'Od gsal, prabhāsvara and pabhassara: the Clear Light from the Pāli Canon to the Great Perfection
Introduction
In the Great Perfection, 'od gsal or ösel is used for the nature of the ground, for the radiance of rigpa, for the luminosity that dawns at death, and for the fruit. It is so central that it is easy to forget that the word has a history, and that for most of that history it was not a noun at all.
In its earliest use it is an adjective. The Pāli discourses say that the mind is pabhassara, luminous. The Sanskrit sūtras say the same with prabhāsvara, and soon add prakṛti: the mind is luminous by nature. Only later, in the tantras, does the adjective stand alone as the name of a reality, prabhāsvara, the Luminous; and in Tibet, 'od gsal becomes a technical term with a precise place in the view, meditation and conduct of the Heart Essence.
The stages are worth tracing one by one, because each preserves something the later ones presuppose. The grammar of the Sanskrit word says that luminosity is a nature, not an event. The Pāli passages show that the teaching is old and that it first appears in the setting of meditation. The Mahāyāna formulas make it the basis of the doctrine of buddha-nature. The tantras turn it into the goal of practice. In the Dzogchen tantras, in Vimalamitra, in the Omniscient Longchenpa and in Mipham the Great, it becomes the description of the ground itself, present before any practice and unaffected by it.
The Sanskrit word prabhāsvara
The roots bhā and bhās
The Sanskrit grammarians list two kindred roots of shining. The first is bhā, “to shine", conjugated in the second class: bhāti, “it shines". The second is bhās, also glossed in the list of roots as dīptau, “in the sense of blazing", and conjugated in the middle voice: bhāsate, “it shines, it appears". The two are siblings. From bhā come prabhā, radiance, and ābhā, splendour; from bhās come bhāsā, light, and ābhāsa, appearance, reflection, semblance. Prabhāsvara is built on the second root, bhās, but its whole meaning lives in the family of both.
The Upaniṣads already use the two together, in one of the most luminous verses ever spoken. The Kaṭha, the Muṇḍaka and the Śvetāśvatara each preserve it:
na tatra sūryo bhāti na candratārakaṃ nemā vidyuto bhānti kuto 'yam agniḥ | tam eva bhāntam anubhāti sarvaṃ tasya bhāsā sarvam idaṃ vibhāti ||
“There the sun does not shine, nor the moon and stars; these lightnings do not shine, how then this fire? As That shines, everything shines after It; by Its light all this shines." The verse uses the root in several ways. Bhāti is intransitive: something shines. Anubhāti is shining that follows another, borrowed light. Bhāsā is light as the means by which other things shine, and vibhāti is shining out in all directions. The source shines by itself; everything else shines by it. Both senses that matter later are here: luminosity as the nature of the source, and luminosity as what lets everything else appear.
The causative proper appears in the Bhagavadgītā, where Kṛṣṇa says of his supreme abode: na tad bhāsayate sūryaḥ, “the sun does not illumine That". Bhāsayati, “causes to shine, illumines", is the transitive form of the root. Grammatically, prabhāsvara is not a causative. But what it describes is never lit by anything else, and it is what lights everything else; the later tradition will use it in both senses.
The suffix -vara
The suffix is as important as the root. Pāṇini teaches that the suffix varaC is added to the roots sthā, īś, bhās, pis and kas. The rule belongs to a long section governed by an earlier sūtra, which says that these agent-forms express three things: one whose nature (śīla) it is to do something, one whose inherent quality (dharma) it is, and one who does it well (sādhukārin).
So prabhāsvara does not mean “shining at the moment". It means “that whose nature it is to shine forth", “that for which shining forth is an inherent quality", “that which shines forth well". The same rule forms sthāvara, “that which stands by nature", the immovable, and īśvara, "one whose nature is to rule", a sovreign lord. Grammatically, the mind is luminous in the way the sovereign lord is lord: as a matter of what it is, not of what it does on a particular occasion.
The three senses of the suffix correspond closely to the way Dzogchen speaks of the ground. Shining as its nature (śīla) answers to the essence, which does not change. Shining as its inherent quality (dharma) answers to the nature, which is never absent. Shining well (sādhu) answers to the unobstructed dynamic expression.
The prefix pra
The prefix pra is the first in Pāṇini's list of prepositions, the list that begins with pra. Grammarians and commentators give it a wide range of senses, and several of them bear directly on prabhāsvara.
Pra means forth, forward, motion outward from a source, as in pracalati, “moves forth", and prāñc, “turned forward". Prabhāsvara is light that streams forth from its own source. In Dzogchen terms this is the ground shining outward as ground-appearance.
Pra means pre-eminence, intensity, excellence (prakarṣa), the sense the commentators cite most often: prakṛṣṭa, “pre-eminent"; prabala, “very strong"; prajñā, knowing in its highest form. In this sense prabhāsvara is shining more brightly than anything else.
Pra means beginning, onset (ādikarma), as in prārambha and prakrama. In this sense prabhāsvara says that the shining belongs to the beginning: the light is primordial, close to what Tibetan expresses with ye nas, “from the very beginning".
Pra means source, origin, as in prabhava, “origin", and prakṛti, “original nature". The later phrase prakṛti-prabhāsvara, “luminous by original nature", uses the prefix twice.
Pra means fullness, completion, as in prapūrṇa, “completely full". The light is not partial; it is entire in every moment.
Pra means away, apart, as in pravāsa, “living away from home". Light goes out from its source without the source moving, as sunlight reaches the earth while the sun stays where it is.
Taking these senses together, prabhāsvara describes something that by its own nature, from the beginning, shines out from its source, more brightly than anything else and without lack, and that lights other things without needing to be lit. The later uses of 'od gsal draw on each of these senses in turn.
The Tibetan rendering 'od gsal
When the translators of Tibet came to prabhāsvara, the great lexicon compiled under royal decree fixed its equivalent as 'od gsal ba.
'Od is light, radiance, the luminous presence of a lamp or a jewel; it renders prabhā, ābhā and dyuti. It is light as something that is there, a radiance that fills.
Gsal is the more subtle of the two. As an adjective, gsal ba means clear, bright, distinct, transparent, unclouded: water that shows the bottom of the lake, a sky without haze, speech that leaves no doubt. As a verb it means to be clear, to become evident, to stand out sharply. And it opens without effort into the transitive: gsal bar byed pa, to make clear, to illumine, to elucidate. The Tibetan scholastic tradition constantly uses gsal byed, “the clarifier", for whatever makes something evident, and rab gsal, “utterly clear", for the luminous. Close in sound and sense stands sel ba, to clear away, to dispel; darkness is what light dispels.
The Tibetan therefore makes explicit what the Sanskrit implies. 'Od gsal is clear light: a light that is transparent, has no colour of its own and is never obscured. It is also clarifying light: the light in which everything else becomes distinct, the knowing in which each appearance is seen sharply. The first is luminosity as essence; the second is luminosity as the capacity to know. Dzogchen does not treat them as separate.
The lexicon records one more equivalence. The gods of the second meditative absorption, called in Sanskrit Ābhāsvara and in Pāli Ābhassara, “those of streaming radiance", are rendered in Tibetan as 'Od gsal. The same word names the purified mind of the sūtras, a realm of beings made of light, and the ground of the Great Perfection. The Pāli Canon shows why these belong together.
Pabhassara in the Pāli Canon
The luminous mind of the Aṅguttara Nikāya
The best-known passage is a pair of short discourses in the Book of Ones of the Aṅguttara Nikāya. The Buddha says:
Pabhassaram idaṃ, bhikkhave, cittaṃ. Tañca kho āgantukehi upakkilesehi upakkiliṭṭhaṃ. Taṃ assutavā puthujjano yathābhūtaṃ nappajānāti. Tasmā assutavato puthujjanassa cittabhāvanā natthī'ti vadāmi.
“Luminous, monks, is this mind, and it is defiled by defilements that come from outside. The uninstructed ordinary person does not understand this as it really is. Therefore I say that for the uninstructed ordinary person there is no cultivation of mind."
The second discourse repeats the statement with the mind freed of the visiting defilements, and concludes that for the instructed noble disciple there is cultivation of mind.
Three features stand out. First, pabhassara is an adjective in the predicate: “this mind is luminous". Nothing is said about a nature, an essence, or an original state. Second, the defilements are āgantuka, guests, arrivals from elsewhere; they do not belong to the mind. Third, the point of the statement is practical. Because the mind is luminous and its stains are visitors, cultivating the mind makes sense; the one who does not understand this has no basis for practice.
The discourses stand in a group that begins with the observation that nothing changes as quickly as the mind. The luminous mind of the Aṅguttara is therefore not presented as a changeless substratum. Buddhaghosa, commenting on the passage, glosses pabhassara as “white, utterly pure", and identifies the mind meant as the life-continuum (bhavaṅga), the passive stream of consciousness that flows when no active cognition is occurring. He compares it to clear water muddied by what is brought into it. On the Theravāda reading, then, luminosity belongs to the resting mind between cognitive processes, not to an unconditioned reality.
Gold, equanimity and the purified mind
Other passages show where the word first belongs: in the language of meditation. In the Discourse on the Analysis of Elements in the Majjhima Nikāya, the Buddha describes the equanimity that remains after the elements have been seen through as “pure, bright, malleable, workable and luminous" (pabhassarā), and compares it to gold refined by a goldsmith until it is luminous and fit for any ornament. In the Aṅguttara, the five corruptions of gold are set beside the five hindrances: gold mixed with iron, copper, tin, lead and silver is neither soft nor workable nor luminous; freed of them it is all three. So too the mind, freed of the hindrances, becomes “soft, workable and luminous", ready for the higher knowledges.
These passages explain the meaning of the Aṅguttara statement. Luminosity is the brightness that appears when what obscures it is removed. The goldsmith does not make the gold shine; he takes away what dulls it. Practice does not produce the mind's light; it removes what conceals it.
Beings of light
The same root names the gods of streaming radiance, the Ābhassara. In the Aggañña Sutta of the Dīgha Nikāya, the Buddha describes how, when the world contracts, beings are mostly reborn among the Ābhassara. There they are “mind-made, feeding on joy, self-luminous, moving through space, glorious". When the world expands again, some come to this world in the same condition, still self-luminous, until craving for a savoury substance makes their bodies coarse and their light fades; only then do sun and moon appear. In this account, light is the original condition of beings and coarseness is what follows from craving. The Tibetan translators gave these gods the name 'Od gsal.
Consciousness that shines on every side
At the end of the Kevaddha Sutta, and again in the Majjhima, the Buddha speaks of “consciousness without feature, without end, shining on every side" (viññāṇaṃ anidassanaṃ anantaṃ sabbato pabhaṃ), where earth, water, fire and air find no footing and name and form come to an end. The commentarial tradition records two readings of the final word, one of which means “radiant all around". The canon thus already speaks of a consciousness that is boundless, featureless and luminous, at the point where all elements cease.
Is the luminous mind a Mahāyāna interpolation?
The question is reasonable. The Book of Ones is a collection of very short sayings, assembled late within the formation of the canon, and the luminous-mind passage has no clear structural parallel in the other Nikāyas. A doctrine that later became central to the Mahāyāna could in principle have been inserted back.
The evidence points the other way. First, the doctrine was held by early non-Mahāyāna schools. Vasumitra's account of the doctrines of the eighteen schools attributes to the Mahāsāṃghikas the thesis that the nature of mind is luminous and is defiled by adventitious defilements. The great Sarvāstivāda commentary on the Abhidharma, the Mahāvibhāṣā, cites the same thesis as the view of the Vibhajyavādins and argues against it. The Śāriputrābhidharma of the Dharmaguptakas contains a closely parallel statement. A thesis attested across several mainstream schools, and disputed between them, is older than the Mahāyāna.
Second, the language of the Pāli passage belongs entirely to the Nikāyas: āgantuka, upakkilesa, cittabhāvanā, the uninstructed ordinary person and the instructed noble disciple. It contains none of the vocabulary of the Mahāyāna sūtras: no emptiness, no tathāgatagarbha, no original nature.
Third, the Theravāda commentators read the passage in their own, quite conservative way, as the life-continuum. A passage taken over from the Mahāyāna would hardly have been absorbed so smoothly into the Abhidhamma framework.
Fourth, the gold similes of the Majjhima and Aṅguttara, which use the same word in the same sense, are part of the common stock of the discourses.
The most likely conclusion is that the luminous-mind statement is an early teaching, shared by several schools and interpreted differently by each. What the Pāli passage does not contain is the word pakati, “nature". It says that this mind is luminous; it does not say that luminosity is its original nature. That step is taken in the Sanskrit literature, and it is with that step that the Mahāyāna understanding begins.
From adjective to name
Prakṛti-prabhāsvara: luminous by nature
The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines opens with the elder Subhūti saying that a bodhisattva should train so as not to be proud of the thought of awakening, and he gives the reason: tac cittam acittam, prakṛtiś cittasya prabhāsvarā, “that mind is no-mind, for the nature of mind is luminous". Two things are new here. Luminosity is now said of the mind's prakṛti, its nature; and it is joined with emptiness: the mind is luminous because it is not a mind, because it has no own-being to which stains could attach.
The Ratnagotravibhāga, the treatise on buddha-nature attributed to Maitreya, makes the image explicit:
cittasya yāsau prakṛtiḥ prabhāsvarā na jātu sā dyaur iva yāti vikriyām |
āgantukai rāgamalādibhis tv asāv upaiti saṃkleśam abhūtakalpajaiḥ ||
“The luminous nature of the mind never changes, like the sky.
It is defiled by adventitious stains such as desire, which arise from false imagining."
The sky is the key. Clouds come and go in it; they do not alter it, and when they pass nothing has been added to the sky. The adventitious defilements of the Aṅguttara have become clouds; the luminous mind has become space.
The Mahāyānasūtrālaṃkāra, also attributed to Maitreya, adds a careful qualification: “The mind is held to be ever luminous by nature, and to be defiled by adventitious faults. Luminosity by nature is not taught of any mind other than the mind that is reality (dharmatācitta)." Vasubandhu's commentary explains that this mind is suchness itself. Luminosity is not a property of each passing thought; it is the reality of mind.
In the epistemological tradition Dharmakīrti uses the same formula as the basis of his argument that liberation is possible: prabhāsvaram idaṃ cittaṃ prakṛtyāgantavo malāḥ, “this mind is luminous by nature; the stains are adventitious". Because the stains are not the nature of mind, they can be removed entirely; because the nature is luminous, nothing remains to obstruct knowing once they are gone. The Laṅkāvatāra and the sūtras on the tathāgatagarbha speak in the same way of the buddha-nature as luminous by nature and pure.
The change from the Pāli is precise. There, “this mind is luminous" justified the possibility of practice. Here, “the nature of mind is luminous" establishes that buddhahood is the mind's own nature, uncovered, not produced.
Prabhāsvara in the Secret Mantra
In the tantras the adjective finally stands alone. In the tradition of the Guhyasamāja, as taught in the Five Stages of the Noble Nāgārjuna and the works of Āryadeva, prabhāsvara, the Clear Light, is the name of the fourth stage of the completion stage, followed only by simultaneous union (yuganaddha). The practitioner, through the winds entering and dissolving in the central channel, passes through three appearances, called white appearance, red increase and black near-attainment, and then through four emptinesses, the last of which, all-empty, is the Clear Light.
The same sequence is taught as the process of dying. As the elements dissolve and the winds withdraw, every being passes through the three appearances and arrives at the Clear Light of death. What the yogin brings about in meditation, death brings about of itself. Here the word has fully become a noun: one “enters the Clear Light", “abides in the Clear Light", “arises from the Clear Light" in the illusory body.
The Tibetan teachers drew from this the distinction between mother luminosity and child luminosity. The mother is the luminosity that is the mind's nature, present in everyone and manifest at death. The child is the luminosity recognised on the path through the teacher's introduction and through practice. When the child, having been recognised during life, meets the mother at death, liberation occurs as easily as a child running into its mother's lap. The image is common to the Mahāmudrā and the Dzogchen teachings on the bardos.
'Od gsal in the Dzogchen Tantras and in Vimalamitra
From the mind to the nature of mind
The history so far has a clear line. The Pāli says that this mind, citta, is luminous. The Mahāyāna says that the nature of mind, cittasya prakṛti, is luminous, and the Sūtrālaṃkāra restricts luminosity to the mind that is reality, dharmatācitta. The Great Perfection completes the movement by distinguishing sharply between mind, sems, and the nature of mind, sems nyid, or rigpa. Ordinary mind, with its thoughts and its grasping, is not what is luminous in the full sense; it is what obscures. Luminosity belongs to rigpa, the knowing that is the nature of mind. The Pāli word citta has, so to speak, been divided: its luminosity goes to rigpa, its restlessness to sems.
Luminosity as the nature of the ground
The Seventeen Tantras describe the ground in three aspects: its essence is empty (ngo bo stong pa), its nature is luminous (rang bzhin gsal ba), and its compassion, or responsiveness, is all-pervading (thugs rje kun khyab). Luminosity has a precise place here. It is the nature, rang bzhin, the very word that renders prakṛti. In the Dzogchen tantras, prakṛti-prabhāsvara has found its exact Tibetan home.
Two things follow. First, luminosity is never separate from emptiness. The essence is empty and the nature is luminous, but there are not two things; emptiness is luminous and luminosity is empty. A ground that was only empty would be a blank; a ground that was only luminous would be a thing. Second, luminosity is not produced on the path. In the Guhyasamāja the Clear Light is reached at the end of a process of dissolution. In the Great Perfection it is present before any process, in every moment, and the path consists in recognising it.
The tantras distinguish two aspects of the ground's purity. Primordial purity, ka dag, is the empty essence, never touched by delusion. Spontaneous presence, lhun grub, is the luminous nature with all its qualities, never needing to be produced. The Clear Light is spoken of in both: the luminosity of primordial purity, ka dag gi 'od gsal, and the luminosity of spontaneous presence, lhun grub kyi 'od gsal. The first is the clear light as the empty, unobstructed openness of rigpa; the second is the clear light as its radiance, the source of all the qualities of the kāyas and wisdoms.
Inner and outer radiance
The tantras use a distinction that has no real precedent in the sūtras: inner radiance, nang gsal, and outer radiance, phyi gsal. When the ground rests in itself, before anything appears, its radiance is turned inward. The image is that of a lamp burning inside a vase: fully lit, but its light not yet shining outside. This is the state called the youthful vase body, gzhon nu bum pa'i sku. It is luminous without displaying anything.
When the seal of the vase breaks, the radiance shines outward as the appearances of the ground, gzhi snang. These are not yet either saṃsāra or nirvāṇa. If they are recognised as the ground's own radiance, rang snang, this is the awakening of Samantabhadra, the primordial Buddha, who never wandered. If they are not recognised, and taken to be something other, this non-recognition is the beginning of delusion and of beings.
This is where the transitive sense of prabhāsvara and the double meaning of gsal become doctrine. Inner radiance is clear light: light that shines in itself. Outer radiance is clarifying light: light that becomes the appearing of everything. The light does not change when it shines outward; what changes is whether it is recognised.
Radiance, dynamic expression and display
The tantras also speak of three ways in which the energy of rigpa manifests: as radiance, gdangs, as dynamic expression, rtsal, and as display, rol pa. Radiance is the luminosity of rigpa itself; dynamic expression is that luminosity becoming manifest as appearances; display is the play of those appearances, like reflections in a mirror. The five lights, the natural radiance of rigpa's five wisdoms, are the source of the five elements; when the lights are not recognised as one's own radiance, they appear as solid earth, water, fire, air and space. The Aggañña Sutta's beings of light, who became coarse through craving, describe in narrative the same process that the tantras describe in terms of radiance and its non-recognition.
The Array of Jewels belongs to this same family of tantras, and its title already carries the point. A jewel does not shine because something lights it; its brilliance is its own, and its many facets show many colours without the jewel becoming many. Luminosity in the Great Perfection is of this kind: self-lit, undivided, and endlessly various in its display.
Vimalamitra
The instructions that tradition traces to Vimalamitra, gathered in the Vima Nyingthig, organise the teaching of the Seventeen Tantras under eleven topics of words and meanings, beginning with the ground and how delusion arises from it, continuing through the path and the bardos, and ending with the fruit. Luminosity runs through every one of these topics: as the nature of the ground, as the ground-appearances, as what is introduced by the teacher, as what is stabilised in practice, as what dawns in the bardo of dharmatā, and as the fruit. The Omniscient Longchenpa later used this eleven-fold structure for his Treasury of Words and Meanings, and through him it became the standard frame of the Heart Essence.
In Vimalamitra's commentarial approach the Clear Light is never treated as an object that rigpa looks at. It is rigpa's own luminosity, cognising itself without dividing into subject and object. This is why the Dzogchen tantras speak of self-arising wisdom, rang byung ye shes, and self-knowing rigpa, rang rig: the light that knows is the light that is known.
The Omniscient Longchenpa
The Omniscient Longchenpa wrote about luminosity in almost every one of his works, but three treatments are especially important: the account of the ground in the Treasury of Words and Meanings and the Treasury of the Supreme Vehicle; the warning against confusing luminosity with the ālaya; and the luminosity of the night and of death.
The ground and its radiance
In the Treasury of Words and Meanings, following the eleven topics of the Vima Nyingthig, the Omniscient Longchenpa begins with the ground as it was before buddhas and beings were distinguished. He describes it as primordially pure in essence and spontaneously present in nature, with its luminosity turned inward like the youthful vase body. When its radiance shines out, it appears through what he calls the eight gateways of spontaneous presence: as compassion, as light, as wisdom, as kāyas, as non-duality, as freedom from extremes, as the pure gateway of wisdom and as the impure gateway of saṃsāra. The same light opens onto both pure and impure appearance. What decides between them is recognition.
This gives his use of 'od gsal a characteristic precision. Luminosity is never just a bright experience. It is the nature of the ground, the radiance that comes from it, and the knowing that can recognise that radiance as its own. When the Omniscient Longchenpa speaks of the Clear Light, he usually means all three at once.
Luminosity is not the ālaya
The most important practical point in his teaching on luminosity is a distinction, made again and again: the ālaya, kun gzhi, the ground of all habitual tendencies, is not the dharmakāya, and its blankness is not the Clear Light.
The ālaya is a state of non-thought without knowing, neutral and dim. It is the basis on which karmic traces are stored and from which they ripen. A meditator who rests in a still, thought-free state without the clarity of rigpa is resting in the ālaya. The experience can be peaceful, even blissful, but it is not liberation; it is the seed of the formless realms.
The dharmakāya, by contrast, is the ground's own luminosity, empty and cognising at once. It has the stillness of the ālaya without its dullness. The Omniscient Longchenpa makes this the dividing line between mind, sems, and wisdom, ye shes, a distinction he treats in a whole chapter of the Treasury of Words and Meanings. Mind is the movement and the dullness; wisdom is the luminous knowing in which both are seen through.
This distinction is the precise Dzogchen answer to the ambiguity of the Pāli passage. Buddhaghosa had identified the luminous mind with the life-continuum, the resting state of mind between cognitions. In the language of the Great Perfection, a resting state of that kind, if it lacks the clarity of rigpa, is closer to the ālaya. The Clear Light is not the mind at rest; it is the nature of mind, whether the mind is at rest or moving.
Luminosity of sleep and of death
In his instructions on the night and on the bardos, the Omniscient Longchenpa describes the luminosity of deep sleep, gnyid kyi 'od gsal. Each night, as the senses withdraw and dreams have not yet begun, the mind passes through a moment of luminosity like the mother luminosity at death. For an ordinary person it passes unrecognised, as a blank. The practitioner who has been introduced to rigpa can recognise it, and the recognition of the luminosity of sleep is a preparation for the recognition of the luminosity of death.
At death, after the dissolution of the elements, the luminosity of the ground arises like a cloudless sky. If it is recognised, the practitioner is liberated in the dharmakāya. If not, the radiance shines outward in the bardo of dharmatā, as sounds, lights and rays; if these are recognised as one's own radiance, liberation is still possible. The sequence repeats, at the moment of death, the sequence of the ground: inner luminosity, then outward radiance, then recognition or non-recognition.
In the Treasury of the Dharmadhātu the Omniscient Longchenpa uses the language of space for the same truth. The expanse, dbyings, is not a dark emptiness; it is luminous by nature, and every appearance is its display. Nothing needs to be removed from it and nothing added to it. When luminosity is understood in this way, the path is no longer a matter of producing light but of not obscuring it.
Mipham the Great
Mipham the Great took the subject up in a different setting. Writing at a time when the Nyingma view was being challenged by scholars of other schools, he had to show that luminosity, as the Great Perfection understands it, is not a return to a self or a permanent substance, and that it is fully consistent with the Madhyamaka of the Noble Nāgārjuna.
The Luminous Essence
His general exposition of the Guhyagarbha Tantra bears the title 'Od gsal snying po, the Luminous Essence. The title is a statement of the view. For Mipham, the Guhyagarbha teaches that all phenomena are, from the beginning, the maṇḍala of the kāyas and wisdoms: pure in their nature and equal in their emptiness. This purity is not something added by the practice of the creation stage; it is the luminous nature of things, which the creation and completion stages bring to recognition. The word 'od gsal in the title names exactly this: a luminosity that is already the essence, snying po, of everything that appears.
Emptiness and luminosity in the Beacon of Certainty
In the Beacon of Certainty, Mipham answers a series of questions about the view. One of them asks, in effect, whether the view of the Great Perfection is an emptiness or something more. His answer is careful. The Great Perfection does not depart from the freedom from all elaboration taught by the Noble Nāgārjuna; it adds nothing that would be an entity. But where the Madhyamaka of the sūtras emphasises the empty aspect, the Secret Mantra and the Great Perfection emphasise the luminous aspect, gsal cha, and the inseparability of the two. To teach emptiness without luminosity would leave a blank, which cannot be the wisdom of the buddhas. To teach luminosity without emptiness would make it a thing. The Great Perfection teaches the union, gsal stong zung 'jug, clarity and emptiness inseparable.
Mipham connects this with the two kinds of mistaken meditation that the Omniscient Longchenpa warned against. A meditation that holds only to emptiness, as an absence, falls into a dull, blank state. A meditation that holds onto clarity as an object, as a bright experience, falls into grasping. The real view is neither: it is the self-knowing luminosity of rigpa that is empty in its essence and does not need to be held.
Buddha-nature and the innate mind
In his Lion's Roar, the treatise on buddha-nature, Mipham defends the reading of the Ratnagotravibhāga in which the buddha-nature is the union of luminosity and emptiness, endowed with its qualities from the beginning. He refuses two extremes: that buddha-nature is a mere emptiness, a non-affirming negation with no qualities; and that it is a truly existent entity distinct from emptiness. Luminosity is precisely what lets him avoid both. The qualities of the buddhas are not created; they are the natural luminosity of the empty nature of mind, present in every being and obscured only by adventitious stains. The verse of the Ratnagotravibhāga about the sky and its clouds, and the Pāli statement about the mind and its visiting defilements, are here given their fullest reading.
In his writings on the innate mind, gnyug sems, Mipham identifies the luminous nature of mind with the fundamental, unconditioned awareness that the tantras call the innate or primordial mind. It is not the ordinary mind, and it is not something other than the nature of the ordinary mind. It is luminous in exactly the sense of the Sanskrit suffix: by its nature, as its inherent quality, and without fault.
Conclusion
The history of the word can be told in a few sentences. In the Pāli discourses, “this mind is luminous" explains why cultivating the mind is possible, and the gold similes show that luminosity is what appears when obscuration is removed. In the Mahāyāna, luminosity becomes the nature of mind, unchanging like space, joined with emptiness, and the basis of buddha-nature. In the Secret Mantra, the adjective becomes a noun: the Clear Light is a stage of the completion process and the moment of death. In the Great Perfection, the Clear Light is the nature of the ground itself, inner as the youthful vase body, outer as the ground-appearances, recognised or not recognised.
The Sanskrit grammar already contains the Dzogchen understanding. The suffix of prabhāsvara says that shining is a nature, not an event. The prefix says that it is primordial, pre-eminent and outward-going. The root, with its intransitive, transitive and causative uses, says that this light shines by itself and lets everything else shine. The Tibetan 'od gsal adds that it is both clear in itself and clarifying.
For the practitioner, all this comes down to a simple point. The light of rigpa is not produced by meditation, by the dissolution of winds or by any effort. It is the nature of the mind in this moment, shining in the very thoughts and perceptions that seem to obscure it, as sunlight shines in the clouds that seem to hide the sun. The defilements are guests. The practice is to recognise the host, and to remain in that recognition without grasping it as an object and without falling into a blank. When that recognition is stable, the luminosity of sleep is recognised as the luminosity of the ground, and at death the child luminosity meets the mother.
The Buddha's words in the Aṅguttara remain the plainest statement of the whole teaching: pabhassaram idaṃ, bhikkhave, cittaṃ. Luminous, monks, is this mind. The Great Perfection adds only one thing, but it is decisive: it always was, and it never needed to become so.
