Vasubandhu used a hundred words
to build the entire universe.
Chemistry has the periodic table;
over a hundred elements build all matter in the universe.
Biology has four base pair letters;
their combinations write the source code for all life on Earth.
But have you ever wondered if
human consciousness,
all your experiences,
your emotions,
your thoughts,
and everything you perceive as the external world,
could also be assembled from a single chart?
Sixteen hundred years ago,
someone did exactly that.
Using just a hundred words,
he wrote a short text of a few hundred characters
to categorize everything you can ever experience,
leaving nothing out.
This text is called the Treatise on the Door to Understanding the Hundred Dharmas.
Hello,
everyone,
I am Wang Lijie.
In the last episode, we discussed the Thirty Verses on Consciousness-Only.
That is the constitution of Yogacara philosophy.
Those thirty verses condense the operating principles of the entire conscious system.
Today's Treatise on the Hundred Dharmas
is the periodic table of Yogacara.
The constitution tells you how the country operates;
the periodic table tells you what building materials the country is made of.
Put them together,
and you can see the entire structure of the building.
The author of this treatise is Bodhisattva Vasubandhu,
the same person who wrote the Thirty Verses.
The translator was Master Xuanzang,
in the 22nd year of the Zhenguan era of the Tang Dynasty.
This treatise is extremely brief,
with only a few hundred characters in the original text,
but the information density is incredibly high.
It originates from Bodhisattva Maitreya's Yogacarabhumi-sastra.
The Yogacarabhumi-sastra lists 660 dharmas.
Vasubandhu felt that was too many;
beginners simply couldn't remember them all.
So he did something that people in the era of Large Language Models
can especially understand:
Knowledge Distillation.
He compressed the 660 dharmas into 100,
removing the redundant and secondary ones,
while keeping the indispensable core nodes of the structure.
He compressed it by a factor of 6.6,
without losing a single piece of core information.
Furthermore, the very first sentence of this treatise clarifies its ultimate purpose.
Vasubandhu says:
"As the World-Honored One said,
all dharmas are without self."
What are "all dharmas"?
What does "without self" mean?
He then used the hundred dharmas to answer these two questions.
He wasn't making an encyclopedia;
he was using categorization to dismantle attachment.
You think there is a solid "me" experiencing the world;
Vasubandhu takes your experience apart into a hundred components and says,
"Look,
which one is you?"
Alright.
These hundred dharmas,
Vasubandhu divided into five major categories.
The order of these categories is very deliberate.
I'll give you a panoramic overview first,
then we'll deep-dive into the most central category.
Category One:
Mind Dharmas.
There are eight of them,
which are the Eight Consciousnesses we discussed before:
Visual, Auditory, Olfactory, Gustatory, and Tactile consciousness;
Mental, Manas, and Alaya consciousness.
These eight are the processors of the conscious system,
the generators of all experience.
Without them,
the remaining 92 dharmas would have nowhere to be anchored.
Category 2:
Mental Factors (Caitasika).
There are 51 of them.
This is today's main highlight;
I'll break them down for you in a moment.
'Mental Factors' refers to dharmas associated with the mind,
various functions that operate in tandem with consciousness.
You can think of it like this:
The Mind (Citta) is the CPU,
and Mental Factors are the processes running on it.
The CPU itself is neutral;
it just handles the computation.
But the processes can be good or bad —
some are antivirus software,
others are malware.
Category 3:
Form (Rupa).
There are 11 of them.
In Buddhism, 'Form' doesn't just mean color;
it's a general term for matter and physical phenomena.
This includes the five sense organs (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body),
the five sense objects (sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches),
plus 'dharmas included in the sphere of cognition,'
which are things with no physical substance that the mind can still process,
like images in a dream
or imagined scenes.
Note that
Yogacara does not deny the existence of Form.
However, it emphasizes that
the Form you experience
is entirely the result of consciousness's manifestation.
Category 4:
Mind-dissociated Formations (Citta-viprayukta-samskara).
There are 24 of them.
This is a real mouthful.
In plain language, it means things that
don't have a direct correspondence with the mind,
yet aren't physical matter either.
Examples include time, space, number, speed,
causality, titles, and the cycle of birth and decay.
You use these every day,
but they aren't physical objects,
nor are they specific mental states.
They are abstract structures created when consciousness processes information.
In computer terms,
they are data structures and the runtime environment.
They aren't hardware or applications,
but the system can't run without them.
Category 5:
Unconditioned Dharmas (Asamskrta).
There are 6 of them,
including Space, Cessation through wisdom, and Cessation not through wisdom,
Immovable Cessation, Cessation of perception and feeling, and Suchness.
The previous 94 dharmas are all 'conditioned,'
meaning they arise from causes and are subject to change.
These 6 unconditioned dharmas are unborn and undying.
The most important is 'Suchness' (Tathata) —
the original nature of all things,
the 'Perfected Nature.'
It is what Prajna wisdom ultimately sees.
Look at the order of these five categories.
Mind is at the very front,
while Unconditioned Dharmas are at the end.
Vasubandhu didn't arrange them randomly.
He's using this sequence to tell you a core idea:
'All things are consciousness-only.'
Everything begins with the mind,
unfolds from the mind,
and eventually returns to the mind's original nature.
This sequence itself is a condensed roadmap for practice.
Alright.
Now let's dive into the second category:
The 51 Mental Factors.
This is the most brilliant part of the 'Hundred Dharmas'
and the most useful for daily life.
The 51 Mental Factors
are divided into six groups.
Group 1:
Everywhere-pervading (Sarvatraga) mental factors.
There are 5 of them.
Contact, attention, feeling, perception, and volition.
"Universal" means
no matter what you are doing
or what state your mind is in,
these five are always online.
They are the lowest-level processes of consciousness,
impossible to turn off.
Contact (Sparsha)
is the meeting of the sensory organ, object, and consciousness.
Your eyes meet light,
your ears meet sound;
this meeting itself is contact.
Attention (Manasikara)
is the activation of focus,
where the brain allocates resources to an object.
Feeling (Vedana)
is the internal sensation:
pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.
Perception (Samjna)
is "taking a sign,"
labeling the information you receive.
"This is red;"
"That is Mom's voice."
Volition (Cetana)
is the will
that drives you to react.
These five steps
run through you every single moment.
Right now, as you hear my voice,
that is Contact.
You focus your attention on this sentence:
Attention.
You find it interesting or a bit boring:
Feeling.
You categorize and tag what I am saying:
Perception.
You decide whether to keep listening or stop:
Volition.
Five steps,
completed in an instant.
This description and modern cognitive science's information processing model
are almost identical.
Cognitive science says the flow of human information processing is:
Stimulus input, attention selection, emotional tagging,
classification, and decision-making.
The Five Universal Factors from 1,600 years ago
and the flowcharts cognitive scientists draw today
are exactly the same.
The second group:
the Five Object-Determining Factors.
There are five:
Desire, Resolve, Mindfulness, Concentration, and Wisdom.
"Object-Determining" means
they are not always online like the Universal ones;
they activate only under specific conditions.
Desire (Chanda)
is the longing for a certain object.
Wanting hot pot
or wanting to finish this video
are both Desire.
Note that
in Buddhism, desire is not a negative term;
it is neutral.
Wholesome desire drives diligent practice;
unwholesome desire drives indulgence in pleasure.
The key is the direction.
Resolve (Adhimoksha)
is forming a firm understanding and belief in something.
When you hear an argument
and a sense of certainty wells up inside,
that is Resolve.
Mindfulness (Smrti)
is retention and memory.
When you meditate and focus on your breath,
keeping it from wandering,
this keeping is Mindfulness.
The core of modern mindfulness training
is this very mental factor.
Concentration (Samadhi)
is the power of focused attention.
Attention not only initiates focus,
but also stabilizes it,
locking it onto an object without distraction.
Wisdom (Prajna)
is the power of discernment,
the ability to distinguish good from evil, true from false, and surface from depth.
If you look at these five specific mental factors together,
they describe the high-level functions of human cognition:
desire, resolution, memory, concentration, and judgment.
The combination and strength of these five factors
essentially determine the efficiency of one's learning and practice.
The third group:
Wholesome mental factors.
There are eleven of them:
Faith, vigor, shame, remorse, non-attachment, non-hatred, non-delusion,
pliancy, conscientiousness, equanimity, and non-harming.
These eleven represent positive forces;
they are the antivirus and firewall of your consciousness system.
I particularly want to discuss two of them:
Self-shame (Can) and social-remorse (Kui).
Many people think they mean the same thing,
but they don't.
Self-shame (Can)
is a sense of shame toward your own inner self.
You did something wrong,
you know it yourself,
and you feel you have failed your own conscience.
Social-remorse (Kui)
is the sense of shame felt toward others and society.
Others find out about what you did,
and you feel humiliated.
One is internal,
the other is external.
Think about it:
if a person has neither self-shame nor social-remorse,
what do we call that?
It is what we commonly call being 'shameless.'
The Treatise on the Hundred Dharmas tells you
that this is not just an insult,
but a precise diagnosis:
it means two functions among the wholesome mental factors have failed simultaneously.
You see,
Buddhist terminology from 1,600 years ago
is much more precise than our daily language today.
The fourth group:
Root afflictions.
There are six:
Greed, anger, ignorance, pride, doubt, and wrong views.
These six are the roots of the disease,
the source code of all psychological suffering.
Greed is grasping.
Anger is rejection.
Ignorance is the inability to see clearly.
Pride is feeling superior to others.
Doubt is distrust toward what is right.
Wrong views are incorrect but stubborn beliefs.
Reflect on it carefully:
don't all the troubles in your life
fall into these six categories?
The fifth group:
Secondary afflictions.
There are twenty of them.
These twenty are the branches and leaves growing from the six root afflictions.
Look at their names:
Wrath, enmity, concealment, vexation, envy, stinginess, deceit, flattery, harm,
arrogance, lack of shame, lack of remorse, agitation,
dullness, lack of faith, laziness, heedlessness, forgetfulness, distraction, and lack of awareness.
Each name is so accurate it might make you feel uncomfortable.
Wrath is an explosive outburst of rage.
Enmity is not an outburst;
enmity is remembering the anger,
clutching it and refusing to let go,
letting it slowly ferment.
Concealment is knowing you're wrong,
but refusing to admit it at all costs,
even finding excuses to cover it up.
Envy is feeling bitter when seeing others do well.
Stinginess is having something but being unwilling to share.
Deceit is fooling others for personal gain.
Flattery is distorting oneself to please another.
Have you noticed?
There is a particularly interesting set of mirror opposites here.
In the Wholesome Mental States, there are shame and remorse.
In the Secondary Afflictions, there are shamelessness and lack of remorse.
Vasubandhu placed them in opposition
to show you
that good and evil are not two completely different things.
They are two positions on the same switch.
When the switch for shame is off,
shamelessness lights up.
When the switch for remorse is off,
lack of remorse lights up.
Spiritual practice is not about destroying an enemy,
but about flipping the switch back.
The sixth group:
Indeterminate Mental States.
There are four:
regret, sleep, investigation, and analysis.
They are called "indeterminate"
because they are not inherently good or evil.
It depends on how you use them.
Regret can be wholesome.
Regretting a bad deed and repenting
is a good thing.
Regret can also be unwholesome.
Regretting a good deed because you feel you lost out
becomes an obstacle.
The same goes for sleep.
Moderate sleep restores the body and mind.
Excessive lethargy wastes life away.
Investigation is coarse thinking.
Analysis is precise scrutiny.
Both can be good or evil.
Alright.
We have finished the fifty-one mental states in six groups.
If you look back at this list now,
you will find something staggering.
Modern psychology has spent over a hundred years
building emotion models through experiments and statistics.
Paul Ekman says there are six basic emotions.
Robert Plutchik drew an emotion wheel with eight primary categories.
These models are valuable.
But when you compare them to the fifty-one mental states
of the Treatise on the Door to Understanding the Hundred Dharmas,
you will find a fundamental difference.
Modern psychology mainly describes the surface spectrum of emotions.
The Hundred Dharmas provides the underlying source code of emotions.
Psychology tells you
that you have the emotion of jealousy.
The Hundred Dharmas doesn't just name jealousy;
it tells you it belongs to the Secondary Afflictions,
rooted in a mixture of anger and pride.
It also tells you that jealousy and stinginess are related.
Jealousy is not allowing others to have;
stinginess is not allowing oneself to lose.
Opposite directions,
but the same root cause.
You aren't just seeing an emotional label,
but the coordinates within the entire system of consciousness
and its genetic lineage.
This is the true value of the Hundred Dharmas.
It is not a simple list;
it is a topological map.
Every dharma has its own coordinates,
with precise causal and hierarchical relationships with others.
You don't just know you're angry;
you can see the circuit the anger traveled through,
which node it's attached to in your consciousness system,
what its upstream source is,
and what it will trigger downstream.
Once you have this map,
your way of handling emotions changes fundamentally.
Before, when you were angry,
you would either suppress it
or vent it.
Suppressing is forcing it down;
venting is lashing out.
Neither method touches the root.
Now, you have a third path.
You take out this map of the Hundred Dharmas.
Pinpoint it.
Which mental factor is operating right now?
Is it anger?
Is it resentment?
Is it jealousy?
Or stinginess?
Which group does it belong to?
Which of the six root afflictions does it stem from?
Just the act of labeling itself
allows you to step back from the emotion.
You are no longer the person overwhelmed by anger;
you become an engineer checking the system logs.
You haven't eliminated the emotion,
you've simply seen its origin and structure.
And seeing itself
is the starting point of practice.
You might be wondering,
"Can these 100 dharmas really cover all experiences?
Could something be missing?"
That's a good question.
Vasubandhu himself actually gave the answer.
The title "Shata-dharma-vidyamukha-shastra" includes the term "Mingmen."
"Ming" means mastery or understanding;
"Men" means a gateway.
He didn't say these 100 dharmas are the sum of all phenomena;
he said
these 100 dharmas are the gateway to mastering all phenomena.
Like the periodic table doesn't list every molecule in the universe,
but once you master the elements,
you have the foundation to understand all molecules.
1,600 years ago,
when Vasubandhu compressed 660 dharmas into 100,
he couldn't have known
that 1,600 years later something called Large Language Models would exist,
using nearly the same strategy to compress human knowledge
into weight distributions in a parameter space.
He couldn't have known
that what he was doing has a modern name: knowledge distillation.
Even less could he have known
that this list of 100 components he left behind
points to the same ultimate question as today's cognitive scientists
trying to build consciousness models:
What are the basic building blocks of our subjective experience?
However,
after explaining these 100 dharmas today,
one question keeps spinning in my head.
The periodic table has a specific characteristic:
Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen—
these elements themselves are not alive,
but specific combinations allow life to emerge.
The 100 dharmas are the same way.
Individually, they are extremely simple mental functions—
contact, feeling, perception,
greed, anger, ignorance.
When taken apart,
there is nothing mysterious about them.
But their specific combination
gives rise to the complete sense of "self" you feel right now—
that self with a story, which thinks it truly exists.
So, here is the question:
If this "self" is just a temporary assembly of 100 parts,
when you take the parts away one by one,
where am "I"?
You can try this right now.
Pause for three seconds.
Notice: what is your strongest mental activity at this moment?
Is it the "Desire" to know more?
Is it the "Wisdom" making judgments?
Or is it "Restlessness," wanting to click away to something else?
The act you just performed
is the greatest gift of this teaching.
You are no longer just pushed around by emotions and thoughts;
you become an engineer who can catalog the parts of your consciousness.
Once you can catalog them,
you can choose.
Once you can choose,
you are no longer a prisoner of the 100 parts;
you become their observer.
And that position of the observer
is where true practice begins.
I am Leo Wang.
See you next time.