Defusing Karma

 During the 1 day meditation retreat today, I started to contemplate on how life often gets in the way of one's practice, and there can be all kinds of conditions that prevent one from being truly on one's practice. Illness is one that I have been contending with recently, as well as the spate of assignments that have come my way. I am fortunate to have the blog as a way for me to settle my mind and really think about the right view of practice.
  Continuing the reading of Tea Words, Volume II, Master Sheng Yen further clarifies what he means by the "fundamental" mind as opposed to the "discriminating mind". He remarks:

     The goal of Buddhist practice is to free living beings from the vexations that arise out of the habit       of making discriminations. To attain true mind we must also be freed from fundamental          consciousness because our karma is centered there; in other words, the seeds of our previous actions and the forces that they exert upon us are “stored”there. [This is the reason why fundamental consciousness is sometimes called “the storehouse consciousness.”] Put another way, to attain the true mind of wisdom, sentient beings must liberate themselves from discriminating consciousness, and they must defuse the karmic force of fundamental consciousness. This is the ultimate direction of Buddhist practice (p.8-9)

Most practitioners that I know are familiar with discriminating mind, which at times I have heard has been referred to as the Seventh consciousness. However, are practitioners as familiar with this fundamental consciousness? I think of it as perhaps the difference between the individual will to live in daily life and a more diffuse sort of will that makes existence take on a particular shape and form. Many people rely on making discriminations to help them to decide a course of action, but most people are not able to see the wider patterns of living that are stored in the eighth consciousness, ready to be activated in lifetime after lifetime. "Defusing the karmic force" is a very interesting remark as well, because it suggests that karma is not influenced by the will. For example,I can be born with a long-standing aversion toward something (spiders, for instance) and this may be due to a previous karmic encounter with a spider that did not turn out well. In this life, my aversion toward spiders is unrealistic and not founded on anything I have experienced using discriminating consciousness, but because it is planted as a seed in the eighth consciousness, it's hard to defuse the habit of having an aversion toward spiders. In this case, what can we do? Buddhist practice, from what I know, does not advocate trying to actively eliminate karmic seeds. Rather, the idea is often to plant new karmic seeds in the mind, such as cultivating a wholesome attitude even toward those creatures that we would rather avoid. Even though such karmic seeds might not reverse the previous negative karma, they can make a difference in terms of the direction that a person takes across different lifetimes, having a better connection with other beings in particular.
   Ultimately according to Sheng Yen, the goal of Buddhist practice is not just to "liberate from discriminating consciousness" but also to "defuse the karmic force of fundamental consciousness". Are these processes co-terminus with each other or are they distinct processes? I believe that the more a person can reduce their tendency to make discriminations, the less severe the karmic force will be, and this leaves a kind of light "footprint" on one's existence. In this way, defusing karma is likened to not watering seeds that are impure or unhealthy, while watering the ones which will produce less vexations.

Sheng Yen Tea Words Volume II. Elmhurst, NY: Dharma Drum Publications