Prabhāsvaracitta, the clear-light mind

If Buddhism has a path, even a winding difficult to follow path, it is dhyāna (meditation). This path involves a gradual spiritual clearing up which culminates in the sudden, intuitive seeing of the absolute.  This clearing up is also a purification of mind in which its natural, pure state is realized which Tibetans call clear-light Mind.  This mind is also recognized in the Pali Nikayas at AN I.10.

This mind, mendicants, is radiant.(pabhassaramidaṃ, bhikkhave, cittaṃ.) And it is freed from passing corruptions. (tañca kho āgantukehi upakkilesehi vippamuttaṃ.) An educated noble disciple truly understands this. (taṃ sutavā ariyasāvako yathābhūtaṃ pajānāti.) So I say that the educated noble disciple has development of the mind. (tasmā ‘sutavato ariyasāvakassa cittabhāvanā atthī’ti vadāmī”ti.)

Pabhassara or in Sanskrit, prabhāsvara can mean shining forth, shining brightly, brilliant, radiant and so on.  In reality, it is a spiritual radiance which is beyond bodily feeling (the second skandha, vedana).  It is mind meeting itself, so to speak, when all dividing and obscuring barriers have been cleared away. 

The highest dhyāna is different than ordinary cognition which sets the mind in motion so that it is constantly reacting, interpreting, doubting, speculating, etc.  We could even think of the fruition of dhyāna as being mind in an absolute, unconditioned state having gone through a process of self-deconditioning.

Mind, in its absolute sense, is at the core of each of us (a universal core).  But we have, inadvertently, become mesmerized by our own art work thus falling in love with our formations and forgetting (avidyā) our intrinsic identity, even rejecting it for the false self.

Prabhāsvaracitta only discloses itself to us when we have overcome the dualizing and fragmenting power of consciousness (vijñāna) by which a particularized and differentiated world appears before us including a false self.  It is not a normal experience but a spiritual experience that has no relationship with the body and its senses.  And why should it?  It is transcendent.

The Zennist 
https://zennist.typepad.com/