Master Gang Xiao on the Twenty Verses on Consciousness-Only: The Nineteenth Verse

dān zhà jiā děng kōng yún hé yóu xiān fèn yì fá wéi dà zuì cǐ fù yún hé chéng

(A phonetic rendering of the original Sanskrit, set down in Chinese characters. The verse poses questions on emptiness, on the sages, on how angry intent's punishment becomes grave wrongdoing, and on how this wrongdoing arises.)

This nineteenth verse, in the Wei recension, reads as follows:

The sūtra speaks of Candaka, the country of Kaluvimardana, emptied through the sage's wrath—thus the mind's karma is heavy.

In this verse, Vasubandhu once again offers several examples to show that one needn't lift a hand to accomplish things.

The first example: the story of the Candaka forest. Long ago, there was a city-state called Candaka. What does "Candaka" mean? Master Paramārtha translated it as "Dantaka," which in Chinese means "punishment"—a place for punishing criminals. In our day we'd call it an execution ground, something like Caishikou in the Qing dynasty—anyway, a place for killing people. This Candaka city-state was once extremely prosperous, but later it ceased to exist. Why? Here's the story.

There was a sage named Maudgalya. What does "Maudgalya" mean? A literal translation would be "having aspiration," while a meaning-based translation gives "prideful idleness" or "evil action." Maudgalya is also a general term for those of the lowest caste. In the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, there's a Maudgalyāyanī. The modern Chinese word modeng (摩登), meaning "fashionable" or "trendsetting," derives from this. Why was the sage called Maudgalya? One reason is humility—here, you shouldn't take "Maudgalya" in its original sense of "low caste" but in its extended meaning: "All of you are good, all better than me; I alone am the most worthless person in the world." The other reason is that this sage had great aspiration and made a grand vow—hence the name.

This sage Maudgalya was practicing in the mountains. He had taken a beautiful Brahmin woman as his wife, and each day she would bring him food. One day, the lord of Candaka was out strolling in the mountains and happened upon the sage's wife. He was stunned—"Truly a heavenly maiden!" The city-states of old were tiny, and the lord was essentially a petty king. In Chinese terms, "All the land under heaven belongs to the king." And those who become kings never have good character—their morals are base. Only people of poor character can become kings; even if you started out decent, the moment you become king, your character naturally rots. It's like corrupt officials today: if you were already a rogue, you couldn't get appointed in the first place—the vetting process would screen you out. But once you're in office, you naturally become a rogue.

So the lord of Candaka began acting the rogue. He said, "A sage practicing the Way should have renounced desire. Renunciation means subduing all craving—what need has he for a wife?" That was the excuse he found for himself. The lord seized the sage's wife and took her back.

When mealtime came and the sage's wife didn't appear, he asked around. Someone told him the lord of Candaka had carried her off. Maudgalya rushed to the city, found the lord, and argued with him. Kings in those days apparently didn't wield the kind of grandeur today's officials do—nowadays, forget about seeing a king, even trying to meet some two-bit mayor or county magistrate, you'd have lackeys blocking your way before you got close. But no matter what Maudgalya said, the lord of Candaka wouldn't return his wife.

Maudgalya was furious. Through his supernatural powers, he sent word to his wife: "Tonight, keep reciting my name—don't stop. Tonight I will destroy the city of Candaka." And indeed, that night Maudgalya unleashed his supernatural intention, and a rain of stones fell from the sky. When stones rain from heaven, how could bodies of flesh withstand it? They were crushed flat. Only Maudgalya's wife, because she had been reciting the sage's name, was spared.

And so the once-thriving city-state of Candaka was reduced to desolate mountain forest, and remains so to this day. You see—killing people doesn't require hands, only intention!

The second example: the story of the Madengga forest. Once upon a time—this is the old storytelling formula—long, long ago. How long ago? Don't look into it. Why not? Time and place are essential elements of any story, but when the time isn't specified, that's really just telling you: this is only a story, not a real event.

There was once a city called Madengga, and in the forests outside the city, a sage sat in meditation. Why did cultivators always live just outside the city walls? Because in those days they didn't cook for themselves—they went on alms rounds with their bowls. Too close to town and they'd be disturbed; too far and the walk would eat into cultivation time. So practitioners of that era generally settled just outside the city, or at least not too far from people. The environment wasn't what it is today—thick forests grew just beyond the city, and that's where cultivators would practice.

This sage outside Madengga was exceedingly ugly—three parts human, seven parts ghost. But don't let his looks fool you: he had supernatural powers, and considerable ones at that.

At that time, there was a courtesan in Madengga, and the city lord was on very good terms with her—much like Emperor Huizong of Song and Li Shishi. But on this occasion, the courtesan provoked the lord's anger. After all, you're a courtesan—can't the lord do with you as he pleases? Please him and he'll pamper you; get uppity and you're out on your ear. Once the lord lost his temper, the courtesan was in trouble. Miserably, she made her way out of the city and into the woods, probably planning to hang herself.

As luck would have it, she ran into the ugly sage. When people are miserable, everything looks wrong. Seeing the ugly sage, the courtesan thought: "So that's why I'm having such bad luck today—it's because of you, you hideous thing!" What kind of twisted logic is that? But you can't reason with someone in that state of mind. Then she had another idea: "I got thrown out by the lord—bad luck. This fellow is hideous—also bad luck. If I transfer my bad luck onto this wretch, won't I be rid of it?" After all, he was already cursed—what's a little more? Truly, the most vicious thing under heaven is a woman's heart. So the courtesan urinated on the ugly sage's head. The sage endured it.

By an extraordinary coincidence, just as she finished, messengers from the lord of Madengga came looking for her. It turned out that after his fit of temper, the lord had reconsidered: "I was in a bad mood over affairs of state, but what does that have to do with a woman? How could I have driven her away on impulse? Taking it out on a woman—what kind of hero does that?" So he sent men to find her. The lord and the courtesan made up, good as new. And the courtesan convinced herself that her bad luck really had been transferred to the ugly sage.

Not long after, a state preceptor ran into some misfortune. The courtesan told him: "In the forest outside Madengga, there's an ugly man. Urinate on his head and your bad luck will pass to him—your fortune will turn." The state preceptor, with his wits completely addled, actually believed her and went out to the forest to find the ugly sage. A courtesan is a simple woman who might not know any better—but you, a dignified state preceptor? He too poured urine on the sage's head. And as it happened, his troubles did pass shortly after. The ugly sage endured this dousing as well.

Word spread through Madengga: whoever had bad luck need only urinate on the ugly sage's head in the forest, and fortune would turn. Even the lord, before setting out on a military campaign, would first have someone douse the sage. No matter what was going wrong, the remedy was the same. After one too many incidents, the ugly sage finally snapped: "Outrageous! The people of Madengga have pushed me too far!" When a cultivator doesn't lose his temper, he doesn't lose it at all—but once he does, watch out. The ugly sage, in his fury, unleashed his supernatural power through sheer force of will. A rain of stones fell from the sky. In an instant, the prosperous city-state of Madengga became a wasteland, and eventually, forest.

The third example: the story of the Jielingga forest. "Jielingga" means "harmonious and elegant." Once, in this place called Jielingga, there was also a sage named Maudgalya. He was born into a Caṇḍāla lineage. The Caṇḍāla occupy the lowest stratum within the Śūdra caste. The Śūdra are already the lowest of the four classes, and the Caṇḍāla are the lowest within the Śūdra—the lowest of the low.

One day, some busybody told Maudgalya: "You should have a son. Your son is destined to become state preceptor." Maudgalya was tempted. He went to the city lord and made a request: "Give me your daughter in marriage. The son we have together can become state preceptor." He hadn't stopped to weigh his own position—you're a Caṇḍāla! Talk about overreaching! The lord was furious. According to the customs of the time, the boundary between lower and upper castes was absolute—cross it and you'd lose your head. For Maudgalya to propose marriage to the lord's daughter was a colossal insult.

But the lord was, after all, the lord. He didn't want to lose his composure before his ministers, so he deliberately put on a haughty front to mask his fury. He said: "You are a Caṇḍāla—the lowest of the low. I am a Kṣatriya. We are not of the same class. Your request is absurd, ridiculous—utterly impossible." In the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Guan Yu said to the Wu envoy with supreme arrogance: "How could my tiger daughter marry a dog's son?" That was exactly the lord's tone with Maudgalya. Guan Yu's arrogance cost him his life, and the lord's arrogance would bring him no good either.

But to continue—the lord rejected and humiliated Maudgalya, yet the sage, for the sake of "love," was utterly thick-skinned. Unmoved by the lord's contempt, he kept pressing his suit. The lord's daughter was moved by his persistence. Isn't that how it always goes with people in the grip of "love"? Have you seen Titanic? I watched it on DVD. Love, doesn't it—doesn't it make you beautiful but foolish? The lord's daughter told her parents: "Maudgalya may be a Caṇḍāla, but he's a sage. His character is good." The lord would have none of it.

The young are the young—caring nothing for propriety. According to the customs of the time, how could a Kṣatriya marry into the lowest caste? But the lord's daughter, defying "feudal" convention, did something shocking—she eloped. In the late eighties and early nineties, in rural China, elopement was quite common. I remember there was even a film at the time called Elopement. The lord's daughter and the sage had a son. Eventually the lord tracked them down and captured both of them. According to custom, he had them bound together and thrown into a river. Maudgalya, audacious as ever, actually threatened the river god into cutting their bonds—and so they survived.

Maudgalya seethed with indignation: "No matter what you say, your daughter and I are already husband and wife in fact. That makes you my father-in-law. You hate me—fine. But you'd disregard your own daughter's honor and have us killed? If I hadn't had some tricks up my sleeve, I'd be dead. You want my life—I'll take yours!" Maudgalya used his supernatural power of intention to bring down a rain of stones, turning the prosperous city-state of Jielingga into rubble. With no one left, the place eventually became forest.

Next, Vasubandhu cites a passage from the Madhyama Āgama. When the Buddha Śākyamuni was in the world, there was a Nirgrantha—that is, a Jaina. A Jaina practitioner named Jātīputra had a disciple called Dīrghataru. One day, Dīrghataru met Śākyamuni, who asked him: "Regarding the three karmas of body, speech, and mind, which does your teacher say is the heaviest?"

Dīrghataru replied: "Bodily karma is heaviest, then speech, then mind. That's what my teacher says. And what do you teach your monks?"

The Buddha said: "I tell them that mental karma is heaviest; bodily and verbal karma are relatively lighter."

Dīrghataru went back and reported the exchange to his teacher Jātīputra. Jātīputra praised him: "Good, good! You told him bodily karma is heaviest, then speech, then mind—that's correct. You've grasped my teaching. Now go find Śākyamuni again, refute his doctrine, and convert him to our Jaina path."

In the Āgama sūtras, Jātīputra refers to the Buddha as Gautama rather than Śākyamuni. His thinking was: if I stay out of it and my disciple defeats Gautama in debate, so much the better for my reputation. What he didn't anticipate was that Dīrghataru thought to himself: "That Śākyamuni is no pushover—how could I possibly be his match?" Dīrghataru kept dragging his feet and never went.

There was also an elder named Upāli beside Jātīputra, who volunteered to go debate the Buddha. Dīrghataru tried to dissuade him: "Śākyamuni's eloquence is beyond measure, and he possesses magical powers that can turn people's minds. Countless beings are his disciples—can you really hope to prevail?" Jātīputra said: "Why do you build up the other side and tear down our own?" He wouldn't listen, and sent Elder Upāli to debate Śākyamuni. At that time, the Buddha was in the kingdom of Mithilā.

Upāli the Elder sought out Śākyamuni and objected: "Of the three karmas, clearly bodily karma is the heaviest—then verbal karma, and mental karma last of all. Why do you say mental karma is the heaviest?" Was the elder off the mark? Look at our laws today: I'm only executed if I actually kill someone. If I merely think about killing someone but never act on it, can you execute me? No, you can't.

There's a bit of comic dialogue by Jiang Kun. He falls into a tiger's den, and a girl up above suggests everyone undo their belts to pull him out. Jiang Kun says, "She can't see how big I am from up there—I figure my marriage prospects are settled." Tang Jiezhong teases him: "Even at a time like this, you're still up to no good." Jiang Kun shoots back: "A gentleman uses his mouth, not his hands. Look at the state I'm in—I'm just scheming a little. What's an old man like you getting so worked up about?"

So scheming a little doesn't matter, right? But the Buddha says that scheming—mental activity—is the heaviest karma. How should we make sense of that? Let's hear how Śākyamuni responds.

The Buddha turned the question around on Upāli: "Suppose someone commits the evil karma of killing and sets out to wipe out all the people of Mithila. How many days would it take to finish the job?" Though Mithila is not large—after all, it's just a small city-state—according to the Madhyama Āgama, it takes five days to walk across it. Upāli replied, "A skilled person could finish off all the people of Mithila in seven days; someone less capable might need ten days, or even a month."

The Buddha asked further: "Suppose there's a sage who wields the psychic power of mental concentration. How many days would it take that person to kill everyone in Mithila?" Upāli said, "Days? In just a moment, it could be done."

The Buddha went on: "Suppose one person gives alms continuously for a hundred, two hundred, or three hundred days, while another merely enters the four dhyānas and eight samādhis—even without remaining in them for a hundred, two hundred, or three hundred days—which merits are greater? Suppose one person keeps the precepts constantly, while another only briefly enters the uncontaminated contemplation—which is greater?" Upāli answered, "Of course, the merits of entering the four dhyānas and eight samādhis and the uncontaminated contemplation are far greater." So the Buddha said to Upāli, "If that's the case, do you say mental karma is heavy or bodily karma is heavy?"

Upāli had nothing left to say. In those days, debates carried high stakes: the loser either lost their head or took refuge with the winner. So Upāli took refuge in Śākyamuni and later realized the fruit of the path.

Note: Some may misunderstand this—how could mental karma be heavier than bodily karma? If it really were, suppose A actually kills someone, while B hates that person so much that he thinks, "I wish I could kill him." Is B's crime then heavier than A's? If B's really is heavier, why is A executed while B goes free? Here's the thing: B has only mental karma, while A has both mental and bodily karma—he actually killed the person. So A has committed two offenses, B only one. That's why A is executed and B isn't. So though A is executed and B is not, that doesn't prove bodily karma outweighs mental karma.

After telling this story, Vasubandhu asked in return: "If the slain's consciousness did not transform into a predominant condition causing their death, why would the Buddha say mental karma is the heaviest among the three? And Elder Upāli, have you not heard why the forests of Tṛṇadāṭa, Madhuvana, and Kālinga became empty and desolate? And did you not yourself answer that you knew it was because a sage used mental power to punish the people?"

From this we can see that the slain's consciousness, transformed into a predominant condition, brought about their death—physical hands were not required. As for Upāli—he was originally a non-Buddhist, but in the end he too admitted that the ruin of Tṛṇadāṭa and the other forests came from sages wielding the psychic power of mental concentration. The punishment wrought by that psychic power is called "mental punishment," and among the evil karmas of the three realms, mental punishment is the most severe. This further shows that one need not have actual objects like cattle, sheep, or knives to commit the act of killing.

An outsider objected: The killing at Tṛṇadāṭa and the other forests might also have happened because the sages had cultivated practice, and ghosts and spirits, out of respect for the sages, killed all the people in the city on their behalf. You, Vasubandhu, cannot rule out that possibility either.

For those versed in Buddhist logic, this is easier to grasp: given that a thing is in a certain state now, none of the possibilities that could have made it so can be ruled out. Vasubandhu replied: "No—this is absolutely impossible. Some read the sūtras and get the point; others just watch the show. Those who know how to read see what's really going on." This possibility absolutely does not exist. When the Buddha told this story, he was establishing that mental karma is the heaviest, that it surpasses bodily and verbal karma. If it were simply a matter of ghosts and spirits killing people on the sage's behalf, the Buddha's teaching of this sūtra would have been meaningless.

In Buddhism, we often see dharma protectors helping to get things done. But actually, the point here is that so-called dharma protectors are themselves provisionally named. When you take refuge in the Triple Gem, the teacher tells you that although you take refuge in the Three Jewels, the true refuge is the Dharma—"the Three Jewels have the Dharma as their essence." So-called dharma protectors protect the Dharma, not people.

A digression: People today may find the stories I mentioned earlier absurd—"Vasubandhu wants to prove his point, yet he cites mythological tales as evidence." This is simply a matter of different eras. In ancient times, people took these to be real events. The ancient Chinese, for example, all believed there was a white rabbit and Chang'e on the moon—who would have found that absurd? Chang'e's flight to the moon is itself a myth. Ancient India had its own myths, and people there believed them too. "Myth" is just a modern label; the ancients didn't think in those terms! When Śākyamuni expounded the Āgama sūtras, he used this legend, and Vasubandhu uses it too. Today, I'm still using it to explain things to you—no good! You definitely won't buy it! It would be a problem if you did.

In fact, ancient writers often did this. Take the Zhuangzi, for instance, which uses a great many parables. Who goes and checks whether those parables are literally true? It's said that during the Cultural Revolution's campaign to criticize Lin Biao and Confucius, some people took the Confucius mentioned in the Zhuangzi to be the historical Confucius. That was the madness of abnormal times and doesn't count. Westerners do this too—the paradoxes of Western logic are stories they invented that keep human beings up at night. This is a common human trait. Chan Buddhism does it especially. All of these aim to clarify a principle; please don't get bogged down in whether the facts are literally true. For now, just remember: when the four conditions are complete, the matter is accomplished—that's enough. If you want examples, it's better to cite the Cultural Revolution, wars, death sentences, and the like.

Now, a few points to note: If consciousness without a body cannot perform karma, why did the cities of Tṛṇadāṭa, Madhuvana, and Kālinga become ruins because of a sage's anger? If consciousness without a body cannot perform karma, why did the Buddha say mental karma is the heaviest?

Whether we're creating good or evil, the mind must initiate it first, and only then do body and speech follow. "To shoot a man, first shoot his horse; to capture a bandit, first capture the king"—isn't that Du Fu's verse? The mind is the ringleader. If we keep the mind firmly in check, body and speech cannot act. So when it comes to reward and punishment, the mind's share is the heaviest.

Next, the outsider grasps another straw—mind-reading, or paracittajñāna. He says: "If there are only inner consciousnesses and no external objects, what about mind-reading? If I have it, I would know what you, Mr. So-and-so, are thinking right now. Yet you, Vasubandhu, say Mr. So-and-so doesn't even exist. Isn't that strange?"

Vasubandhu tilted his head back: "What's the use of your mind-reading? Whether you have it or not proves nothing." Still, the outsider was cautious. Even with Vasubandhu holding his head high, the outsider carefully explained: "If, even with mind-reading, I cannot know what you, Mr. So-and-so, are thinking, then my mind-reading isn't mind-reading at all. But if I do have it and I know what you're thinking, then your theory falls apart." Vasubandhu replied: "No, no. I haven't become a Buddha yet, but I do have mind-reading. I can know what you, Mr. So-and-so, are thinking. What you think is just a mental dharma. I have always recognized both my own consciousness and that of others. And knowing what you're thinking only takes your mind as the underlying substratum and self-transforms an image to cognize it—so it doesn't contradict my theory." Do you all understand this? Probably not—and I won't spell it out in detail. I'll just tell you: mental dharmas are also conditioned dharmas, illusory and unreal. "Taking the original mind as the substratum, self-transforming an image to cognize" is just using illusion to simulate illusion. Next, Vasubandhu stated the twentieth verse: