On Sunday, I had the pleasure to listen to Ven. Guan Cheng’s Dharma talk at The University of Hong Kong. (HKU) Hong Kong-born Ven. Guan Cheng is abbot of the International Buddhist Temple in Richmond, in Canada’s British Columbia. With his organization, the International Buddhist Society, he established the Vinaya Samadhi amd Prajna Lecture Hall in Hong Kong, and has become a prominent organizer of charitable initiatives, from Dharma talks to life release (fangsheng) events.
I found Ven. Guan Cheng to embody a treasury of solidly rooted Dharma teachings, which he presented with humor, wittiness, and common sense. Where he also shines is his writing, which presents profound Dharma philosophy in a relatable, everyday fashion. He is a regular columnist in the Chinese-language magazine Buddhist Compassion, and has published many books on happiness in everyday life, as well as Buddhist thought and philosophy.
Ven. Guan Cheng’s Dharma talk was titled, “Transform Your Consciousness, Transform Your Life.” This is not an exaggeration. Consciousness is perhaps the core subject of Buddhist examination because the Buddha himself, and indeed all the ancient Indian spiritual traditions of his time and before, identified consciousness as at once the shackles that keep us in the cosmos of suffering and delusion (samsara) and the vehicle that takes us to spiritual liberation. This preoccupation with consciousness gave rise to what became known as the Yogacara or vijñapti-mātratā school.
Known in English in various translations as Consciousness-Only, Mind-Only, or Mere Consciousness, Yogacara is a rich philosophical system that developed first in an Indic context in the 4th century with the brother-philosophers Asanga and Vasubhandu. Yogacara developed into distinctly Chinese and Tibetan expressions that are far too complex to elaborate on here. But Ven. Guan Cheng explained the essentials, which is universal to all Yogacara sub-schools: the world as we perceive it arises purely from the eight consciousnesses (vijñāna).
The first are the five sense organs of eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body consciousnesses, plus the 6th mentation, cognition, consciousness (manovijñāna). In addition to the six forms of ordinary consciousness, Yogacara posits a 7th type, commonly referred to as defiled or afflicted mind (kliṣṭamanas). Finally, there is the 8th store or substratum consciousness (ālayavijñāna). The alaya consciousness was one of the major innovations of the Yogacara, which, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
. . . developed from Yogācāra attempts to solve common Buddhist and Abhidharmic problems posed by the doctrine of no-self (anātman) and the impermanent or momentary existence of all conditioned phenomena (dharma). . . .
Relying on the theory of ālayavijñāna, the Yogācāra answer holds that actions produce karmic seeds (bīja) or impressions (vāsanā), i.e., potentialities or dispositions for future experiences and perceptions, which are retained, as in a sort of “container” or “store”, in the ālayavijñāna until they are ready to produce their effects. . . .
According to the Yogācāras, the continuous operation of the ālayavijñāna grounds karmic continuity and efficacy over both one and multiple lifetimes and ensures that karmic results belong to the same personal “continuum” that committed the action.
(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
To apply the teachings of this rich and idealist philosophy of thought and consciousness, Ven. Guan Cheng provided the case study of Mr. Lee. We have all experienced at some point the “transfer of emotions,” which is essentially being affected by someone else’s emotional state of mind. We might praise someone with an infectious smile, or avoid someone with a dark cloud over their heads. These are all positive as well as negative indications of emotional contagion.
Mr. Lee was a truly pitiable fellow who only needed a moment of clarity and wisdom to prevent his day from spiraling into a tragedy. On his birthday, this fictional but all-too-relatable Mr. Lee was screamed at by his boss for a minor mistake, and carried his humiliation and rage to dinner, where a minor mistake by his wife triggered his emotional contagion and led to a rapid transfer of emotions from him to his partner, leading to a shouting match in front of their son. The son, extremely distressed, pushed or kicked the family cat away when it tried to comfort him. Now the cat was stressed and frightened, and ran out of the house door, causing a driver on the street to swerve in panic and run over an innocent dog.
Ven. Guan Cheng provided a four-step solution to this case study. Despite being understandably humiliated, aggrieved, and enraged, Mr. Lee neglected to mindfully attend to his arising of emotions, and recognize that his feelings and physical discomfort were temporary and impure responses, fleeting and not integral to his being. Ven. Guan Cheng continued: Once Mr. Lee became aware of his emotional pain as a form of suffering. He could step back and try to stop clinging to these feelings since they unsatisfactory and arise from attachment to self-clinging and expectations. Detachment would lead to more self-control, allowing Mr. Lee to then introspect on his anger and frustration as impermanent reactions to the moment and regain composure more easily.
Finally, the recognition of these mental phenomena as impermanent and impersonal would have prevented impulsively acting out with destructive tendencies, preventing his transference of negative emotions to his loved ones and even to strangers. Seen at its most positive, Mr. Lee would have stopped the emotional chain reaction or causation from indirectly causing suffering, injury, or death.
Ven. Guan Cheng’s focus on consciousness, and his ability to speak so effortlessly on everyday examples and principles of the good life, mark him out as one of the most popular Chinese Buddhist teachers and writers in Asia and Canada. There was so much more to talk about, given his encyclopedic (one might even say his vast store!) of knowledge, experience, and empathy. That simply means that on his next Dhama Propagation Tour in Asia, he needs an entire talk series at HKU.
See more
Yogācāra (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
More from Ven. Guan Cheng on BDG
The Eight Consciousnesses by Ven. Guan Cheng
Nine Stages of Training the Mind with Ven. Guan Cheng
