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Afternoon Dharma Talk
Human beings are subject to many wrong perceptions, creating suffering for themselves and others by viewing the impermanent as permanent and the non-self as having a self. Even visual certainties are often illusions; for instance, we never see the sun in the present moment, but only an image from eight minutes ago. To transcend this ignorance (Avidya), one must go beyond intellectual understanding and maintain the samadhi of impermanence and non-self. The character for perception (tưởng) is composed of “mind” and “sign,” and liberation requires breaking through signs of birth, death, coming, and going.
The fourth skandha is samskara, or mental formations. There are fifty-one mental formations, including wholesome, unwholesome, and indeterminate types. A practitioner learns to recognize specific formations like anger or jealousy as they manifest, greeting them as old friends. Right Mindfulness is a vital mental formation that acts like sunshine; it shines upon and penetrates other formations, nourishing the good and transforming the negative.
The fifth skandha is Consciousness, described as Store Consciousness (Alaya Vijnana). This acts as the soil preserving the seeds (Bija) of all fifty-one mental formations. When a negative seed manifests in Mind Consciousness, mindfulness is generated to embrace it tenderly, similar to how sunshine penetrates a lotus flower to make it bloom. This practice requires “selective watering”: actively nourishing seeds of understanding and compassion while refusing to water seeds of violence, fear, and craving through unmindful consumption of media or unskillful interactions.
