Why Does the Phenomenon of Sheng-Linked Gratitude and Dou-Linked Enmity Arise?

When a person first receives a small act of kindness, their conscience naturally feels gratitude. However, when they are continuously showered with favors, it forms a habit of dependence, leading them into a comfort zone where such kindness is taken for granted. Should this expectation be disrupted—if others cease their giving—the comfort zone vanishes, the dependency is broken, and discomfort arises. Psychologically unable to accept this change, resentment begins to brew. Breaking a person's habits is difficult; denying them dependency breeds resentment. People are generally unwilling to break habits, especially comfortable and enjoyable ones. They resist education that challenges their ingrained tendencies and beliefs too drastically. To change a person, one must proceed gradually, avoiding undue haste.

Given the tenacious nature of habits, one must strive to cultivate good habits to displace the bad ones. For instance, if the practice of observing the breath becomes habitual, it will drive out distracting thoughts. When the mind is lost in chaotic thinking, simply observing the breath focuses all the mental energy of the manas (the underlying mind) on the breath. Concentration arises, and the distracting thoughts vanish. Gradually adapting to receiving kindness forms a habit and dependency in the manas. The manas is prone to greed and laziness; forming bad habits is easy, but changing them is difficult. Accepting benefits is easy, but losing them is hard to bear.

Which mind feels gratitude? Which mind turns resentful? Love, hate, affection, and resentment all depend on which level and to what degree they manifest—whether they are genuine or false, and to what extent. Emotions that run deep belong to the manas; those that are shallow and not yet habitual belong to the mano-consciousness (the surface mind). Emotions are easier to regulate at the mano-consciousness stage. Once they sink into the manas and become habitual, emotions become difficult to control.

Upon receiving kindness, anyone with a shred of conscience will feel gratitude, remembering it constantly and intending to repay it when possible—both the mano-consciousness and the manas respond this way. If the mano-consciousness must constantly remind the manas to be grateful, it indicates the manas lacks conscience. A person with conscience doesn't need reminders from the mano-consciousness. It's like someone whose mano-consciousness has attained the fruit (spiritual realization); they must constantly remind the manas not to give rise to afflictions, not to cling to the five aggregates, because the five aggregates are illusory. But when the manas itself attains the fruit, there's no need for the mano-consciousness to constantly remind it. The mano-consciousness doesn't need to speak or repeatedly chant about the emptiness of the five aggregates; the manas simply knows.