The Non-abidance of the Mind

The karmic causes we have committed and the deeds we have performed in the past—what mentality we adopt in this present life to face those causes and their respective results—this constitutes our Dharma practice. It is to cultivate positive connections extensively and to perform contrition for the negative karmic obstacles and obscurations: purifying the karmic debts of hostility accumulated since the beginningless lifetimes, thereby resolving grievances and karmic entanglements, while further extending more positive connections and virtuous deeds, so that our lives may become a positive and self-sustaining cycle.

At present, we must also remain aware of the emergence of the karmic cause and effect as it unfolds, and be attentive to the fluctuations of our mental states. Within these very changes of mind, we sow the seeds of virtue and the seeds of wisdom—this is the work of transformation. All that presently arises and exists is to be transformed into virtue, into wisdom, into benefit for oneself and others, into bodhicitta, and into self-awareness that awakens both oneself and others.

What we must do in the present is to be awake rather than deluded. When one is deluded, that itself is non-virtuous. The question, then, is whether we choose to strengthen our connection with non-virtue or to deepen our resonance with virtue. The initial step of practice is to transform the non-virtues into the virtues, thereby fostering ever more expansive and refined goodness. At a further stage, however, the view of practice is the Middle Way: it is not a matter of taking full delight in neither virtues nor non-virtues. Rather, our view is that “the mind does not abide in anything”—it does not fixate on any conditioned arising or changing circumstance. To transcend these conditioned and transient phenomena is what is meant by Dharma practice.

We should not treat the karmic forces of the past, the results that come forth in this life, or the environments, people, and situations we encounter, as though they were pets to be kept and nurtured within the mind—harboring resentments, attachments, or preferences, and storing all gains and losses within alaya, or so called the eighth consciousness or the storehouse of consciousness. Instead, we should learn to relieve again and again, to let go again and again. Although we may not be able to master this immediately, and we may not yet do it well, we must genuinely undertake the effort. We should not deceive ourselves by claiming it cannot be done; rather, we must strive to do it. Regardless of how much we are able to accomplish, it is not something we can afford not to practice.