Zen in Ten: "The Realm of No Thought"

Consciousness Only Buddhism

Photo by Samuel Austin on Unsplash

This companion post to Piercing the Veil of Self outlines the next 10 verses of Vasubandhu's “Thirty Verses” as translated in Ben Connolly’s book Inside Vasubandhu’s Yogacara. From the book’s introduction: For understanding the functioning of consciousness, “the ‘Thirty Verses’ uses a model of experience called the eight consciousnesses and teaches us how to practice with and understand consciousness to liberate ourselves from afflictive emotions like anger, selfishness, and laziness. . . . For the study of the nature of phenomena, it uses what is called the three-natures model, which is rooted in Mahayana teachings that emphasize letting go of delusion, letting go of the way of seeing that creates alienation: the delusion that our happiness or suffering are dependent on the slings and arrows of an external world from which we are separate.”

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11. “The beneficial factors are faith, conscience, humility, lack of desire, aversion, and delusion, Energy, tranquility, carefulness, equanimity, and nonviolence.”

12. “The afflictions are desire, aversion, delusion, pride, wrong view, and doubt. The secondary afflictions are anger, hatred, hypocrisy, malice, envy, selfishness,”

13. “Deceitfulness, guile, arrogance, harmfulness, lack of conscience and humility, sluggishness, Restlessness, lack of faith, laziness, carelessness, forgetfulness, distraction, and unawareness.”

14. “Remorse, sleepiness, initial thought, and analysis can be either afflictive or not.”

15. “The five sense consciousnesses arise on the root consciousness together or separately, depending on conditions, like waves on water.”

16. “Thought consciousness always manifests except in the realm of no thought, The two thought-free meditation states, unconsciousness, and thought-free sleep.”

17. “This transformation of consciousness is conceptualization, What is conceptualized does not exist, thus everything is projection only.”

18. “Consciousness is all the seeds transforming in various ways Through mutual influence producing many conceptualizations.”

19. “Karmic impressions and the impressions of grasping self and other Produce further ripening as the former karmic effect is exhausted.”

20. “Whatever thing is conceptualized by whatever conceptualization Is of an imaginary nature; it does not exist.”

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