(7) So long as we, Chan Buddhists, desire to practice the system of Chan tenets, we have to always guard against and overpower all the “delirious obsessions” which would assail us from time to time. In other words, it is obligatory for us to eradicate the “delirious obsessions” cropping up one by one in the “fields of eight consciousnesses”. To eradicate them, the operation of removal should initially be conducted into the five fields of consciousness including visual consciousness, auditory consciousness, olfactory consciousness, gustatory consciousness, and tactile consciousness. And then the operation should be extended into the seed consciousness (alaya consciousness) until it finally succeeds in eliminating all the “delirious obsessions” in the psyche of any of us. It is only until after we have succeeded in eliminating all the “delirious obsessions” in the fields of eight consciousnesses that the Buddha-nature in our psyche can be shaken free of all its enthrallments. I believe most of Chan followers have heard of or learned of a number of terms describing different fruitions attainable for various categories of Chan-doctrine practitioners. Included among suchlike terms are such as “the four fruits of the ‘sravaka path’ (the voice-hearer’s path)”, “the ten stages of the bodhisattva path”. As a matter of fact suchlike terms are various indicators showing the progress a Chan-doctrine practitioner has made in the direction of ridding himself of mistaken thought or wrong conceptualization. The greater the extent of elimination from his psyche of mistaken thought or wrong conceptualization, the higher the stage of fruition his self-cultivation has attained. The way the progress made by a Chan-doctrine practitioner toward eliminating the mistaken thought or wrong conceptualization brewing in his mind is comparable to the way knowledge is acquired by a scholar studying at an academic institution. The more the knowledge a scholar has gained by attending an academic institution, the higher the grade he would be placed in. (From My Heart My Buddha)