Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 92-minute opening session of a six-part course, Venerable Thubten Dondrub introduces the Buddhist framework of mind and mental factors—the fifty-one key mind-states traditional Buddhism identifies as operating in consciousness. He establishes why this matters: understanding how the mind works at this granular level is essential groundwork for recognizing disturbing thoughts and cultivating virtuous ones, which is the heart of all Buddhist practice aimed at reducing suffering. Dondrub begins with foundational Buddhist philosophy on consciousness itself—that mind is formless, clear and knowing, and fundamentally distinct from the brain—before explaining the six primary consciousnesses and their distinction from mental factors. He then introduces the five omnipresent mental factors (feeling, discrimination, intention, contact and engagement) that accompany every moment of awareness, walking through concrete examples of how they operate together and illustrating why recognition and intention matter for both understanding and ethical practice. The teaching draws on Abhidharma texts and is pitched at people with some Buddhist familiarity, though newcomers are welcome; Dondrub notes this material is more technical and abstract than typical teachings, and encourages note-taking for clarity.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 M F L 2004 11 08.mp3
UUID: 2e95450c-b595-467f-b8f8-3c7d14ff0654
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: Mind and Mental Factors (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 2004-11-08
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 92.7 minutes
Words: ~10,175
Joseph So I’d like to welcome everyone to this first of a series of how many, five, six, six talks on the topic of minds and mental factors. So in this course, we’re going to look at what are traditionally delineated as the fifty one different mental factors, which are the most important mental factors that operate in our mind stream. There are more mental factors than fifty one, but these are the most important ones. And particularly it goes into looking at the positive and mental states of mind. So these are extremely important to understand because the very heart of the Buddha’s teachings is all about working with our mind and in particular, subduing the disturbing thoughts with the aim ultimately to be able to eliminate them from our mind and cultivating the positive qualities, the positive potentials of our mind.
And so to be able to do this well, reason for doing this of course is this is what reduces and eliminates our suffering and cultivating the positive qualities brings happiness for ourselves and others. So to be able to do this, it’s really helpful to know even intellectually the disturbing to be able to recognize intellectually by through intellectual definition what constitutes a virtuous mind, what constitutes a disturbing thought. And on the basis of having that intellectual understanding, it helps us actually identify the type of thoughts arising in our mind moment by moment so that we can then overcome them. Remember last week for those people studying the Eight Verses of Mind Training, it says, the third verse says, As soon as a disturbing thought arises, I have to face it and avert it. So knowing the definition of these disturbing thoughts really helps us to face them and then avert them.
So it’s a really important topic. So it’s really important to listen to this teaching with the right motivation. And the very best motivation that we can cultivate is the bodhicitta thought, wanting to achieve a state of perfect enlightenment, complete Buddhahood, so that not only do we bring about our own perfect happiness, that we’re always seeking life after life, but we have developed the mental qualities that enable us to be a vast and lasting benefit to all sentient beings. And in particular, this enables us to repay the kindness that we’ve received from sentient beings life after life. So this is really important to try and cultivate that motivation as much as one can, much as one understands it.
I’m not going to talk about it tonight. Should, because it’s the first, but anyway, I’ll talk a bit about it each week. And to really fully cultivate this mind of bodhicitta requires having the basis of refuge in the Buddhas, believing in the existence of the Buddhas and their perfect qualities and therefore having a complete refuge, trust and confidence in the Buddhadharma, the teachings of the Buddha that contain all the methods that enable us to free ourselves from suffering, achieve enlightenment. And also a refuge in the great practitioners of these teachings, the great accomplished beings, the Sangha who have followed the path very intensively. So this is why at the beginning of the teachings we say the prayer of refuge in bodhicitta, which is on page fifteen of the prayer book.
The Tibetan is on page fifteen, we say that twice. And the English which is on page fourteen, we say one time. As we say this prayer, we try to mix those words with the thought, the feeling of bodhicitta in our mind and the thought of refuge. And to help us do that, we can visualize the historical Buddha Śākyamūni directly in front of us, imagining the Buddha appearing with a body of golden transparent radiating light. His very presence is that very image, the complete embodiment of wisdom and compassion.
And at the same time as we think of the Buddha present in front of us, we imagine ourselves surrounded by all the infinite kinds of sentient beings whom we’ve depended on life after life have been so kind and who now we wish to repay. Starting with our mother of this life on our left, and think of our father on our right, the rest of our family and friends behind us. And we think of the people we dislike or who dislike us, who upset us in some way directly in front. And we do that especially to try to overcome our negative thoughts and feelings towards these people and replace it with a love, concern, and compassion for them because they are sentient beings like everyone else. Have also been kind to me life after life.
So with this visualization and with this motivation we can say the prayer together if you’d like to join in. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Supreme Assembly by the merit of maintaining the state of a Buddha in order to benefit all sentient beings. I think the Buddha is very pleased with our motivation, with our intentions, and because of that one can imagine the Buddha coming to the crown of one’s head, dissolving into light, and that very blissful light coming down through the crown of your head, filling your whole body, pervading the whole of your mind so that in one instant we feel our body becoming very light and supple, free of all pain, pervaded by a very blissful feeling. At the same time our mind becoming very calm and clear, very light, a sense of the mind no longer trapped just in this very limited body, but a mind without any boundaries, any limitations whatsoever, vast space and pervaded by the blessings of the Buddha’s inconceivable wisdom and compassion. So in this positive state of mind, for those who know how to do the nine round breathing exercise with the visualization, it’s good to do that.
Otherwise just simply, for a short time, focus your mind on the breath, being aware of the sensation in the nostrils as the breath comes and goes. Just focus on that. Let everything else go away. Don’t pay attention to anything else. Don’t get distracted by anything else.
Just simply experience the breath totally for a short time. K. Thank you very much. So maybe if you could pass these out. So I particularly like to welcome there’s some new people here I don’t seem to know.
So welcome. I don’t know if you have any Buddhist background or what brought you here. And for the people who have been coming regularly, what we’re to do tonight or in this course is a little bit different in some ways than what I’ve been doing so far. Well, I’ll be doing it in my usual confused way, of course, maybe even more confused this course. But this topic is much more technical, abstract, less reaching to the heart.
This is more to your mind or to your intellect than most of the other in fact, all of the other material that we’ve been presenting. But still, it’s extremely important. For some people, it may be too technical and complicated. I hope I don’t over complicate it. So don’t get upset.
Just see it as a challenge for the mind. Remember, we just did transforming problems. Some people find this kind of material very, very interesting. Some find it a little bit dry. But it is important to understand.
It also is just giving some idea of a different aspect of the Dharma than what one may normally be familiar with. But Lama Zopa Rinpoche, my teacher, who was the spiritual guide of this center and all the FPMT centers, depicted in this beautiful photo here, says this is a very important subject. It’s a fundamental subject to study. And one thing I’d like to really emphasize for people, encourage people, is to take notes because there are books that you can read on this. For example, there is this book, maybe not so easy to get hold of unfortunately at the moment called The Mind and Its Functions by Geshe Rabten.
We are trying to get hold of this one. During the course. Anyway, we’re trying to get copies of this about mind and mental factors. And there’s another one called I won’t spend time on that now. But since you don’t have material in front of you, it’s good to make notes because you’re not going to remember all of this, right, and the definitions and so on.
So it is important to try and make notes if you can, at least some if you think it’s of any kind of interest. So it’s really important to understand this topic of mind and mental factors. I just read something from one teacher who taught on this course where he says that we must make full use of our perfect human rebirth with its eight freedoms and ten qualities. If we become involved in working only for the happiness of this life, we will forget our future lives. On the other hand, by contemplating future existences, which are much, much longer than this one short life, we will realize that the mind never stops.
It continues from one life to another. And by meditating on the continuity of consciousness, we will realize that the future mind is unable to choose the rebirth that it wants. That is at the moment, our mind goes on uncontrollably and right now, we have almost no control in the way our mind goes on, what kind of future life we have. Of course, Buddhism teaches that we are able to gain that control step by step, but we certainly don’t have it right now. So there is no freedom to choose pleasant rebirths, and without choice we are sometimes obliged to take birth in unpleasant places.
The absence of any choice in our future lives is due to the force of karma, our previous actions. When we understand that karma forces us into different situations, we will realize that there is a connection between the main mind and mental factors. We will understand that rebirth is determined by karma and karma is created by various mental factors in different combinations. For example, the mental factor of anger leads to actions that create karma for unhappy rebirths and the mental factor of non anger leads to actions that create karma for happy rebirths. Realizing this, we will decide to make a positive effort to change the situation of being reborn without choice.
And so that means that we have to make the decision to work with our mind, to cultivate our mind in a wise and skillful way because it’s our mind, our own mind, that gives rise to all our experiences in this life. It is the root cause of all our happiness and suffering now and in the future. So what the Buddha taught basically among many basic things the Buddha taught fundamental things is that everything depends on our mind. If we want happiness, real happiness, not just illusory stuff, the fake stuff that doesn’t last, but if we want the real thing, real happiness, contentment, peace, real freedom from suffering, we there is only one way to achieve that, and that is to work with the mind in the correct way. There is no other solution.
Not at all. One can do all sorts of external things that give the illusion temporarily that one has happiness and freedom from suffering. But one this can end at any time, and certainly when death comes, all that illusion finishes. Then at the time of death, really discover what we’ve been doing to our mind. But then it’s too late, of course.
So this topic is about mental factors. So most of you, I don’t know about the new people here, but have know something about Buddhist view of mine. So I just want to mention this very, very briefly. First, I’ll try and find my notes, if I have some notes. Alright.
Right. So the mind, just very briefly as it is understood in Buddhism, is the most important thing in the entire universe. It gives rise to all experience. Without the mind there is nothing really. Mind is not, from a Buddhist understanding, not the brain.
It is not a product of the brain. It is not a byproduct of the brain. The mind is something quite different than the brain even though it does function through it at the moment. But the mind is something completely non physical and formless, having none of the characteristics of physical matter whatsoever. The definition of mind, which I hope most people know by now, which is very brief, is the mind is that which is clear and knowing.
Right? Clear in the sense that the mind is formless, it is not physical in any way, and clear in the sense that it has the ability to take on the characteristic of anything it is perceiving or knowing. There’s nothing obstructing it from being able to know or experience things. And then the other aspect of the definition is that it is knowing. Mind is the only thing that knows, experiences and feels.
So the mind is not just referring to intellect, it’s referring to feelings and thoughts and perceptions and conceptions and countless different activities. All of these together make up what we label the mind. The mind is not just one thing doing one thing. The mind is what is labeled on many experiences, things happening. But they all have the nature of knowing or experiencing, and they’re all formless.
And the mind, because it is formless, has no end. It cannot be harmed or destroyed in any way. So it is quite literally according to the Buddhist view, beginningless. It has no beginning whatsoever. There is no point when the mind started.
It was never created out of some empty state. It’s always existed and it is beginningless. Sorry. And it is endless. It goes on and on and on.
And it is what gives rise to everything else. In some views of the evolution of existence, some some scientists accept the view that there is mind, but they argue that the mind came somehow evolved after physical matter. Whereas the Buddhist view is quite the opposite, that because there is consciousness, there is physical matter. Physical matter cannot exist without consciousness. So this is of course, all of this is extremely difficult to prove, but just so is the materialist view, very difficult to prove actually, although it looks like it’s more easy.
So I’m not going to go into that, but that’s the basis of what we’re looking at in this course: mind and the various mental factors, all of which are clear and knowing. So the Buddha’s teachings, just to go back a bit, the Buddha’s teachings, all of the countless teachings that the Buddha gave over the somewhat something like fifty years that he taught, are contained in what are called the Tripitaka, which literally translates as the three baskets. Because when the Buddha passed away, the collections of teachings were this was after because at the time of the Buddha, things weren’t written down. But when they were finally the Buddhist teachings were finally written down, they were collected into these and put into these three baskets, these three separate collections. One is the collection called the Vinaya, which is all about ethical discipline.
One collection are the Sutras, which is mainly about developing meditation, but it’s all the other associated themes about developing love and compassion and so on. And then the other basket or collection of teachings is called the Abhidharma, which is about metaphysical things and the nature of phenomena. So the topic we’re considering tonight of mental factors, which in Tibetan is called lo rig, comes from this section of the Buddhist teachings, the Abhidharma. So the mind, just as I’ve said before in other classes, I don’t if it’s helpful or not, but our body we conceive of our body when we just think of it in general. We think of the body as one thing, a body, but actually the body is what we conceive of as the body is something that is made up of many, many different parts.
There’s arms and legs and hair and skin and blood and bones and all sorts of different things. But putting all these things together, we label that a body and the mind is the same in a sense. It’s not physical, but the mind is based on many, many different things, many, many factors, all in the nature of clear and knowing, and all of that we label that the mind. Called the mind or consciousness. There are six primary consciousnesses that are identified in the Buddhist tradition.
In one philosophical school of Buddhism they talk about eight consciousnesses, but this is in the mind only school, but it’s the only one. And all the other, the three other philosophical schools of Buddhism, it’s accepted that there are six consciousnesses. So these six primary consciousnesses are, as most of you know, the eye consciousness, the ear consciousness, the nose consciousness, the tongue consciousness, and the body consciousness. So these are the five sense primary consciousnesses, and then there is the mental consciousness itself. So these five sense consciousnesses each have a unique object that they know and experience, which is of course the eye consciousness knows shapes and colors.
Right? And that’s all it knows. It experiences those. The nose consciousness knows smells. The the the tongue consciousness experiences and knows tastes.
The ear consciousness knows and experiences sounds, and the body consciousness knows and experiences tactile sensations. So I just would like to make this point clear I’ve said this many times in other classes, but just maybe this might help or confuse some people, I don’t know, but this whole business of the body consciousness is interesting because as an ordinary person, maybe as a non-Buddhist, one would think that the body has feelings. We would say, if you touch the body, you have feelings. There can be pleasant feelings. If someone hits you, there’s an unpleasant feeling.
When it’s too hot, we say our body, you know, I feel hot, the body is hot. If it’s too cold, the body feels cold and so on. But from a Buddhist view, this is not correct at all. The body isn’t feeling anything. What is actually experiencing those things is the body consciousness, which is not the body at all.
It is this formless phenomena that is existing with the body, but is not the body. If you take a dead body that has been dead one second, is completely dead, unquestionably dead for one second, what is the difference between that body, that dead body, and the live body is the dead body doesn’t have a consciousness. It doesn’t have any consciousness whatsoever because it’s dead. That’s the meaning of being dead. The consciousness is no longer there.
So that body or if and it’s only one second dead. It’d be different if it’s like three three weeks old and rotting. But in just one second, it’s only been dead for one second. But that body, if you hit it, it doesn’t feel anything. Yeah.
It doesn’t feel hot or cold. It doesn’t experience anything because it’s not the body that feels. You know, if it was the body that feels, even the dead body in some way should feel something, but it doesn’t. It’s the consciousness that knows things. You hear a dead body, it doesn’t know it’s been hit.
But when there’s a consciousness there, it knows. It experiences. So that’s something to think about. Maybe that’s very primitive for some people, but it’s worth thinking about. The brain is still there, you know, and and it’s hasn’t degenerated very much in one second, but it’s not giving rise to anything at all.
It’s the consciousness that does things. This is the Buddhist view. So each of these sense consciousnesses has their own unique field of awareness and experience, and these things do not overlap. Then the mental consciousness itself this is the most important of the primary consciousnesses. This field of the mental consciousness itself is all phenomena.
It knows what the sense consciousness knows indirectly, and then it knows other things that the sense consciousnesses cannot know. One difference between the primary sense consciousnesses and the mental consciousness is that the and this applies especially for us as ordinary people because we’re just talking about ordinary mind. We’re not talking about Buddhist minds and everything now. We’re trying to understand our mind and how it works. For the ordinary mind, the sense consciousnesses know their object directly.
So the sense consciousnesses perceive their object. There is direct perception of the object. The eye consciousness directly sees blue. It directly sees shapes and so on. Whereas the mental consciousness, our mental consciousness, is able to both directly perceive things and conceive of them as well.
So the mental consciousness has concepts about things that the sense consciousnesses do not have concepts about things. The eye consciousness doesn’t have a concept about a flower. It only has perceptions of shape and color, whereas it’s the mental consciousness that can have either direct perceptions or indirect conceptions. And for us as ordinary people now, actually the way our mental consciousness knows most things right now is indirectly through concepts. Whereas Buddha’s mind is only perceiving everything directly.
For example, right now, we can intellectually understand impermanence, and we can perceive gross impermanence directly. We can perceive it, but we cannot directly perceive subtle impermanence. We can have a concept about it, but we cannot directly perceive it right now. Whereas a much even before a Buddha, you can directly perceive subtle impermanence, how things are changing literally moment by moment. So we can’t perceive that now.
We perceive it with our eye consciousness and we certainly can’t perceive it with our mental consciousness. We can conceive of it, but we cannot perceive it. But as we purify our mind, this is possible. So of course, when there are perceptions, there are no mistakes. Conceptions can be correct or incorrect.
We can have a correct conception about something or an incorrect one. Anyway, that’s a whole another story, getting a bit carried away there. So there are these six primary minds, primary consciousnesses, of which the mental consciousness is the most important one. And it is the mental consciousness, of course, that under the influence of various mental factors creates both good and bad karma that results in happiness and suffering and the experiences of the future lives. And it is the most subtle level of the primary mental consciousness which goes from life to life.
So our I consciousness of this life and the other sense consciousnesses of this life do not carry on into the next life. Even the gross mental consciousness of this life doesn’t go into the next life. It’s only the very subtle level of our mind that goes on. So as you can see in the handout I gave you, this is what we’re going to cover very briefly in this course. Usually to go through these it takes much, much longer.
So I’m just going to give a brief introduction to these fifty one mental factors. So they’re divided into six groups, if I remember six groups. They are what are called the five omnipresent mental factors, meaning that these five mental factors, are always operating with every primary consciousness. They have to go together. Then there are what are called the five object determining mental factors.
There are the eleven virtuous mental factors, the six root delusions, the six root afflictions or disturbing thoughts, And then there are the twenty secondary afflictions. So these are by products or outgrowths of six root delusions. And then there are what I call the four variable mental factors. Variable meaning that they can become, depending on the motivation, these can become positive mental factors or negative or neutral depending on circumstances. So we’re going to go through these mental factors tonight.
Start tonight. So I mentioned there are six primary consciousnesses. So what is a primary consciousness? What does that mean? So the definition, the simple definition of a primary consciousness is it is a cognizer that apprehends only the general entity of its object.
So every every valid phenomena that exists has a general entity and specific qualities. Right? So the primary consciousness is that which apprehends the general characteristics of something. Whereas the mental factors, all these different mental factors operating in our mind stream, these are what identify the very specific things and fill in, in a sense just roughly speaking, all the details that make up a particular phenomena. Right?
Okay. So these and these two things, the primary a primary consciousness, whether it’s the mental consciousness or the eye consciousness or so on, and the mental factors always some of these mental factors always have to be operating with the primary consciousness. You don’t you can’t have a primary consciousness separate from other mental factors, and you can’t have mental factors operating without the primary consciousness. These two always go together. One analogy that is given is that the primary consciousness is like the hand, the totality of the hand, whereas the mental factors are like the fingers and the palm of the hand and the back of the hand, something like that.
So they all you can’t have a hand without fingers, roughly speaking. Let’s not get into the fine debates about that. But generally, a hand is what is labeled on having fingers and a palm and so on. So can’t have a primary consciousness without the mental factors there. The two go together.
One thing I’ve mentioned before, just to remind you again, whenever there is a primary consciousness operating, then there are always mental factors and there will always be either a positive or a negative mental factor connected with that primary mind. So if there is one negative mental factor connected with that primary consciousness, then it means that whole consciousness is affected and is negative. If there’s a positive mental factor operating, then the whole consciousness is positive. You cannot have a positive mind and a negative mind operating absolutely simultaneously. Right?
These are mutually exclusive. It can look like to our ordinary mind that that we have positive and negative minds operating simultaneously, But this is because our mind is very speedy and our mind is very gross, and it may look like that. But at any one moment, in one actual moment, you can only have a positive mind existing or a negative one. In the next moment, the mind can change, of course. But in any one moment, only the mind can have only one kind of characteristic, one kind of quality.
So now we’re going to go into something a little bit technical. Hope this doesn’t there’s too much for you. So the mental factors always accompany a main mind. So the definition of a mental factor, and this is what we’re going to look into, is a cognizer that apprehends the qualities of an object and which arise within the retinue of a main mind with which they have five things in common. Okay?
So a mental factor is is a cognizer, that is it’s a consciousness that apprehends specific qualities of an object and it arises at the same time as the primary mind, and it has five things in common with that primary mind. So these five what are these five things? So we’ll just look at these briefly. The first of these is what is called a similar basis. So to explain this, I just have to explain something else first.
According to the Abhidharma and to Lorig, how the mind works is that conscious three factors are necessary for a particular consciousness to arise in any moment. So these factors are: firstly, what is called the immediately preceding condition. So the immediately so for example, the immediately preceding condition for an eye consciousness to operate, to become functioning, is a former moment of that consciousness. Then the second factor that is necessary is what is called the dominant or subjective condition. And this is the sense power itself.
So if we take the example of for an eye consciousness to arise, there has to be the dominant condition of having the eye sense power, right, itself. And then the third factor that’s necessary is what is called the observed object condition, which is just a technical way of saying the thing that’s being apprehended, the thing that’s being known in some way, which just also leads to this point which is helpful to know. Whether we believe it or not is another thing, but one can check this. But according to Buddhist understanding, you can’t have a consciousness existing that is not knowing something, that is not experiencing some object. Right?
You just can’t have a mind knowing no thing whatsoever. Consciousness has to be knowing something. That thing it is knowing or experiencing can be something very, very subtle, but it still there still has to be something to be known. Otherwise, there is no consciousness. So for a consciousness to arise, for a consciousness, you know, an I consciousness to be actually existing, to be arising, there has to be at the same time an object of I consciousness to be perceived.
It is also according to Buddhist logic, also works the opposite way around that things cannot exist without a consciousness knowing them. It just it is utterly impossible for phenomena to exist without them being known. In fact, in Buddhism, the definition of a phenomena, of something that validly exists, is that which can be known by a valid mind. If there is something that cannot be known by a valid mind, it doesn’t exist. No.
At least some consciousness has the ability to because of course Buddha consciousness has the ability to know everything all the time. So if Buddha consciousness, valid consciousness, cannot perceive it, it doesn’t exist. And it’s worth trying to reflect how something could exist that is not known by any consciousness whatsoever. Of course, many things exist that we don’t know. We don’t but that doesn’t mean that they’re not known by another consciousness.
But from Buddhist point of view, it’s utterly impossible for something to be known, to exist that cannot be known at all by any mind whatsoever. Because another way of understanding what is known as mind in Buddhism is that mind has the ability to know anything that does exist. If something is validly existing, all minds have the potential to know it. Everything that exists can be known. This doesn’t mean that our mind as it is can know anything right now, but if our mind is purified and becomes completely and perfectly valid, then in such a condition, then mind can know things.
There is not anything whatsoever, no matter how subtle, if it exists, that cannot be known. So our mind has that potential to know everything. That’s part of that’s one aspect of its Buddha potential. It has this potential to be completely omniscient. Because mind knows, and if you let it know, it will.
The trouble is we don’t let our mind know things properly. So anyway, these are the three factors that give rise to any particular consciousness in any particular moment: the immediately preceding condition, which is a previous moment of consciousness There is the dominant subjective condition, which is the sense power. And then there is the object condition, which is the conventionally existing external object. The reason I said all that was to help explain what a similar basis means. What this refers to is that the dominant condition, which is the sense power, is the same for the main mind and the mental factors.
So for example, the visual consciousness apprehending blue has the eye sense base as its dominant condition, and this is also the dominant condition for the mental factors in the retinue of that consciousness. So this is how you have this. This is the first of the five things in common between the primary mind and the mental factors operating within it. There is this similar basis. The second thing in common is that they have a similar object.
In other words, the main mind and the mental factors associated with it in its retinue are observing the same object. So in other words, the primary consciousness, if it’s perceiving the color blue, then all the other mental factors are also knowing that. They can’t be knowing something else, seeing green or something. So they have the same object, similar object. The third thing in common is a similar aspect.
In other words, anything that shows a particular aspect to the main mind shows the same aspect to the mental factors in its retinue. So again, if this is this is very similar to number two. So if if the if the color blue is appearing to the the main mind, the color blue is also appearing to the mental factors. They have the same aspect. As it says here, the main mind and the mental factors are generated in the aspect of blue, like clear glass placed on a blue cloth taking on the aspect of blue.
The aspect of the object is taken up by the subjects, the main mind and its mental factors. This is explaining more clearly than what I said at the beginning. In the definition of mind, the mind is clear and knowing. So clear has the connotation of being formless, but also clear in a sense that it has the ability, because it is formless, unobstructed, to take on the aspect of what it’s knowing. And as it gives the example here, if you put like a crystal on a blue cloth, then that crystal will appear blue.
It will take on the aspect of that. So the mind takes on the aspect of whatever is appearing to it because nothing is obstructing it from doing that. That’s what this is the miraculous quality of our mind. That’s how we know things because consciousness takes on the aspect of each thing that can be known. And of course, what yeah.
It takes it on accurately. At least the fully purified mind has the potential, ability to take on things, to take on the aspect of things completely as they are. We think our mind is doing that now, but unfortunately, it’s not. That’s one of our troubles. Then the fourth thing that is in common between the mental factors and the primary consciousness is similar time.
So in other words, the main mind and the mental factors in its retinue occur simultaneously. So if the primary consciousness is perceiving the color blue, then the mental factors perceiving the color blue are operating exactly at the same time, not a split second later, but exactly at the same time. This color blue is used a lot in Buddhist philosophy as an example of things. Pots and the color blue, if you get into studying philosophical subjects in Buddhism, pots, which is defined as what is the round bellied thing with a neck, pots and the color blue are always often taken as examples to illustrate various things. Of course, the hairs of a rabbit are often given as an example of something I was talking about things that validly exist.
So if something validly exists, then it can be known. It can be perceived by a valid consciousness. But there are things we may think exist or said to exist that don’t exist at all. So these, of course, can’t be known. An example is the horns of a rabbit.
There’s a concept of the horns of a rabbit, but the horns of an actual rabbit do not exist whatsoever. There’s no rabbit that has ever produced horns, right? So these horns exist as a concept, but not in reality. So they cannot be known. Even a Buddha doesn’t know, doesn’t experience the horns of a rabbit because they just simply do not exist at all, But if something does value exist, there is consciousness out there that can know it, and our consciousness has the potential to know it.
And the final factor of the fifth thing that is in common is a similar substance. For example, the main mind cannot be unhappy if it has the mental factor of happy feeling in its retinue. Happy feeling and unhappy feeling cannot abide together in any one group of mind and mental factors. So they must all be of the same substance. So if there’s one negative factor which is also producing suffering, then it will all be of that similar substance.
If there’s a positive factor and therefore happy feeling, then the whole mind will be of that one substance. Right? That’s what substance there is referring to. So these are the five things that are in common between any particular primary consciousness and the mental factors that operate in its retinue that go together with it. There are these five things: a similar basis, a similar object, a similar aspect, a similar time, and a similar substance.
So I think that’s the most boring technical part we’ll cover in this course. Hopefully it’ll get more interesting from this. If you have any questions that I can try to answer. Sorry, I misplanned as usual. We started late and also I talked much longer than I expected because anyway, this course is not meant to run as long each night as the Dharma courses have been doing.
Anyway, very quickly, we’ll try and then move into the first group of mental factors. So these are the five omnipresent mental factors. So these, as it says, are they operate with every single primary consciousness, whether it’s an eye consciousness, a nose consciousness, or the mental consciousness, these five mental factors exist simultaneously with those. They’re always present. So these mental factors are feeling, discrimination, or one trouble with this whole topic, and especially this topic, a problem with Buddhism coming to the West or into non-Buddhist countries is translation and terminology.
So there are these very precise terms in Buddhism, in Sanskrit and also in the Tibetan language, and we don’t have the exact words in our language to really translate them. Some cases we do. I mean feeling is not a problem. There’s no problem with translating that word. But in many other words, sometimes we have many English, like maybe five, six English words that may fit, that seem to fit the Tibetan word, but none of them quite catches that one.
Or some translators use this word and other translators use this word, so it can be quite confusing. That’s why I put the Tibetan words alongside the English so that if you come across in the reading, if you have the Tibetan word, can check what, like in the glossaries and things at the back, what terminology they’re using. It can be helpful sometimes. So this feeling the second one is called discrimination, but it may be better to call this recognition. It’s most commonly translated as discrimination, or maybe discriminating recognition, or recognition.
The next one is intention, contact, and here in the list I’ve given you, it’s been translated, yid la byed pa has been translated as attention, but also it may better be translated as engagement. Engagement. The mind engaging with the object. So just briefly, we’ll go a little bit through feeling. Feeling, of course, is an incredibly important mental factor, one of the most important mental factors of all, because this is what really motivates us.
If we have pleasant feelings, we’re attracted to something. If we have unpleasant things, unpleasant feelings, we develop aversion to what we believe is generating those unpleasant feelings. So feeling So feeling is is the is the way we experience a particular object or the particular way we experience an object. So feeling is omnipresent with every moment of consciousness. This is an interesting thing that whenever a consciousness is operating and that there’s always, you know, while we’re alive or even after we’re dead consciousness is always there.
When consciousness is operating, there is always feeling present. There is never a moment in our existence when we are not having some kind of feeling. It may be very strong. It may be very weak, but there is always feeling there in our consciousness. So there are different ways of dividing up feelings.
One can talk about physical feelings, and then another category is mental feelings. But again, what we need to understand is feeling is a mental factor. It is consciousness. It is clear and knowing. It is not physical in any way.
So when we talk about physical feelings, it doesn’t mean feelings that are physical. Feelings are consciousness, but the physical feelings are referring to those feelings that directly arise from the physical body, which is what I was talking about earlier tonight. And then there are are purely mental feelings that don’t have any direct relationship with the physical body. So for example, if we have a disease, the body consciousness is experiencing that, then there will be an unpleasant feeling. So that is physical feeling because it’s arising directly from the body consciousness.
But then also, especially what happens with human beings, much less so with animals, when we have an unpleasant feeling, especially arising in our body, there’s pain in the body due to some sickness or wound or something like that, then our mental consciousness thinks about that, gets very upset and worried and anxious and stressed out and generates unpleasant mental feelings as well. So we can have both operating unpleasant physical feelings and unpleasant mental feelings about the same thing. And what often happens is that our mental feelings can be much stronger and more problematic than the physical feelings themselves. The fear and worry that we have about a disease and that suffering, the suffering generated in our mental consciousness that can be far greater than the actual physical suffering. So that leads to the other categorization of feelings.
There are physical and mental feelings, but then there are three kinds of feelings. There are pleasant feelings, unpleasant feelings and neutral feelings. So we’re experiencing one of those kinds of feelings all the time. As you are listening to me, you’re experiencing either a pleasant feeling, a neutral feeling, or an unpleasant feeling in your mental consciousness. Your body consciousness sitting on your chair is also experiencing some kind of pleasant feeling, unpleasant feeling, or neutral feeling.
As you look at things, your eye consciousness is experiencing pleasant feelings associated with what you see, unpleasant feelings with what you see, or neutral feelings with what you see. They’re happening all the time. So neutral feeling is very difficult. I don’t know about you, but I find it quite difficult to get a concept of neutral feeling because neutral feeling does not mean no feeling. It is not possible, as I just said, to have no feeling.
We are always having feelings because it’s an omnipresent mental factor. Consciousness is always there and the mental factor of feeling is omnipresent. It’s always there. So there’s never a moment when we have no feeling. So neutral feeling is not an absence of feeling.
It is a particular feeling which is neither a feeling of happiness nor a feeling of suffering, of pain, unpleasant. It is a neutral feeling. I can’t say much more about it because I don’t really understand that one. I think we all know what pleasant and unpleasant feelings are. Difficult to define them, but we all know.
And of course, this is what motivates us. As soon as we have pleasant feelings, we want it. We want it to continue. We want to increase it. If there is an unpleasant feeling, we want it to stop when we want it to stop immediately.
The trouble is in saṃsāra, we identify these feelings as originating in external things. That when we eat food and we have pleasant feeling, we say, oh, this is delicious. I am enjoying that. We think that the food is the sole source of that feeling. Therefore, we eat more.
Because if I eat more, I will be more happy. But the feeling is not in the food. It’s our consciousness. It’s our consciousness. There is this taste consciousness bubbling away that is generating a pleasant feeling, and the mental consciousness is noting that pleasant feeling and says, Oh, I like that pleasant feeling.
I want more of that pleasant feeling. And the mental consciousness in its confusion, our mental or my mental consciousness in its confusion says, Oh, it comes from there. So if I have more, there’ll be more, more pleasant feeling. More, more, more. But it doesn’t quite work.
And of course when there’s suffering, unhappiness, our mental consciousness says what is causing that is out there. That pain is something, you know, as soon as you start to think about it, it becomes completely stupid that we never, in the moment, we never think about it because we act habitually. But we always feel that our suffering is actually coming. When someone says something unpleasant to us, it feels like that unpleasantness has come from that person into me. They’ve manufactured, they’ve deliberately manufactured this poisonous stuff and put it in me.
And therefore I to get rid of it. The way to get rid of it is kind of to destroy that person or harm them or put them down or get rid of them, move away from them because they’re generating it. But it’s not there at all. That unpleasant feeling that we’re experiencing when someone says you’re an idiot, stupid, ugly, or whatever is our consciousness. The mental the the ear consciousness here is, you know, the ear consciousness, actually it’s very interesting to analyze this, but there’s no time.
But the ear consciousness, all it hears are sounds. Right? It does hear intelligent sounds and non intelligible sounds. But all it hears are words. Right?
So words actually don’t have any power to cause harm. But all our ear consciousness is hearing, is experiencing, is knowing are sounds. Right? And someone says stupid, so we recognize that sound and it’s an intelligent sound. It has an actual meaning.
But that word, that sound has no power in itself to cause pain. And to say stupid or intelligent, they’re just sounds. Yeah. And all our ear consciousness does is know that sound. But then our mental consciousness comes along and says, you recognize stupid.
Stupid is bad. This person is saying, I am bad, inferior, blah blah blah, and generates our mental consciousness generates this whole series of thoughts and and stuff that in the omnipresently generates a feeling of pain, unpleasant feeling. Yeah? And then we say in our stupidity, that comes from you. You did that to me.
You made me unhappy. Of course, you know, they are the outer condition, but the root cause is our own consciousness. When you when you look into it, I think if you really look into it, it’s very difficult to deny that that is true. Our self-cherishing likes to say, you are the problem, but actually the root problem is our own uncontrolled consciousness. So very quickly, discrimination or recognition is this mental factor that distinguishes the particular feature of an object.
This also is an incredible all of these five omnipresent mental factors are incredibly important. Seem so very simple because they are so simple. They are so fundamental. They are so important. This discrimination or recognition, I mean, there’s various levels of it, the most basic level is just the simple ability of each primary consciousness to be able to distinguish this from that.
That’s all. This is this, and this is that. If we didn’t have this mind, this ability, this mental factor, we would not be able to do anything. Right? Because this mental factor is able to distinguish that there’s this and there is that and there is that.
Amazing. You know? If you if if you if you couldn’t distinguish that, you wouldn’t know. You would think that that was one thing. So you wouldn’t know, oh, you can take that off and there’s stuff inside and you can drink.
And you wouldn’t be able to distinguish. You wouldn’t be able to discriminate that the cup is different from the liquid. Right? But there is a mental factor that distinguishes that there is this and there is that. This is an amazing quality of mind.
I’m not sure if I mentioned it here. Know I’ve mentioned it when I teach in Perth quite a few times. Many, many years ago I knew this woman in America who worked in the field of artificial intelligence and computers and all that stuff. And this was many years ago, so I’m sure things have improved since then. But she was saying, or what I understood with my limited scientific understanding, she was saying that they have computers in order to be able to distinguish something like on top of a table, it takes millions of calculations to do that.
Millions to be able to distinguish. And I don’t know what they can do now, but this was ten, fifteen years ago, maybe even longer. So maybe they can do amazing things now, they can. But at point, computers had great difficulty being able to distinguish even the most simple things from each other. Whereas our consciousness does that instantly.
In one moment, we can do this. If couldn’t do that, we wouldn’t be able to get out of this room. You wouldn’t be able to distinguish the doorway from the wall. Fortunately, we can. We can distinguish there’s a gap, you know, so that’s where you go out there.
So it’s very helpful. It’s an extremely helpful kind of mind, right? And on that fundamental, it’s very simple fundamental ability of mind, there are so many other levels of discrimination and recognition. Recognition of all the different parts and being able to recognize different colors and shades. This is dark red and this is light red and so on.
Infant varieties of discrimination and recognition. So this factor, this mental factor is always present with every primary consciousness. If it wasn’t, you know, we wouldn’t be able to know anything. So with our eye consciousness, you know, our eye consciousness is discriminating, recognizing so many things right now. You know, there’s red and blue and there is white and black and so on.
And then our mental consciousness is distinguishing, you know, this is like Chinese brocade and this is paper so on. And this is cheap thing wearing away old eye case. You know. So there’s various levels of discrimination going on all the time and absolutely necessary. If we couldn’t distinguish, you know, this is from that, you know, I put that, you know, it’s kind of very difficult, you know.
So so it’s a very important mental factor. And it has to be there all the time, all the time. It’s present all the time. So very quickly, what else do we have? There is so then there is the mental factor of intention, which is a consciousness.
It’s a mental factor that moves its accompanying primary mind towards an object, a particular object. So, you know, with the eye consciousness, always with the primary eye consciousness, there is this mental factor of intention that moves the eye consciousness to take interest in a particular thing. If it wasn’t there, the eye consciousness wouldn’t know, wouldn’t experience that phenomena. Oh, a good question. I think it’s a little bit of both, but it’s more just the moving.
It is taking some interest. It’s moving the mind towards that. Of course, once the mind has moved to it, then it can generate more interest on the basis of other mental factors, more interest in concern and so on. Actually, this mental factor is extremely important because it is also, it is this mental factor that moves our primary consciousness towards a particular object. And this is why it’s also very much associated with karma.
It is almost synonymous with karma. Because karma is a Sanskrit word that simply means action or movement or activity. And in the context of the Dharma, the Buddhist teachings, karma is used to refer to the movement, the activity of the mind. So every time the mind is moving towards an object, karma karma is there. There is this activity.
And when there is this activity, these karmic imprints are being created, good and bad. And it gets kind of complicated that operating with that intention is past karma because why does that mental factor of intention that takes interest, that moves a particular primary mind to a particular object, why does it take interest in that thing? Why does it move the mind to that thing? Because of karma, because of our past imprints. So this intention is a mental factor that gives rise to physical and verbal actions.
So with this mental factor, generate karma mentally. But because of that it also motivates our speech, and then we create speaking the karma of speech, and it also motivates the actions of our body. And therefore, we create karma with the body as well. Next maybe we can talk about that a bit more in detail next week. But I just want to cover these very quickly tonight and finish these just to give an idea.
The next of the omnipresent mental factors is called contact. So contact just, you know, in the English language, you know, just sounds is a physical action. In my understanding of contact, it’s the meeting of two or more objects coming together, right? And the touching. But here contact is a mental factor.
It’s a mental factor that that arises upon the coming together of the sense base, the main mind, the primary mind and the object. So for example, we always take the example of the eye consciousness, there is the sense base of the eye organ itself. There is the primary eye consciousness and then there is the object, the shape or color. So when these three things come together, is the mental that is that mental factor bringing that and enabling those three things to arise together. And it acts as the basis of a particular feeling.
Contact is the mental factor that is the basis for a particular feeling to occur. So contact and feeling are operating simultaneously. So the sense base, the consciousness and the object come together and that is contact. And as soon as that happens, in that very moment, there is feeling unpleasant or unpleasant feeling. And then finally, the fifth of these mental factors, these ever present mental factors is called engagement.
And this is the factor, the mental factor that focuses the mind upon a particular object. So intention moves the mind to that object, that moves the primary mind to that object, its own unique object. And then engagement, which is happening simultaneously in a sense that stays or focuses on that object. Right? So this operates with all the sense consciousnesses.
With the mental consciousness, there’s another mental factor that we’ll look at next week, which is concentration, which is able to stay on an object for as long as we like. There’s that particular mental factor has to be developed, that we have the potential within our mind, in our mental consciousness to have, we have this mental factor of concentration and right now it’s in a very primitive form and our mental consciousness is not able to stay on an object very long at all. That’s one of our big problems that we can train that mental factor to develop that mental factor so that we can stay on an object longer and longer until there’s a point we can reach where mental consciousness can stay effortlessly on whatever object it likes for an enormous amount of time. So that’s a very highly developmental factor, whereas this factor of engagement is much more primitive than that, and it’s associated with the sense consciousnesses. Each sense consciousness is able to stay on its object.
So this is that mental factor of engagement that enables the sense consciousness to stay on the object. Because if our consciousness didn’t stay there long enough, we wouldn’t be able to know the object properly. If we were only to see something for a split second and and and the mind moved immediately away from it, we could hardly experience anything. We would have, you know, just the the barest I mean, we would have a very schizophrenic experience of the world if, you know, if our mind didn’t stay on anything at all. So this, again, is an omnipresent and always present mental factor that has to be there.
Okay, so that’s just a little bit of introduction to just to give a very rough idea of these five omnipresent mental factors, which is the first group of mental factors. Any questions, comments? Yes. I wanted to talk about that another time when there’s more time, but some of you are already familiar with the concept of the five aggregates of dividing us as a human being. We can talk about us what we consist of, the five aggregates of form, which is our physical body and there are four other aggregates, which make up our mind.
Aggregate meaning a combination, a coming together of many things. So our body is a coming together of many things, an aggregation of many, many things, changing moment by moment, and our mind is a coming together, combination and aggregation of many things coming together, changing moment by moment. So the mind is divided into, for purposes of analysis, into feelings, discriminations or recognition of the primary consciousnesses and compositional factors. So it’s done that way. Feelings are separated out because they are so incredibly important.
That’s what motivates us all the time. And discrimination, factor of recognition is separated out as an important factor of the mind because without that, you know, we don’t function. We have to be able to tell this from that. And it’s the basis of developing all kinds of wisdom, that ability to distinguish things. And then I talked briefly in the beginning about the six primary consciousnesses.
So this is another part of one of the aggregates of the mind. And then the compositional factors, which is one of the other aggregates of the mind, all of the other mental factors here, forty nine of the other mental factors fit into that category, into that aggregate. So this first part of the topic is, I must admit, is kind of dry and a bit technical, but it does get hopefully more interesting when we get into the positive mental factors and the six root delusions and the secondary negative minds. These are really very important and helpful to know. But it’s also, even if you find this kind of quite complicated, I think it’s helpful to know that Buddhist scholars have looked into the mind a lot.
They have really delved into looking at the mind from many, many factors. So what I’ve said tonight is just very, very primitive. Geshes could talk about just one of these things for days and days and days and go and explore all the aspects from the different philosophical schools. Know, school thinks this about this, you know, and the other school. So this is just a very, very simple introduction just to give some idea of these mental factors and what our mind is doing and what it’s made up of.
We really need to know our mind. Yeah. It’s our best friend and our worst enemy. Alright. Okay.
Thank you very much. We can dedicate the merit of this time. The prayer, if you’d like to join in, is in the book, page Page seventeen, halfway down. May the precious bodhimind not yet born arise and grow. May that born have no decline but increase forevermore.
No. Maybe we can take a short break.