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Chap 10 - Pointing-Out Instructions

Further Research:

The Essence of Mind

Gampopa:

Among the essence, nature, and characteristics of mind:

Its essence is that it is clear yet nonconceptual; unborn and unceasing awareness.

Its nature is that is free from arising, abiding, and ceasing; natural purity – what is unconditioned pervading samsara and nirvana.

Its characteristics is that it appears as samsara and nirvana; its appearances as the various representations of latent tendencies.

Pakmo Drupa:

Nondual mahamudra

has three [aspects]: a characteristic, an essence, and a nature.

Its nature is its clarity with unimpeded understanding

Its essence is its freedom from the elaborations of arising and cessation.

Its characteristics is to appear as the many of samsara and nirvana.

Rangjung Dorje:

It is empty in essence yet clear in nature,

and its manifestations appear unimpededly as anything at all.

The essence of mind (p 260)

Guhyasamaja:

Commentary on Bodhicitta:

The buddhas maintain

bodhicitta is not obscured

by notions of self, skandhas, or consciousness.

It is always characterized by emptiness.

Entrance to the Two Truths:

If what appears as the conventional

is examined with reasonings, nothing is found.

That very not finding is the ultimate:

primordially present dharmata.

Aryadeva in Four Hundred Verses:

The emptiness of one

is the emptiness of all.

Entrance to the Two Truths:

In emptiness there is

no differentiation at all.

The Nature of Mind

Prajnaparamita in Eight Thousand Lines:

The meaning of luminosity:

It is described as referring to what is not veiled and is purified of elaborations (such as those of arising and ceasing);

what is stainless and devoid of particles (such as those of the skandhas or dhatus);

what is always unchanging, like space;

and what is nondual and the nature of space.

The Sutra of the Questions of Upali

The Highest Continuum:

The luminosity that is the nature of mind

is unchanging like space.

The Ornament of the Light of Wisdom:

Luminous does not mean bright like light, but

Capable of knowing, cognizant, experientially vivid, self-revealing.

Cf. prakāśa

🔥 So luminosity = the fact that experience is present and knowable at all, without needing a separate knower.

So awareness is:

This is the classic Dzogchen formula:

👉 emptiness and luminosity are inseparable

(Tibetan: stong gsal dbyer med)

🔥 So “equal to space” is guarding against reifying luminosity into some subtle cosmic consciousness. It says: yes, experience is vividly present — but that presence has no core, no boundary, no center.

The text says awakening luminosity that is the naturally luminous mind, not awakening to luminosity.

That grammar matters.

It implies:

Naropa's Summary of the View:

This reflexive awareness , free from elaborations,

appears yet is empty, is empty yet appears.

Thus appearances and emptiness are indivisible,

like, for example, the moon and its reflection in water.

What is awareness? (264)

Nowadays, the word "awareness" is used as an experiential term for such [experiences of clarity-awareness), because those [experiences] involve conceptuality, are not emptiness endowed with the most sublime of manifestations, and are not the governing principle of all, they are not true awareness....

From the Kalacakra Tantra:

What is called "awareness" is a nonconceptual, inner awareness: it is emptiness endowed with all manifestations. What is unchanging is awareness: it is without reference point, devoid of defilements, the embodiment of bliss.

Tantra of the Inconceivable Secrets:

Devoid of the extremes of permanence and annihilation,

birth and cessation, mind is reflexively aware

and primordially without elaborations.

Be certain that this point is inconceivable.

Reflexive awareness is the absence of characteristics and is inconceivable. Natural luminosity is as explained before.

The Characteristics of Mind (p. 265)

The essence of the mind and its pure nature are obscured by adventitious stains.

When [mind] itself is unaware of its own abiding state, one the basis of the interdependence of afflictions, the manifestations of samsara appear: the six classes of beings with their happiness and suffering.

Following the separation from adventitious stains and the awareness of [mind's] own abiding state, on the basis of the interdependence of purification, the kaya of ultimate dharmata manifests and the manifestations of the rupakayas appear for others like illusions.

From Summary of the View:

E MA HO. The mind-itself with stains

has projections of the six kinds of beings

throughout a limitless realm of space

with unimaginable rounds of suffering.

It also says:

E MA HO. The mind-itself without stains

has projections of the pure appearances

of the myriad displays of

[buddha] fields and mandalas.

all encompassed by the rupakayas.

These marvelous projections

pervade the limitlessness of space.

[Interpretation: When mind-itself is recognized, its expressive energy does not disappear into blankness.

It continues to appear, but now as enlightened form — compassionate, responsive, communicative appearance — which is what “rūpakāya” actually means in lived terms.

When mind-itself is recognized, its expressive energy does not disappear into blankness.

It continues to appear, but now as enlightened form — compassionate, responsive, communicative appearance — which is what “rūpakāya” actually means in lived terms.

From the Mahāmudrā / Vajrayāna view, form is not a problem to be escaped.

Form is how realization shows up.]

“Everything that appears is the vivid play of empty-luminous awareness, and suffering or freedom depends on whether this is recognized.”