Fascinating study of a controversial passage. An interesting thing that I think is left out is that the Dharmaguptaka version of many stories agrees with the Theravada versions. The two canons seem closer to each other than the Theravada is to the Sarvastivada. So, it’s not particularly surprising to me that the Sarvastivada version of the Kevaddha Sutta doesn’t agree with the Theravada (saying that consciousness is vast rather than luminous). They often diverge in these cases.
I personally wouldn’t change the Theravada reading given that it’s very close to the Dharmaguptaka reading; DA 24’s verses are a strong confirmation of the reading in DN 11 given the overall agreement between DA and DN compared to the Sarvastivada parallels that exist.
Well, the issue is that there is not one single Theravada reading, as Analayo notes. So the reading of “giving up” is also a Theravada reading. I think in these cases, when you have alternative readings from the same tradition, you can use historical comparative studies like Analayo’s to choose which way to go. So I think Sujato’s choice here is apt (especially since there are already other translations that have the other reading).
Yes, it’s one of those passages that turned into a focal point of attention, perhaps used as evidence in debates. It seems sometimes what happened with those passages is that each canon rewrote them to make refuting the others a simple matter. “Oh, well, we don’t recognize that reading. Our sutra says this.” The result is that the original reading is probably lost to the proliferation of meanings, as it were.
DA 24 obviates the issue of consciousness being essential by immediately saying that it ceases after saying that’s luminous. So, it wouldn’t serve as a way to argue otherwise. Tough call to make in the Pali translation. Sometimes a translator ends up playing, “Eeny-meeny-miney-moe, with which of these readings shall I go.” People will be unhappy if it’s already controversial.
It seems the term or idea, the luminous mind (Skt: prabhāsvara-citta or ābhāsvara-citta, Pali: pabhassara citta; C. 光明心 guangmingxin; J. 光明心 kōmyōshin) is not found in SA/SN, particularly the major portion of SA/SN.
I can’t speak to SN, but I just clicked through every occurrence of 光 in SA. The vast majority of cases was the light of the gods, the Buddha, or natural light (the sun, moon, lamps, etc). In fact, there’s a sutra that says those are the three kinds of light.
The only metaphorical use of light I saw was that of Dharma or wisdom light vs. the darkness of ignorance.
So too, bhikkhus, there are these five corruptions of the mind (cittassa), corrupted by which the mind is neither malleable nor wieldy nor radiant (pabhassaraṃ) but brittle and not rightly concentrated for the destruction of the taints. What five? Sensual desire … ill will … sloth and torpor … restlessness and remorse … doubt is a corruption of the mind, corrupted by which the mind is neither malleable nor wieldy nor radiant but brittle and not rightly concentrated for the destruction of the taints. (SN V 92 and A III 16, cf. AN I 257 and MN III 243)
Yes, there’s a parallel to that gold metaphor in SA (SA 1246), though it’s not exactly the same (doesn’t use the five hindrances). The Chinese uses a term (光澤) that means “luster” or “shiny” like a polished metal or a cut gemstone, so it’s not quite the same as being radiant. It connects the four dhyanas to the purification of the mind to be like pure gold, but the Pali version would imply that since the five hindrances are what one is rid of in order to achieve samadhi.
Looking closer, I see that the same term occurs a few other times, usually when talking about purification, like sentient beings being purified by the abodes of mindfulness. So, that would be a second metaphorical use of light-like qualities for samadhi. It’s interesting that wisdom shines and samadhi is shiny, as it were.
SA 1246 is in Piyu Xiangying 譬喻相應 ( = SN 20. Opamma Samyutta) which belongs to Vyākaraṇa-aṅga portion of SA. But the Pali parallel of this SA 1246 is the first part of AN 3.100 Suvaṇṇakāra (CSA vol. 3, pp. 707, 721 note 2).
I think this is pretty solid evidence that terms like radiance and shining are metaphors for the mind in samadhi as Brahmali argues, and not prefiguring some kind of Mahayanistic pure consciousness as some believe. It’s quite a widespread practice to take the “mind is luminous” passage and say that it’s equivalent to Mahayana Buddha nature ideas or to ideas of the mind being pure in Mahayana (of course that gets interpreted in different ways too).
Okay. I would say we’d need to think about what gold represents to really make that case. Or even the whole concept of purification in Buddhism. Apparently something is being purified, which begs the question as to whether it requires some quality that makes it purifiable. I mean, this is all these metaphors are really saying to me. It’s like the clouds and sky metaphor.
Well, I think my main point is that it is a pragmatic metaphor for meditation. It’s not positing a metaphysical position about the mind. So when he uses the gold metaphor or the moon and clouds metaphor, we shouldn’t try to draw some kind of ontological theory out of these statements. Their context is always in descriptions of mental culture.
A fascinating discussion. While reading Satipaṭṭhāna Meditation: A Practice Guide, I was taken aback by Bhikkhu Anālayo’s comment:
In fact the notion that there is a constantly present form of awareness which needs to be recognized and which equals the liberated mind does not square with the early Buddhist understanding of mindfulness (or of consciousness). Apparently the outcome of a complex development with a starting point in a discourse that contrasts the luminous mind to its adventitious defilements (AN 1.6.1; Anālayo 2017b), the resultant notion runs counter to the recurrent emphasis on impermanence in the Satipaṭṭhāna-sutta…..
For me, this seemingly technical discrepancy in interpretations strikingly illustrated the importance of getting “original conceptions” right. Almost every other Buddhist meditation book or article I’ve come across, seems to endorse the view that there is a “constantly present form of awareness”, a sort of universal ground to all of existence. Bhikkhu Anālayo seems to be saying that the Buddha would not have endorsed such a view. Either such an awareness is not constant or it is not present or it isn’t a form at all.
In his paper, Bhikkhu Anālayo is considerate enough to say that “….my intention in what follows is decidedly not to debunk various meditation traditions or to pretend that they are not based on, or conducive to, genuinely transformative experiences.” But this difference in understanding surely has tremendous bearing on meditative practice, doesn’t it? It’s not just a theoretical wrangle. What it asserts, very politely, is that most Buddhist traditions have re-conceived the end goal of Buddhist meditation in a way that does not reflect Buddha’s own conception of the process.
A “genuine transformative experience” cannot be based on the wrong end goal. How can one let go of delusions if one is meditating under the delusion that once all delusions are let go or dissolved, an universal, infinite awareness is there to be recovered?
Bhikku Sujato in his three blog articles on nibbana (thanks to the OP for providing the links) refers to something like the perennial temptation of eternalism; roughly, the idea that there is an ultimate something that survives or is immune to impermanence. If one discards the idea of reincarnation, then the elimination of any kind of eternalism from one’s conception of the world would “simply” entail that there is nothing after death. Whether one dissolves into nothingness at the end of million lives or at the end of one is a mere technical quibble, after all, in the face of infinity.
I’m curious whether Bhikkhu Anālayo’s reinterpretation (I should probably say this “line of interpretation”) has attracted broader support within the community of scholars and practitioners.
It’s a deep question, and one that probably can’t be addressed satisfactorily in the space of a forum post. But just to say, Analayo is, as always, diplomatic, but IMHO this is pretty clear cut. The deeper I go into understanding the “infinite consciousness” teachings of the Upanishads, the more clear it is precisely this that the Buddha was rejecting. Not just one or two passages, but overwhelmingly throughout the canon. The whole idea crept into Buddhism over a long time, partly due to almost wilful mis- and over- interpretation of a couple of incidental passages.
What this means for practitioners is another question. Within Buddhist yogic circles, this is, and has always been, controversial. Many Theravada meditation masters would reject such ideas outright. I don’t really have quotes to hand, but I’m guessing that would include pretty much all the Burmese and Sri Lankan schools. In Thailand, some of the forest masters teach like this, others not. Ajahn Cha said the word “original mind” was just a term for the mind that has ceased. Ajahn Liem (informal remarks) said the original mind thing sounded a bit like a “self” (dtua dton).
Similar debates have also been live in Taiwanese Buddhism, thanks to the work of Yin Shun.
My point here is that if this is a question that crucially determines the validity of a person’s meditative realization, this applies just as much to contexts in traditional Buddhist cultures as in new cultures.
Most of these people, it must be said, have little knowledge of the Suttas and are just repeating what others have told them. I recall being told this by a very famous Tibetan yogi, who insisted that the “radiant mind” was even found in the Pali canon, at which I’m like, “Ummm …”.
I’d make a couple of points:
For most meditators, the question of the final goal is less relevant than matters of personal connection, motivation, and integrity. A teacher is there to help us take the next step.
The bigger problem is not that your teacher might have some incorrect ideas, but whether your teacher is allowed to be wrong. If that’s not the case, you’re in a cult and should leave.
The connection between text and experience is complex at best, and is never a straight one-to-one relationship.
It seems to me (1) the Buddha resisted being forced to offer yes/no answers in these matters. So ambiguity about the existence of an ultimate ground awareness is to be expected. (2) impermanence/aniccha, in the sense of non-constancy, needn’t rule out a ground awareness (as Bhikkhu Anālayo seems to be suggesting). For example, quantum vacuum flux is thoroughly impermanent, but nonetheless, persistent enough to support the tenures of entire physics departments. (3) Finally, Thomas Clark recently offered an interesting argument attempting to show that even from a thoroughly secular, naturalist point of view, subjectivity does not cease at death. I don’t wish to summarise his arguments to the realm of error, so I’ll simply point to the article: Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity.
But as you said, this is a subject that cannot be handled too satisfactorily in a discussion forum. Thanks again.
To me, it is impossible to reconcile the suttas to the notion that there is or was an intrinsic, pure, luminous mind that is hidden; one there but merely clouded or defiled. If there was an original mind that was pure, then how could it become defiled? The mind of an arahant can’t go backward, back to being defiled.
It makes more sense that one on the N8FP is working towards removing the defilements of an impure mind and temporarily experiencing a luminous mind in jhana.
Samkhya has a whole dualistic system around the notion - Basically, there’s Purusha, undefiled pure consciousness, and there’s Prakrit, basically all the matter / substance / activity. They’re distinct, and Purusha is always pure, and it’s basically Prakrit playing a show for Purusha.
I’m oversimplifying a bit, but that’s the gist of it. My point is, the entire Samkhya system is built around explaining this dichotomy - if there was something of the sort in Early Teachings, we’d have similar elaborations explaining why it’s the case.
Well, people can improve their understanding over time and realize that abstract ideas rarely match reality very well. It seems to me that everyone is going to be practicing with one delusion or another, and some are tougher to resolve or overcome than others. If nobody could correct themselves, then there’s not much point in any Buddhist practice. But people can correct themselves, and they will correct themselves about many, many things over the course of their lives, much less during their practice of Buddhist teachings. And while doing so, they become wiser. Because outside authorities like religious texts and teachers aren’t always right, the whole process is a messy one.
In terms of this belief in an originally pure mind, it seems to have gained popularity throughout the Buddhist world. There was a famous poet monk in Japan named Bankei who wrote a lot about an “unborn mind.” I don’t think it was just based on this one passage in a later EBT. Maybe it was a diffusion of Tathagatagarbha thought, actually. It seems as though some of these ideas penetrated southeast Asia during medieval times as well.
(3) Finally, Thomas Clark recently offered an interesting argument attempting to show that even from a thoroughly secular, naturalist point of view, subjectivity does not cease at death. I don’t wish to summarise his arguments to the realm of error, so I’ll simply point to the article: