Volition and the Functions of Store Consciousness

Thich Nhat Hanh — Winter Retreat 2013–2014 Full Moon Meditation Hall, New Hamlet, Plum Village · 19 December 2013 · talk 10 of 24

Illuminates: cetanā — the “food of volition” / bodhicitta · the nine functions of store consciousness (store · learn · process · ripen · nourish · heal · self-navigate · sustain life · manifest body-and-environment) · nāma-rūpa arise together (matter doesn’t give rise to spirit) · Vasubandhu’s Verse 19 on maturation — and the Fifty Verses’ advance to maturation at every instant (direct parallel to Verse 9).

---

Today is the 19th of December, 2013. We are in the Full Moon Meditation Hall of the New Hamlet, in the winter retreat. Today we speak in Vietnamese; the next four talks — the 22nd, the 24th (New Year’s Eve), and the new year — will be in English.

The five universals, and volition

Last time we said the ālaya consciousness is connected with the five universal mental formations. In the Theravada school the universals number not five but seven, adding one-pointedness of mind (concentration) and the life faculty (vitality).

Among the five, volition (cetanā) does not mean “thinking” here; it means a determination, a desire to realize something. We should ask: what does the ālaya want to realize? This is the food of volition (manaḥsañcetanā — one of the four foods). Volition is a food; without it we have no life. Someone who wants to do nothing is someone about to die. The ālaya does not want to die; it wants to live. A momentary desire is one thing, but the food of volition is something always there — something we always remember wanting to realize. Whoever has a strong source of volition has a great deal of energy.

But that energy can be wholesome or unwholesome. The desire for revenge — to kill another to assuage our anger — is also a food of volition; terrorists have that strong desire to punish, and it gives them great energy, even to sacrifice their own lives. So the food of volition is a source of energy, wholesome or not. As human beings we need a desire to realize something, and the Buddha taught us to sit quietly, look deeply, and find our deepest desire: is it money, fame, sex — or something else? Each of us has to sit and identify the source of volition-food in us.

Bodhicitta — the wholesome volition-food

Before he became a monk, the Buddha had a desire: to understand and transform suffering and to help the world. As Prince Siddhartha he had every material condition — power, a future, a beautiful wife — but he was not satisfied. His volition-food was not to become a king, for he saw that being a king did not bring happiness: his father on the throne was not happy, unable to resolve the corruption, injustice, and hunger in society. Siddhartha did not want a kingship that lacked the power to resolve even his own suffering. He wanted to find a path to undo worry, trouble, and fear — to be free, to have insight for himself and others — because he saw that politicians have no power to help people in this deep way. That is a very wholesome source of food.

When young people become monks or nuns, they have the same kind of volition-food: seeing that people with money, fame, and power still have no happiness, they want a different path — the path of transforming oneself and joining the career of the Buddha and the Sangha, so that life has less suffering. In a retreat of five or six days, many people transform greatly — they reconcile with loved ones, find their joy — so we know this path can help people stop suffering. In Buddhism we call this volition-food bodhicitta, the mind of love — the mind that wants to wake up in order to help others. A monk or nun who keeps bodhicitta alive and strong has great energy, is not afraid of difficulties, and does not wish to run from them: bodhicitta is a heart on fire. We become monastics because that source is there — and the reason someone no longer wishes to be a monastic is that the source has worn away. So we must maintain, preserve, and strengthen our bodhicitta; as long as that source is there, we are happy.

Knowing the volition-food — in ourselves and others

We become monastics to live and work with brothers and sisters who share the same direction, the same volition-food. So before ordaining, look carefully: do the monks and nuns in this Sangha have the bodhicitta, the ideal I have? Do we have a future together? It is the same in the world. In the East, when a woman marries a man she often takes his career as her own; so before marriage the couple should discover each other’s volition-food — what are your dreams, the dreams you want to realize? — and ask: is this something I can take part in? If one only wants fame, profit, or sex, do I want to share that dream? If the two have separate dreams, the marriage is only an outer appearance, with no deep relationship and no great happiness — they lie on the same bed with two different dreams, which is a tragedy; then the other person becomes a tool for realizing one’s individual dream, and that is suffering. In the West they call it dating — meals, cinema, time to understand the other’s dreams and tradition before marrying.

So as a monastic, ask: I have a life — what do I want to do with it? What is my dream? And in family life, ask too: parents and children often talk only of functional daily things. A daughter can ask her mother, “When you were young, did you have dreams? Have you realized them?” — and her father, “Daddy, did you have dreams? Did mother help you realize them, or was she an obstacle?” To sit and sympathize with one’s father, to become his good friend, makes both happy — “Father, if you haven’t realized your dream, I can realize it for you.” Some are already sixty or sixty-five and it is a little late to ask “what have I done with my life?” — so the young should ask early, not leave it too late. This is one of the best ways to re-establish communication — in the monastic family or the blood family. Where there is such communication, the family has happiness, and that is applied Buddhism. When we talk about love, we have to talk about the food of volition.

The dream realized in every step

But the food of volition is not merely a dream about the future. If we have an ideal, we begin to live it now, in such a way that each step, each breath is the realization of the dream. The path is not different from the end; the means is not different from the end. Normally we think the path is a means toward a dream at its end — but if the dream is to be realized, it must be present in every step. If we want liberation and happiness, we must bring liberation and happiness into each step we take now. To say “tomorrow, when we have the socialist government, I’ll have energy to do this” is to chase a dream that can never be realized, because our way of life now has nothing to do with the ideal. Pure Land, Kingdom of God, Socialism — these can all be empty dreams if we cannot realize them in daily life; they are things people sell us, and we sell our lives for them, with nothing in it. We have to live so that the Pure Land, the Kingdom of God, is really there in the present moment. The same is true of married life: not two separate dreams, but living together so there is real happiness every day. So as we enter the new year, this is an opportunity to sit and ask: What is my dream? Am I realizing it, or is it just an empty dream? — and to nourish that source of energy in daily life, for if we cannot nourish it, it wears away and we lose our path, our raison d’être.

The nature of ālaya, and its functions

Store consciousness also has cetanā — so we ask, “Store consciousness, what is your volition?” We have learned the nature of the ālaya: it is unobstructed, of indeterminate nature (not good or bad), and its feelings are neutral. The five universals it carries include feeling, but not happy or suffering feeling — only neutral; so its nature is neither suffering nor happiness, neither good nor evil, neither pure nor impure. And we learned the eleven characteristics of the seeds, which are also the eleven characteristics of the store (the seeds are organic, so the ālaya is organic; neither inside nor outside; both individual and collective). Now the functions:

(1) To maintain, preserve, store — like the hard disk of a computer: all the information put in is held so it is not lost, not deleted. Because it holds all the seeds, it must preserve them all.

(2) To learn (vāsanā — to be perfumed, infused). We don’t know how to write Chinese characters, so we learn; the result goes into the ālaya, and after a while the ālaya orders the hand to write them. Learning to drive: at first we give it all our attention through the mind-consciousness, but once learned, the ālaya does the driving together with eye-consciousness, without the mind-consciousness — which is meanwhile thinking of other things — and the ālaya reacts very quickly while the mind-consciousness reacts slowly. What is learned becomes habit energy.

(3) To process and organize information — to handle what it stores. We meet someone and remember the face but not the name; the mind-consciousness searches and fails; we let the matter go, and the next day the name comes up by itself — the work of store consciousness.

(4) To ripen, to mature. Information and experience need time to ripen — like hearing the elder brothers chant every day: the learning is maintained and increased and one day ripens, and we open our mouth and chant as they do. Like mung beans: it is not enough to put them in boiling water; they need time to cook, and when cooked they smell good. Like Mother Earth: we bury a seed, and it takes time to sprout, then flower, then fruit. Art, insight — all need ripening.

(5) To nourish — as Mother Earth nourishes what grows. Emotions, love, insight, bodhicitta, enlightenment — all need nourishing, and the ālaya can nourish.

(6) To heal. This is a very natural capacity. Cut a finger while chopping vegetables, and the body heals the wound by itself if we let it (keep scratching it, and it never heals); rest when sick, and the body heals itself. The mind is the same: given time, worry and suffering calm down — something happens and we think we cannot live, yet a few days later we feel light again. So body and mind heal themselves, on condition that we allow them to rest. When we lose a loved one we feel we cannot live, but time is a kind of medicine, and slowly the ālaya nourishes and heals us.

(7) To navigate by itself — self-directing, like a boat on autopilot. The brain needs no one to direct it: billions of neurons communicate and give rise to the mental formations — contact, attention, feeling, perception — automatically. There is no self, no boss; no neuron says “I am the president, obey me.” The trillions of cells in the body are likewise connected, each able to receive and give information, in harmony — very like the ālaya.

(8) To sustain life. When the ālaya has ripened something, it manifests the proper retribution (the body with its six senses) — and the ālaya keeps it alive; thanks to the ālaya there is life in the body. To say the body gives rise to consciousness is not correct; to say consciousness gives rise to the body is not correct either. Body and consciousness rely on each other to arise — body is rūpa, mind is nāma; nāma-rūpa are causes of growth for each other, and their basis is the ālaya. The seed-cause is the relationship called hetu-pratyaya (the main condition, from the seed); the relationship between nāma and rūpa is the growth-condition, adhipati-pratyaya. So to say matter gives rise to spirit, or spirit to matter, is not correct — both arise from the seeds in the ālaya and rely on each other to manifest. (To say consciousness exists “because of the brain” — brain as matter producing spirit — is not correct: matter and spirit are linked, but both need the seeds, the potentiality, in the ālaya to arise.) This is why, beyond the five universals, there is the life faculty (jīvitendriya, vitality): we cannot have an ālaya without the life force that keeps the body and its six senses alive. (In Plum Village we say the ālaya goes with the five universals and with concentration and the life force.)

(9) To manifest the environment — the environmental retribution. The body (proper retribution) and the environment (environmental retribution) both come from karma, stored in the ālaya; when ripe, they manifest as body and environment.

So far we have nine functions, and with the eleven characteristics, that is how we read the store. And practitioners who come for a five- or six-day retreat transform and see life completely differently — they write, “Dear Thay, this retreat has changed my life.” That person has died and been born as another: that is maturation — we don’t have to wait until our deathbed to mature.

Verse 19 — maturation at every instant

When are the actions ripe? One thing may be ripe while another is not — like an orange and an apple, some ripening first, some later. So maturation is always happening. Verse 19 [of the Thirty Verses] says: with the habit-energies of action (karma-vāsanā) and the habit-energies of the double grasping (grāha-dvaya-vāsanā), some things ripen first and others later — for the double grasping (seeing things as separate) is still there. So when this life is finished, another follows: when one maturation ends, another begins. When this body dies and its environment is gone, the action remains as karma, which ripens; and when that ripening ends, this life ends, and we are born into another maturation.

But this is one-time (cyclical) maturation. In the Fifty Verses we hold the point of view of instant-in-instant maturation — maturation taking place at every instant, not only when one life ends and another begins. This is loyal to impermanence and the three dharma seals: the ālaya is impermanent, birth and death taking place at every instant, running like a turbulent stream.

The sutras speak of two kinds of impermanence: moment-to-moment impermanence (in every instant) and cyclical impermanence (at the end of a stage — we are born here and die there, the baby’s cradle and the old person’s deathbed). But analyzing clearly, the baby did not continue: the child had to “die” to become a teenager, the teenager to become the young adult, the young adult the middle-aged, the middle-aged the old. So we do not become impermanent only when we die — we were already impermanent in becoming a young man, becoming middle-aged, becoming old. Seeds become actual dharmas at every moment, so that impermanence happens all the time; instead of “impermanent at every moment” we can say “born and dying at every moment.” This is very scientific: even now, hundreds of cells are dying and millions being born in the body each moment. We are being born and dying at every moment — and thanks to this, the child can become a young adult.

So maturation should be understood as maturing in every instant, as well as cyclical. If we read only Verse 19, we might think rebirth is possible only when this body disintegrates — but the truth is we have a new body at every moment; we are renewed each moment, though we can’t see it (a child living with us seems not to grow, yet over three years grows very big). When a nun trained in the traditional way comes to Plum Village, her body and environment become different — she has gone from one maturation to another without waiting to die. Maturation takes place in every instant — and this is one of the lines in which the Fifty Verses pushes the Manifestation-Only teaching forward.

Life and death go together

Picture a globe whose mass is always the same, neither increasing nor decreasing: press a finger in on one side, and it bulges out on the other — the pressing-in and the bulging-out happen at the same time, one leading to the other, with no increase and no decrease. Or a wave: as it comes down it “dies,” but its force pushes up the next wave, which is its continuation. So life and death go together. You may think you are dying, but you are being born; to die is to be born, and to be born is to die. We are so afraid of death, but death goes along with life — wherever there is life there is death, wherever death, life. Living and dying do not happen only in cycles; they happen at every instant. If life had no death, it would not be life, only something static and inanimate. The reason we can live happily is that we can die at every moment — for if old cells did not die, new cells could not be born. Death means life, birth.

Next time we will talk in English.