My recent experience from my stagnant dawn meditation taught me a lesson that to see any progress in whatever you do, you can not just satisfy with your achievement of current level of the things. If you do so, you'll experience a slip back and frustration before long. Instead, you must evolve constantly.
My dawn meditation practice is still going without skipping a single day, however, by just sitting and counting the breath-in and breath-out for one or some more hours of time, I have noticed a more frequent wandering around and clinging to the thought that arose randomly during my practice recently. I believe it is time to bring up an evolution movement for my daily sitting at the dawn hour.
A few days after I started writing this article, I received a friend's e-mail from Melbourn updating me his progress on the path of quest for enlightenment. He urged me to study a bit of the Yogacara Buddhism.
He reckons one of its sutras is like a mini Buddhism encyclopedia and by studying its sutras I will know how our consciousnesses process the external stimulus; understand what is essential in my own spiritual development and which aspect of meditation or recital of Amituofo I have to pay attention to. It will help to make sense of what I am going to do. It will also let me know what is true or false.
His own great effort spent in the learning of the Yogacara Buddhism himself, and his earnest urging me to learn the effective and helpful subject moved me, and I immediately delved into the learning process right away in the early part of December 2014.
As my friend said it was hard to make sense at the beginning with the terminologies. I tried three times attempting to get a breakthrough for a start to move forward, however, the commentary text essays are difficult for me to understand. Though they are written in Chinese, the scripture of the sutra are translated from Sanskrit into ancient scholar Chinese style. The translation of the Buddhism sutras was taken really seriously by the emperor of that era as a sacred event of his reign, and so I believe its quality was the superb and unsurpassable one. However, readers without a good level on reading the ancient Chinese literature will be knocked out easily. I put out my white flag, and get away from it about a month later.
My friend followed up my progress one day. I told him what had got me stuck. He encouraged me to try other means to get around it such as listening speech of the subject from YouTube. The IT technology is amazing, luckily I landed on an introductory speech of an one hour and half long video presented by Dr. Thomas Tam. I tried to listen to his video on the introduction to the Yogacara Buddhism for a few minutes, and I was sucked in right away. I think what has helped me in the breakthrough of my attempt to learn this branch of Buddhism is because Dr. Tam used adequate similes in places of the difficult terms. Or perhaps it is due to the reason that speeches presented in English are naturally requiring the speaker to have fully understood the Chinese original text first, digested the meaning of the original and then interpreted the processed thoughts into the speech with closest everyday living examples. This is the video that helped me out. Thank you Dr. Tam.
Having got a breakthrough, I came back to read the original literature of Yogacara Buddhism, The Mere Consciousness in 30 verses', which was translated by Xuan Zhuang of Tang Dynasty. And I found I could read through the verses with fairly good level of understanding, I am amazed.
What have I learned from the adventure? The book I have put hands on is "The Mere Consciousness 30 verses". It seems to be describing the three consciousness- the mind, the Monas and the Alayavijnana; stating the features of each one of them and how they work together.
The mind consciousness is in charge of the 5 sensory organs (eye, ear, nose, tongue, body) or the five receptors of external stimulus (incoming data); The Monas being the 7th consciousness can not stop its natural urge for processing the data within its reach, and involuntarily catches the data collected from the 5 sensory organs to differentiate, compare, analyse, judge, label, organize, rearrange, retrieve, all kind of data processing functions and store them back into Alayanijnana when need to. Lastly the 8th consciousness called Alayanijnana stores anything and everything, freshly new or partially processed, it never bias to any kind of data, all are securely and permanently kept without a trace of loss. This configuration of the eight consciousnesses with their respective function or nature results in becoming a system which is able to track everything the identity did in the past, present, and the consequence of that deed in the future.
The above hypothesis is based on my personal contemplation over the commentary talks presented by preceding masters or Buddhism scholars. There must be a lot of mistakes, but it has developed into something like a seed in terms of its nature and is stored in Alayanijnana be it profound or dump. The seed will at a certain point of the time line meets all the conditions optimal to its sprouting and grow and eventually serves as the condition affecting other seeds to sprout. This seed to fruit process once started will bring up a chain reaction and thus the wonder of the world emerges.
If the seed contains any of the ingredient of negativity, it will manifest in the fruition and bring about suffering to others and vise versa.
--to be continued--
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