What is a Buddha? The three bodies of a buddha.

A bodhisattva is someone who follows the path of compassion towards the realization of buddhahood, "for the benefit of all sentient beings", while recognizing those beings don't truly exist. The bodhisattvahood being described by Mañjuśrī is that of a fully realized being, one placed in the spectrum of realization/understanding being described.

A pratyekabuddha is someone who has "thoroughly comprehend the dependent origination of all dharmas" without the hearing of the buddhadharma a sravaka depends on. It is a direct revelation but one that does not reveal the buddha knowledge required to properly share that realization with others.

The engrams are not available but the experience remains; this is why this realization is often said to be ineffable.

What makes this complicated is the relationship of the alaya-vijana and the dharmakaya, particularly with regard to the sambhogakaya and its intervening projections (the heavens).

It's hard to describe but the pratyekabuddha's realization is limited to a given nirmanakaya, its associated heavens and alaya-vijana. They know the truth of the dependent origination of conditions.

There are always countless buddhas manifesting their buddhafields; nothing occurs outside of the awareness that they encompass. The realization of a pratyekabuddha is what the rocks and trees are said to cry out.

It's not the same realization a buddha has; it is a subset of what is realized. It takes the mindstream in the direction where phowa leads.

This is an interesting question to answer.

There are the sambhogakaya buddhas and their projections. When the contents of the repository consciousness are being built, they are built by the various sambhogakaya buddhas not their projections.

In this stagewise development each manas (I am) builds its inner world (a model) in relation to an outer world that is being generated from the priorly developed contents of the repository consciousness.

When the contents they contributed to the repository consciousness are used in the presentation of this nirmanakaya it occurs via their projections. These projections are the heavens; at the top of this nesting of heavens is the alaya-vijana. Each layer contributes their understandings stagewise as the conditions are built up.

The key distinction is that the projections "know" about the conditions they participate in the generation of, whereas the actual sambhogakaya buddhas have no knowledge of the conditions they support outside of those they are building their model from.

When you travel "up" through the heavens your “inside” is maintained as the identities with which you experience these worlds changes.

When the mindstream witnesses cessation, you, your “inside”, is repeatedly surrendered. In that surrender its details are no longer available. When the conceptualizations that give rise to conditions have not yet been added to the repository consciousness, the conditions do not yet “exist.”

The maintenance of the inside is the maintaining of the world model; this is how a mindstream can travel to the realms above (around) this one.

I've had an experience of this that I believe we've talked about a bit before, but I'll do a write-up of it for everyone in a little bit.

When you travel “up” there is a transition of identity and the world that identity occupies, but there is a consistency of the information that is maintained. You might think of it as though we are playing a MMORPG and we sit around and talk about it.

The key component of this is that the rules of the game are just rules of the game and we see them as such at higher levels. In fact, all of the “later” contributions to the repository consciousness are seen simply as choice.

At the top, in the alaya-vijana, it's all information (you are question and answer at once) and none of the choices have been ever solidified.

With regard to resonating with higher perspectives that can be done through shared states of mind via held conceptualizations. This doesn't involve the same transitions.

When Buddha touched his toe to the ground and converted everyone's experience to a pure land, this is a demonstration of the nature of a pure land.

In the Lanka, Buddha says (to paraphrase) that the purity of a buddhafield is due to the purity of the bodhisattvas it supports.

Imagine if I could share my dream worlds with you. In that world, if I had pacified everything that might lead away from understanding, you would have no trouble setting aside held understandings.

When one has realized that our minds do create all conditions, one can maintain an aspiration to create such a future/parallel/related set of unfolding conditions.

The access to the pure land would be relative to the nirmanakaya that developed the aspiration it fulfills. The pure lands we might aspire to build or occupy would be a “future” nirmanakaya of the buddha that projects it.

That's a great quote; we can combine the two in a movement towards harmony with the process itself and set aside the idea of separate entities to be devoted (or compassionate) towards. The less conditions we place on the feeling of generative well-being the better we harmonize with what begins free from conditions.

Karma is intention. In the Nibbedhika Sutta Buddha said “Intention (cetana) I tell you, is kamma. Intending, one does kamma by way of body, speech, & intellect.” Why, though?

The repository consciousness contains the activity of the conceptual consciousness, i.e., it contains the explanations that relate the contents of experience (the sense consciousnesses) to the manas (sense of self / I am).

Karma is intention because it is the future association with the reason (explanation) for the activity that is placed in the repository consciousness.

We do what we do because we believe what we believe and what we believe is what matters for the future experiences because those beliefs are what ultimately generates conditions.

If you've experienced jhana it's part of the contents of the repository consciousness that your mindstream has “perfumed.” It's part of the things that “you” believe in. When you interact with it intentionally you reinforce the rationale for that activity into future potential experiences.

We can look at the sotāpanna under this lens and see that it is what they know to be true that determines their lack of returning to disharmonious states of being.

Merit is simply what conditions (facts) we know to be true. When merit is increasing, we are understanding less “truths” via conceptualizations and moving into relaxing those held truths via a harmonizing surrendering of that effort.

It's like riding a bike with no hands, we want to aim ourselves in the right direction and figure out how to trust enough to let go.

Yes, exactly.

Conditions are a buddhafield tended/directed by our held understandings; this is why, of all the compassions, truly, self-compassion is key.

Compassion implies suffering, but there is an essential unqualified good before suffering begins; "enlightened self-interest" is a matter of exercising appropriate function in light of the form being presented. Functionally, perhaps the best expression of self-compassion is the letting go of the ideas of responsibility to (and for) the conditions that occur.

A narrative of suffering does not serve the movement towards freedom from suffering; especially when the suffering is ultimately just a narrative.

Suffering is noticing that we're doing it wrong. That is a legitimate feedback from within conditions about conditions; if it doesn't help us let go of the causes of that suffering and move towards where nothing is happening at all, then it is just a further tightening of the Chinese finger cuffs of our struggle with apparent conditions.

Often we can substitute compassion for suffering and the relationship still holds. Regardless, we cannot 'win' a dream. Understanding is always creative in nature; we want to cut through our understandings whenever possible.

We act in this world for the same reason we do in our dreams, because our behavior is the natural expression of our inner condition (our views). When we intentionally cultivate harmony with underlying process, and not directly with the conditions it presents, our outer experience of those conditions follows suit; when this self-reinforcing feedback takes hold, this is the inflection point.