We can't find the internet
Attempting to reconnect
Something went wrong!
Hang in there while we get back on track. If this problem persists help us by reporting it so we can investigate it.
Watch this talk
Login or create a free account to watch this talk and discover other teachings from Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh.
Log in or create an account
The Five Universals: Five Tâm Sở Biến Hành
Freedom to Transform Habits through Mindfulness
Thầy organizes this talk as three sections:
- The Feet of the Buddha which is the theme of this retreat, walking meditation, and Touching the Earth.
- The Eight Consciousnesses focusing on the seventh, the lover, in relation to the eighth, store consciousness.
- The Five Universals which along with the Eight Consciousnesses are the core framework of the Mahāyāna Yogācāra school’s model of how consciousness works, how we interact with the world and our own psychology.
In the first section, Thầy invites us to walk like the Buddha, so naturally and effortlessly that it appears like “the practice of non-practice” with “no other purpose except to enjoy.” He provides instruction for “allowing the Buddha to walk” through you; how to slow walk by yourself; how to use walking like a buddha in challenging contexts, especially in dire conditions such as prison during wartime; how to draw upon the support of the Sangha; and how to use this practice to heal one’s ancestors and even one’s perceived enemies. Thầy ends the section with the practice of Touching the Earth, in which “we touch the earth with our feet”—as well as our hands and forehead—“and we heal the earth, we heal ourselves and the humankind.”
In the second section, Thầy introduces the Eight Consciousnesses:
- 1-5: The sense consciousnesses (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body),
- 6: mental or “mind consciousness,”
- 7: Manas—the lover, an ego-like grasping consciousness that thinks itself to be an autonomous self, and
- 8: Store consciousness, a subconscious repository of all “seeds”—experiences, thoughts, and actions (potential karma).
While store consciousness has access to reality itself, the lover does not, instead creating mental images as the objects of consciousness and erroneously assuming that they are reality. The lover does not understand that its self consists of non-self elements. It falls victim to four illusions of manas: self-ignorance, self-view, self-complex, and self-love.
In this, Thầy is talking to and about all of us. The lover in us is very seductive. All of us frequently and unmindfully accept the conditioning of our past experiences as reality and so reproduce stored assumptions, projections, prejudices, etc.—“to cognize is to recognize,” emphasis on “re.” We “fabricate the object of [our] own perceptions.” That is a central lesson of this talk.
A second central lesson is that Thầy advises us to make use of the “implicit processing” of our “mind consciousness” (Eight Consciousnesses number six) by using our meditation practice to train our unconscious mind to default to wholesome seeds such as understanding, compassion, and love. “With the practice, mentation will be transformed little by little until it becomes the wisdom of non-discrimination.” It is this very reformation of previously hardened habitual feelings, judgments, and misperceptions that constitutes the mind’s freedom, the freedom to change the future by literally changing your mind. Through practice, one can come to access the “True Love” of non-discrimination, “the love of the Buddha” by which “the lover becomes the true lover” who “knows that the self is made of non-self elements” and knows to take care of non-self elements.
Thầy segues to the third section by posing two familiar questions within Western neuroscience and philosophy:
- How is that external material objects become internal subjective consciousness?
- Given that “we are not free from our experience” but rather conditioned by it and not “free” in some abstract metaphysical sense, do we have free will?
Thầy asks these questions with Socratic purpose and rhetorically. He invites us to discover that they carry hidden assumptions via oversimplifying dualisms: inside vs. outside, matter vs. spirit, objective vs. subjective, and the ego’s limitless free will vs. no free will exists. And Thầy had previously answered the second question: though we are interdependent with all else in the universe, and though unmindful living can surrender much of one’s freedom by the replication of habits, mindfulness practice can transform that conditioning, and that is our freedom to grow.
Thầy then pivots to the Five Universals, perhaps because they are the opposite of the preceding abstract metaphysical questions. They are the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of how consciousness actually functions:
- Touch or sense contact with an object.
- Attention turns the mind toward it.
- Feeling gives it a tone— pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.
- Perception recognizes and categorizes it.
- Volition activates a response to it.
These operations are “universal” because they “always function at any time and at any level of consciousness.” They may at first seem simple, but they are more concrete, specific, and observable than metaphysical abstractions and crude dualisms. They describe the interaction of consciousness with the world as participatory, constructed, and transformable.
Thầy closes by saying that tomorrow’s talk will be “even easier” to understand!
This is the third talk in a series of fourteen given during The Feet of the Buddha, twenty-one-day retreat in the year 2004. Thầy offered this talk at the Upper Hamlet, Plum Village, France.
Part of the following collection
"Universal Mindfulness: Integrating Buddhist Principles into Everyday Life"