmesan cheese of this delectable culinary adventure, I fear that this metaphor has gone terribly stale.
Let’s return to the seed of anger. In the diagrams I am going to use the traditional classification of black (or filled) dots for unwholesome seeds, and white (or unfilled) dots for wholesome seeds. That means tending towards ill-being or wellbeing, respectively. Let’s say that the seed of anger has been embraced by mindfulness, subsided naturally, and is sleeping sweetly in store consciousness. But you’re not satisfied. You want that seed transformed! Before you wake it up to do battle, you should know that latent seeds can also be transformed.
The function of alaya itself is totally neutral. It only ensures the continuity of the seeds and their ripening. What I mean here is that on its own, the store can’t transform anything. The seeds, however, are not independent entities. In the language of Thay Nhat Hanh: the seeds in store consciousness inter-are with one another. Whenever a seed is sown it can have an effect on the manifestation of another seed, or even on the whole store. Although your seed of anger is dormant, it is still susceptible to influence through the cultivation or exhaustion of associated seeds. This opens up many avenues for transformation.
Aside: Some Things Don’t Need to be Transformed
Life is not lived solely in relation to seeds that need to be transformed, and although the transformation process will eventually have a radical effect on every single seed, that doesn’t mean that you need to hunt down your afflictions. On the contrary, a lot of Buddhist practice is dedicated to avoiding them. This is not in conflict with the thrust of Mundane Right View, because this is a conscious, tactical avoidance rather than a coping strategy built on aversion and ignorance. Last week, I mentioned that embracing your anger with mindfulness fits in as the second practice of Right Diligence. The first is to prevent your anger from arising altogether–not through suppression, but through the elimination of the internal or external conditions that will bring it to fruition in mind consciousness. This is called restraint, is central to ethical conduct in Buddhist Practice, and is one of the most effective and straightforward ways to cultivate a mind that is capable of deep looking.
Yes, the anger arose because it had been conditioned by past experience, but it also arose because you were watching TV. Restraining action here would be to just stop watching TV. Maybe you will never get angry again! From the perspective of present-moment experience, that’s already a pretty good result. This is the only reason that monks never get irritated by having to do their taxes.
Actions are of three types: body, speech, and mind, and restraint can be carried out at all three levels. This is one of those things that’s hard to market as a meditation teacher. People want to be “free,” which means that they want to follow their twisted karma wherever it takes them. Once you have developed an appreciation for just how much trouble you can get in through unwise conduct, however, restraint can begin to look pretty appealing.
When you have a clear aspiration and you know the outcomes of different actions, restraint becomes effortless. Before that point, however, it can feel like work. This can be tiresome, but you do have another option: seclusion. This could mean becoming a forest dweller or taking refuge in a monastery, but the underlying principle can be applied to any lifestyle in any environment. The key question is, seclusion from what? The traditional answers are as follows: worldly activity, foolish people, and entrancement with dharmas. In our scenario the most important thing to seek seclusion from is your TV.
In summary, simplify your life as much as your commitments allow and practice restraint within whatever complexity remains. This will go a long way towards giving you the clarity and presence of mind that you’ll need for directly addressing difficult mental formations when they arise.
Methods of Transformation
Gradual Weakening – If the anger is not acted upon when it arises, it is not re-imbued with volition. When it returns to store consciousness, it will be weaker than before. This is the abandonment spoken of in the traditional Right Diligence. Abandonment here has to be complete, however, or new seeds will be resown. For instance if your restraint from acting out your anger is colored by a subtle resistance to your anger, judgement of your anger, etc, the cycle will not be broken. Thay calls a totally receptive, nonjudgmental awareness “mere recognition.” Anger is recognized like a familiar face in a room full of people, without any compulsion to strike up a conversation. If this is practiced consistently, the seed will weaken to the point that it no longer has enough karmic potency to arise.
Direct Reconditioning –
This is more along the lines of the example from last week. The anger itself is engaged with in a wholesome way. You still don’t act out your anger, but you also take its arising as an invitation to cultivate good seeds in relation to the anger. These seeds can be of any kind–cognitive, affective, investigative–as long as they have the right result. Mundane Right View is a group of cognitive seeds that have this effect: “This is my karma. I will take responsibility for it.” Thay introduces an element of lineage to this that can support the arising of affective seeds, “This is the suffering of my ancestors and descendants. This is my chance to manifest my love for them.” Eventually formations need to be investigated intensively, but at this level curiosity alone can help to cut the cycle of acting them out, “Hello my little anger! What are you really about?”
Strictly speaking, the effect that this has on the anger is still just gradual weakening, but through engagement, a whole suite of supportive wholesome seeds can be cultivated and linked to anger at the level of the seeds in the store. This turns anger into a “bell of mindfulness,” as Thay Nhat Hanh would say. If this association is made strong, mindfulness or any number of wholesome factors will co-arise with anger, which can be very handy.
Cultivation of Antidotes – The seeds in store consciousness interpenetrate one another, but these associations are not uniform. The store has a structure. Seeds are organized into coordinated groups that ripen together, and those associations are not segregated by the notions of good or bad. Anger is associated with ill-will, and ill-will is associated with goodwill or loving kindness, which both connect with a more general seed of how relations of self and other are colored in your consciousness. Practice loving kindness and it will be more likely to arise, more powerful when arisen, more generally associated with your relation to the world, and more readily acted upon. This can dramatically change the supportive milieu of the seed of anger, and without support, it simply can’t arise. And all this without the seed of anger ever ripening into mind consciousness.
Reorientation –
When you’re blundering around in samsara, seeds are constantly resown with a kind of naive self-interest. Even altruistic intentions are colored by a sense of possessiveness, appropriation of virtue, or attachment to outcome. Despite the fact that I have represented it here as stink-lines, this self-centeredness has no moral tone. It is a natural result of the functioning of the seventh consciousness, manas, which imbues all of the manifestations from store consciousness with grasping for “I” and “mine.” This happens automatically, and only fully stops at complete enlightenment, so it should be no surprise that the untransformed mind is a little myopic. Normally, your seed of anger would be resown through any one such self-centered volitional thought or action: “They’ll pay,” “I’m right,” etc. That volition plants the seed, and the seed influences the store, which means that next time a seed manifests, it may be more likely to carry a flavor of self-centeredness, vindictiveness, or aggression.
What is the obvious admonition here? Cultivate a wholesome intention. The adoption of a powerful volition such as Bodhicitta will restructure the whole of store consciousness because it will eventually be associated with all of the seeds. I will elaborate more on this later, but the key thing here is that if you find a universally applicable volition, it can act as a compensatory factor for the activity of manas and for your conditioning. Seeds will still arise imbued with grasping, but they will carry a spacious altruism with them on their way back down to the store.
My teacher would wander around the monastery and if he came upon someone doing something in a rush or with a sense of tension, he would ask them, “What are you doing?” Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, however you are feeling, whatever is present in your mind, it is your motivation that answers that question. If you find a good one, hold fast to it. It will be resown into store consciousness with every action you take.
Exhaustive Investigation –
The ultimate fate of the seeds on the path of transformation is exhaustion, which means that a seed is permanently dried up. Thay Nhat Hanh calls this “transformation at the base.” Through direct investigation into the impermanent, selfless, and dependently originated nature of a dharma, the appropriate conditions for wisdom are established. When wisdom operates in relation to a given dharma, the mind can no longer perform a volitional act that appropriates that dharma as “me” or “mine” because its nature is seen to be ungraspable. When the dharma eventually subsides, it is like a stalk of wheat that dies before producing new grain. Since no seed was resown, that dharma can never arise again as an object of grasping.
We’ve done some meditations on developing the 7 Factors of Awakening. Their coordinated action is responsible for the arising of wisdom.
Incineration via Samadhi –
Once you have developed some facility with deep looking, mindfulness will help you to quickly recollect the supportive structure that allows for wisdom to arise. Hopefully along the way you have been practicing various forms of meditation that have helped you to build confidence in your ability to sustain engagement with a given object. When mindfulness can steadily hold an insight-object before the mind, you will be able to train in the Wisdom Samadhis, powerful forms of concentration that transform mind consciousness into a very inhospitable place for seeds.
In exhaustive investigation, you bring together the factors required for penetrating insight into a specific dharma and, in a certain sense, see that very dharma disappear as a graspable thing. Goodbye, my dear inferiority complex! But in the Wisdom Samadhis, the mind is pervaded by insight into the ungraspable nature of the whole stream, so much so that dharmas have no chance to constitute themselves into perceivable objects. You aren’t really able to say anything about what is happening or what is being transformed. Your inferiority complex, your anger, your attachment to silk scarves, whatever else might normally populate the mind, is nowhere to be seen. But seeds are ripening as usual into mind consciousness, experienced only as a transparent, ungraspable flow. They never mature into anything that can be grasped and are never resown. This is like the stalk of wheat trying to sprout in a firestorm.
Sublimation –
After spending time in one of the Wisdom Samadhis, the mind is “perfumed” with non-grasping. For a while, there will be no impulse to grasp at dharmas that arise. They will simply “self-liberate,” meaning that they will exhaust themselves on their own with no intervention. Technically this is not a method for transforming seeds, because it does not involve any action on your part.
Seeds that don’t completely self-liberate take this flavor of non-grasping back down with them to the store, where it builds up and prepares the whole system for a big change: total liberation. The neat thing about Mahayana Buddhism is that the encounter between your everyday problems and this aroma of wisdom is considered to be essential to the path, hence the reduced importance of seclusion compared to the Buddhism of the Nikayas. This is why Bodhisattvas can truly do their takes without getting irritated.
Bam!
So there we have a rough overview of the path, conceived of in terms of the transformation of the seeds in store consciousness. This is mostly how Thay presents it, with a few minor divergences that we can talk about when we get into the traditional Yogacara perspective. The practices are in order of accessibility, with the most foundational being the basic changes in conduct and lifestyle that make space for meditation, and the most demanding being the development of sustained wisdom.
But the transforming of the mind is not like the baking of a delicious pie, in which the flour of sense restraint must be sprinkled upon the table of ethical conduct, and only then can the dough of karmic reconditioning be flattened with the rolling-pin of mindfulness, placed in the pie-tin of seclusion, filled with the lemon custard of Bodhicitta, topped with the meringue of wisdom, and baked in the oven of Samadhi. No, no! It is a widespread and tragic misfortune to mistake the transformation of the mind for the baking of a delicious pie.
To distance myself from this woefully misleading image I will use the safer but much more esoteric image of a person walking along a path. The journey begins with the more foundational practices, continues on through the advanced practices, and eventually culminates in enlightenment. Let’s say that the person is you, and steps taken along the path correspond to your accumulation of practice experience. We will call your field of view the “circle of accessibility.” The closer a practice is to you, the more relevant for your growth.
The important thing here is to recognize that while there definitely are basic and advanced practices, all of the practices are at least a little accessible at any given moment. They all have the potential to water wholesome seeds. I want to place this disclaimer here because, to really get something out of the exploration of the 5 aggregates, we are going to be delving into the realm of insight meditation, which is by all accounts the end of the path.
I am so late to finish these notes. Here I am, gasping, collapsing, crawling over the finish line, days after the end of the race, and I want to make one final note about the meditation from this week. Normally the guided meditations I give have a kind of pedagogical bent to them. They are meant to bring about an experiential demonstration of a point that we’re exploring. The meditation from last Tuesday was not like that. That was a meditation that, if done regularly and authentically, will radically transform your mind. This isn’t because I gave a particularly good meditation. It’s just the function of Bodhicitta. Here it is in the words of Santideva:
I happily rejoice in the virtue of all sentient beings, which relieves the suffering of the miserable states of existence. May those who suffer dwell in happiness.
I rejoice in sentient beings’ liberation from the suffering of the cycle of existence, and I rejoice in the Protectors’ Bodhisattvahood and Buddhahood.
I rejoice in the teachers’ oceanic expressions of the Spirit of Awakening, which delight and benefit all sentient beings.
With folded hands I beseech the Fully Awakened Ones in all directions that they may kindle the light of Dharma for those who fall into suffering owing to confusion.
With folded hands I supplicate the Conquerors who wish to leave for nirvana that they may stay for countless eons, and that this world may not remain in darkness.
May the virtue that I have acquired by doing all this relieve every suffering of sentient beings.
May I be the medicine and the physician for the sick. May I be their nurse until their illness never recurs.
With showers of food and drink may I overcome the afflictions of hunger and thirst. May I become food and drink during times of famine.
May I be an inexhaustible treasury for the destitute. With various forms of assistance may I remain in their presence.
For the sake of accomplishing the welfare of all sentient beings, I freely give up my body, enjoyments, and all my virtues of the three times.
Surrendering everything is nirvana, and my mind seeks nirvana. If I must surrender everything, it is better that I give it to sentient beings.
For the sake of all beings I have made this body pleasureless. Let them continually beat it, revile it, and cover it with filth.
Let them play with my body. Let them laugh at it and ridicule it. What does it matter to me? I have given my body to them.
Let them have me perform deeds that are conducive to their happiness. Whoever resorts to me, may it never be in vain.
For those who have resorted to me and have an angry or unkind thought, may even that always be the cause for their accomplishing every goal.
May those who falsely accuse me, who harm me, and who ridicule me all partake of Awakening.
May I be a protector for those who are without protectors, a guide for travelers, and a boat, a bridge, and a ship for those who wish to cross over.
May I be a lamp for those who seek light, a bed for those who seek rest, and may I be a servant for all beings who desire a servant.
To all sentient beings may I be a wish-fulfilling gem, a vase of good fortune, an efficacious mantra, a great medication, a wish fulfilling tree, and a wish-granting cow.
Just as earth and other elements are useful in various ways to innumerable sentient beings dwelling throughout infinite space,
So may I be in various ways a source of life for the sentient beings present throughout space until they are all liberated.
Just as the Enlightened Ones of old adopted the Spirit of Awakening, and just as they properly conformed to the practice of the Bodhisattvas,
So I myself shall generate the Spirit of Awakening for the sake of the world; and so I myself shall properly engage in those practices.
Upon gladly adopting the Spirit of Awakening in this way, an intelligent person should thus nurture the Spirit in order to fulfill his wish.
Now my life is fruitful. Human existence is well obtained. Today I have been born into the family of the Buddhas. Now I am a Child of the Buddha.
Thus, whatever I do now should accord with this family, and it should not be like a stain on this pure family.
Just as a blind man might find a jewel amongst heaps of rubbish, so this Spirit of Awakening has somehow arisen in me.
It is the elixir of life produced to vanquish death in the world. It is an inexhaustible treasure eliminating the poverty of the world.
It is the supreme medicine that alleviates the illness of the world. It is the tree of rest for beings exhausted from wandering on the pathways of mundane existence.
It is the universal bridge for all travelers on their crossing over miserable states of existence. It is the rising moon of the mind that soothes the mental afflictions of the world.
It is the great sun dispelling the darkness of the world’s ignorance. It is the fresh butter formed from churning the milk of Dharma.
For the caravan of beings traveling on the path of mundane existence and starving for the meal of happiness, it is the feast of happiness that satisfies all sentient beings who have come as guests.
Today I invite the world to Buddhahood and temporal happiness. May the gods, humans, and all others rejoice in the presence of all the Protectors!
