Study

Here is everything we have made to support your study of Thầy's teachings, illustrations and additional explanations around Thầy's commentaries, a reference tool for the map of the mind, and the fifty verses themselves.

The map of the mind

The Inner Landscape

The whole of the mind Thầy describes, in one place — the eight consciousnesses, the seeds, and the fifty-one mental formations with their families and valences, each in plain English. The reference to keep open beside the verses.

Open the Inner Landscape →

The Verses & the Reflections

All fifty verses, in the book's six parts. Pick one on the left and you get Thầy's own words, the illustration where we have made one, and the Reflections written on it — each one an evening we spent on that verse, written out for reading. Open whichever you want. The number beside a verse is how many it has.

Part I · Store Consciousness

Verse 7 · Habit Energies

The ground of the mind, where all our seeds are kept โ€” and how they ripen into the worlds we live in.

Habit energies: a sign drops from what we meet into the store and runs along a worn groove, while a monastic waters the seeds โ€” one rising as freshness, another as aversion. ×

The function of store consciousnessis to receive and maintainseeds and their habit energies,so they can manifest in the world, or remain dormant.

We have not written on this verse yet. We are working through the book one session at a time, and this page fills in when we reach it. The Inner Landscape covers the terms in the meantime.

The verses are Thich Nhat Hanh's, from Understanding Our Mind (Parallax Press) — shared freely by Plum Village and Deer Park Monastery, and reproduced here with gratitude.