They were simply different ways of dividing any given moment of awareness into a manageable matrix to demonstrate to anyone willing to wander around these matrices that they contained the universe of our awareness, its inside and its outside, and yet they contained no self. That was their function: to show practitioners that there was no self.

“truths that transcend words.”

everything turns out to be a non-dharma, or made-up reality.

the way the repository consciousness works: you never know what seed is going to sprout next.

The Buddha answers that while consciousness rises and ceases, it possesses an intrinsic quality that remains unaffected by those forms of consciousness tied to the contents he has just now denied.

the Buddha is not so concerned with philosophical argument as he is with putting an end to suffering, which arises from projection and which ceases upon understanding the true nature of one’s own perceptions.

Gunabhadra,

The reason bodhisattvas should study this is that seeing whatever they think of as real as not real will free them from the fabrication or projection of reality and prepare them for the personal realization of what buddhas know.

And just as the past is a projection, so are the future and the present. Lord of Lanka, the tathagatas do not project what amounts to reality.75 They transcend projection and fabrication76 and do not go along with distinguishing forms, except to instruct or to pacify the ignorant.