| abstract | - In contrast to the Self teachings of the Upaniṣads, the Buddha stated clearly that all ontological speculations regarding a Self are detrimental to spiritual progress. He stated that all thoughts about self are necessarily, whether the thinker is aware of it or not, thoughts about the five aggregates or one of them. As one scholar has written, The mysticism found in the Pali discourses ... goes beyond any ideas of 'soul' in the sense of immortal 'self' and is better styled 'consciousness-mysticism.' Furthermore, early Buddhism was not subjective idealistic. Some have misinterpreted the Yogācāra school of Mahayana Buddhism that developed the consciousness-only approach as a form of metaphysical idealism, but this is incorrect. Yogācāra thinkers did not focus on consciousness to assert it as ultimately real (Yogācāra claims consciousness is only conventionally real since it arises from moment to moment due to fluctuating causes and conditions), but rather because it is the cause of the karmic problem they are seeking to eliminate. The standpoint of consciousness-only starts by explaining the world that presenting to each being is regulated by and according to the seeds underlying in each being's ālaya consciousness (the eighth consciousness, the seed consciousness). One special species of the innumerable seeds, which will be activated when proper conditions are reached, are evolving from the accumulation of traces of sense perceptions and our behaviors in previous lives which then become seeds and stored in the eighth consciousness as "karma seeds" (there are still numerous other kinds of seeds, which can be considered as numerous different functions,such as the seed of eye-consciousness which, of course,produces eye-consciousness when activated. Unlike karma-seeds, seeds like eye-consciousness cannot be perfumed). When activated, these seeds drains from the eighth consciousness just like datas stored in the hard disk turn or appear in the monitor as all kinds of illusions or appearances, and in a substantive way ,one for one, these seeds produce, or better describes as induce, new "seeds" (bīja) similar to themselves after perfumed by the external and interactive world, according to a regular pattern, as seeds produce(induce) plants. Each being possesses a store of perceptions and beings which are generically alike will produce similar perceptions since their first five of Six Sense-organs (Six Indriyas), which are produced by the eighth consciousness according to the karma seeds, are similar to each other. The external world is created when the store consciousness (ālaya) is "perfumed" (薰) by activated seeds, i.e. the effects of good and evil deeds. To summarize, the seeds behave in three ways: 1 Seeds, when activated, produce the external (material, physical) world and the internal (spiritual, mental) world, in total, the Eighteen Fields. 2 Seeds (or, to be more precise, Alaya consciousness) are perfumed by the three karmic activities of deed, word and thought (Three practices). 3 Seeds induce seeds. And this gives the solution to the original paradox. The conception of "self", the false atman, is produced from seeds which stored in the eighth consciousness(store-house consciousness" ,Sanskrit: ālāyavijñāna). Actions in this world, good, bad and neutral deeds, perfume (or mutate) these seeds. The seeds then produce or induce new seeds, with some seeds tainted by your actions, and others unaffected. Even after death, the impressions of deeds — their karma — linger on in the seeds of alaya consciousness. As long as the four defilement mental function(心所法)－－ self-delusion (我癡), self-view (我見), egotism (我慢), and self-love (我愛), of the seventh consciousness of certain being remain polluted , his reincarnation in the Three Realms (Sanskrit, Trailokya.) will never ceased. An Arhat is someone who has managed to obliterate all impressions of himself, verified for himself that the Eighteen Fields or the five skandhas(five aggregates,Sanskrit: pan~cāskandha ) are all illusionary and empty of "self nature" or "essence" (Sanskrit: Svabhāva), and any desire to clamp any of them should be and can be extinguished, thus at the last moment of his life , when the seeds of the other seventeen Fields stored in the eighth consciousness stop being activated through the determination of the seventh consciousness(The manas consciousness) and all the body functions stop concurrently, finally the seventh consciousness decides that it itself should cease being activated also and thus the eighth consciousness stop draining out the seed of the seventh consciousness, and so the whole Eighteen Fields extinguish after all, with the eighth conscousness alone exists in a state called as "never born and therefore never will die" or "no beginnning and no ending ", in other words, Nirvana (涅槃) . It is extremely important for us to remember, while we may say that such Arhat has escape the wheel of samsara and will not reborn again in the Three Realms, there is definitely no such Arhat or any being stop existing here and reborn in anywhere else. In contrast to that, a Buddha is someone who manages to get enlightened (eg. to verify for himself the true existence of his ālaya consciousness) first, and after the verification or enlightenment , through innumerable karmic lives and non-karmic lives as Bodhisattva, clears and substitutes all his polluted seeds while they are activated until all of the seeds stored in the eighth consciousness are pure and clean.Through the dispolluting process, the Bodhisattva also manage to apprehend and verify all the indivadul and interactive functions of each seeds until he thoroughly masters them and attains the All-inclusive wisdom (一切種智); Such alaya consciousness fully cleansed of karmic sediment is renamed as amalavijñâna(菴摩羅識), or "pure consciousness"(無垢識). The doctrine of consciousness-only thus reduces all existence to one hundred dharmas ( or factors) in five divisions (五位百法), namely, Mind(心法), Mental function(心所法), Material(色法), Not associated with mind(心不相應行法) and Unconditioned dharmas(無為法). The consciousness-only school thus sets out to enumerate and describe all these dharmas in detail. An alternative explanation to the truism that "man has no soul" lies in a simple but powerful extension and paradigm shift: "man has no soul, rather, the soul has man." In other words, we are spiritual beings having a human experience, not human beings having a spiritual experience. Assertions that "man" has a "soul" are necessarily false because man's physical existence, which "man" most predominantly identifies with, is merely an observable artifact of the true spiritual reality. Another important contribution of the consciousness-only thinkers was that of the three natures of imaginary, provisional and real. See three natures or Trikaya for details.
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