Loss Of The Manas Analysis

The Loss of the Manas Throughout Yogacara, we learn about the mind, and how our sense of self disrupts our process of 'enlightenment, ' for lack of a better term. We must disregard ourselves, or rather, the selfishness of our well-being, the ego, prior to reaching higher understanding of the world and the life outside of our understanding. While there exist three 'transformations, ' we shall focus mainly on the second 'transformation, ' which relies on the transformation of the manas. Of course, before we jump into the second transformation, we need to understand what I mean by transformation, in the sense of Yogacara. While Yogacara uses the word transformation, it does not mean a quick, snapped change that will suddenly mean one 's closer …show more content…
As humans, we all contain this sense of self, this ego, where we all search ourselves and perform actions in our best interest. We want to accomplish tasks that will benefit us, or perform duties that will offer us some long-term (or short term, in some cases) benefits. While this doesn 't necessarily make us bad people (after all, we want to have a good life for ourselves), we will never be able to truly understand life or the nature of life through these means. As such, the second transformation relies on losing this sense of self, or selfishness. However, it 's not the sense of selfishness that first comes to mind. As defined in Living Yogacara, “The function of the manas is to continuously turn its eye toward the alaya-vijnana-as-self, and attach to it.”(Shun 'ei 63). This essentially means that the manas, which always remains on, continually attaches our ego to the alaya-vijnana, or our definition of …show more content…
The alaya-vijnana can be boiled down to our stored-consciousness, which stores and preserves information from our life experiences (Shun 'ei 29). In my mind, this can be defined by what we consider a person 's character. In life, people latch onto experiences from others, and interactions with others, as well as occurrences in daily life. When it all comes together, people usually develop characteristics based on those experiences and in turn, create a personality that others can define them by. That 's why, even if one cannot remember certain events, they can continue to act out characteristics based on those events that happened years ago. The alaya-vijnana doesn 't just follow our memories, but our experiences. The book, Living Yogacara, defines these as “seeds that represent the momentum of the impressions of manifest activity (Shun 'ei 46). Every action sends our 'seeds, ' and these seeds plant themselves in people, which in turn, will develop their