The Knowing That Knows Itself
Jñāna, Vidyā, and Svasaṃvedana, from the Early Discourses to the Ye Shes and Rig Pa of the Great Perfection
Introduction: Two Words, One Wager
Two words carry the entire weight of what the Great Perfection says about the mind, and they are almost always rendered by the same English word. Ye shes (ཡེ་ཤེས་) and rig pa (རིག་པ་) are both translated as “awareness”, “wisdom”, “pristine cognition”, “gnosis”, “intrinsic awareness”. A student is told to rest in rigpa, that yeshe is spontaneously present, that the five wisdoms are the nature of the five poisons, that awareness knows itself (rang rig, རང་རིག་). The student quite reasonably concludes that the Dzogchen tradition has one thing to say and says it in several ways.
That conclusion is half right, and the half that is wrong is instructive. The two words have different histories. Ye shes renders jñāna, the Buddha’s wisdom, which the Mahāyāna and the tantras placed first at the end of the path and then, with growing boldness, at its beginning and in its ground. Rig pa renders vidyā, knowledge as the opposite of ignorance (avidyā), the pole on which the Buddha’s own awakening was first described. These two inheritances were joined in the Great Perfection by a third idea that Indian Buddhist philosophers fought over for a thousand years: svasaṃvedana, the self-knowing of knowing itself. They fought over it because it appears to ask for the impossible, an awareness that is neither an object for another awareness nor in need of one.
The Great Perfection’s wager is that this impossible thing is not a theoretical postulate but the ordinary condition of the ground, which can be pointed out and recognised. This essay follows four words — jñāna, vidyā, svasaṃvedana and svasaṃvedya (what can be known only by itself) — through their Indian history, and then asks what the Great Perfection does with them.
I. The Words Before the Doctrine
Sanskrit jñāna comes from the root √jñā, “to know”, which is cognate with Greek gnosis, Latin (g)nosco, and English know. Vidyā comes from √vid, “to see, to know, to find”, cognate with Latin videre, German Wissen, and English wit. The first names knowing as such. The second names knowing as seeing, and as learning, a body of knowledge. Beside them stand two others that the tradition keeps carefully distinct. Vijñāna, translated rnam par shes pa (རྣམ་ཤེས་), is the knowing of consciousness, with the prefix vi-, “apart”: a knowing that divides, setting subject over against object and discerning one aspect (rnam pa) from another. Prajñā, shes rab (ཤེས་རབ་), with the prefix pra-, “forth, supreme”, is discerning insight, the sixth perfection. Jñāna has no prefix. It is bare knowing. When the Mahāyāna later speaks of the transformation of vijñāna into jñāna, something quite literal is being said: the dividing is let go.
The Tibetan translators fixed the equivalents: jñāna as ye shes, prajñā as shes rab, vijñāna as rnam shes, vidyā as rig pa, avidyā as ma rig pa. In the first of these they did something bold. The syllable ye has no direct equivalent in the Sanskrit. It abbreviates ye nas, “from the very beginning”, so that ye shes is literally “primordial knowing”. By that single syllable the lotsāwas wrote into the word what the garbha scriptures taught: this knowing is not newly produced. The Great Perfection would later lean the whole weight of its view on that surplus.
Vidyā also had a life that the Tibetan rig pa inherited. In India the word means knowledge and also the sciences, the five vidyāsthānas (rig gnas lnga). It names the Vedas (rig byed). It is the word for a mantra, especially a female mantra deity, and by extension for the female consort (rig ma). Its holder is the vidyādhara, rig ‘dzin (རིག་འཛིན་), “holder of awareness”. Even before Secret Mantra, the Heart Sūtra calls the perfection of wisdom the great mantra, the great vidyā-mantra, the unsurpassed mantra. Knowledge and mantra were already converging long before the tantras made them one.
II. The Earliest Layer: Knowing Arises as Light
The first thing the early discourses say about awakening is said in the language of vidyā. In the account of the night of the Buddha’s awakening, as each of the three knowledges arises (recollection of former lives, knowledge of the passing of beings, destruction of the taints), the refrain is the same: ignorance (avijjā) was banished, knowledge (vijjā) arose; darkness was banished, light arose. In the first sermon he says of himself that knowledge and vision (ñāṇadassana) arose. The earliest Buddhist account of the awakened state is therefore neither a doctrine nor a state of emptiness, but a seeing, and it is a seeing that arises, uppanna. In Tibetan the same verb, shar ba, “to dawn”, is the one the Great Perfection uses for the awareness that arises by itself, rig pa rang shar.
Another early saying plants the seed of every later claim about the nature of the mind: “This mind, monks, is luminous, but it is defiled by adventitious defilements.” And another draws the distinction on which the later separation of mind from wisdom is built. Asked how wisdom (paññā) differs from consciousness (viññāṇa), Sāriputta replies that the two are conjoined and cannot be separated: what one knows, one discerns, and what one discerns, one knows. Yet wisdom is to be developed, whereas consciousness is to be fully understood. Consciousness is what must be seen through; wisdom is what must be cultivated. The distinction between sems and ye shes in the Great Perfection has this root.
The Abhidharma then systematises knowledge into the ten jñānas, among them the knowledge of the Dharma, the knowledge of inference, the knowledge of conventions, the knowledge of the minds of others, the knowledges of suffering, its origin, cessation and path, the knowledge of exhaustion, and the knowledge of non-arising. This is already the first sign of an issue that will not leave Buddhist thought. Knowledge is graded. It is direct or inferential, mundane or supramundane, and it takes objects. The early schools also disputed, in reports that survive, whether a cognition can take itself as its object. Those who refused did so because a thing cannot act on itself, as a sword’s edge cannot cut itself and a fingertip cannot touch itself. Others allowed that the nature of awareness is to apprehend, so that it might apprehend itself as it apprehends others. The quarrel over self-knowing was already underway.
III. The Perfection of Wisdom: Knowing That Stands on Nothing
The Prajñāpāramitā made knowledge radical. Prajñā is called the mother of the Tathāgatas, but she is a mother who owns nothing. The knowledge of a Buddha, jñāna, is non-abiding (apratiṣṭhita). It has no support, no sign, and no object that it grasps as real. Whatever it knows, it knows without making what it knows into a possession. The Vajracchedikā had already said that the guides are dharma-bodies and that this dharmatā cannot be known. The tension at the centre of the Mahāyāna is plain: the highest knowing is the one that cannot be an act of knowing something.
The Laṅkāvatāra gave this paradox a name that the tradition would carry for the rest of its history: the noble wisdom to be known by oneself inwardly, svapratyātmāryajñāna, which Tibetan rendered so so rang gis rig pa’i ‘phags pa’i ye shes. This wisdom is the domain of no reasoning (atarkya). It cannot be handed from one person to another, and it is not the self of the non-Buddhists. It is simply what the Buddha’s awakened knowing is, as experienced by whoever is awakened. Tibetan authors, the Nyingma among them, would take this phrase as a standing description of the wisdom they were pointing to. Here the idea of svasaṃvedya, what is knowable only by oneself, enters Buddhism in a soteriological register. It describes not a faculty but a character of the highest wisdom: it can be pointed at but not delivered.
IV. The Epistemologists: How Knowing Knows Itself
While the sūtras spoke of wisdom that is known only by oneself, a different tradition was asking, in the language of cognition, how any knowing is known at all. Dignāga’s answer, in the Pramāṇasamuccaya, is that every cognition has two aspects (dvirūpatā). It has the aspect of its object, and it has the aspect of itself. Its being known by itself, svasaṃvedyatā, is what he calls svasaṃvedana, self-experiencing. The central argument is from memory. When one later remembers a cup, one remembers not only the cup but having seen it. If the original cognition had not been in some sense aware of itself, no such memory could be possible. Dignāga adds that without such reflexivity there would be no difference between the cognition of an object and the awareness of that cognition.
Dharmakīrti made this the foundation of his system. The Nyāyabindu gives four kinds of direct perception: sensory, mental, the self-awareness of all minds and mental factors (svasaṃvedana), and the perception of the yogi. Self-awareness is non-conceptual and not mistaken, and for Dharmakīrti it is in some sense the only perception that cannot deceive. The yogic perception in the fourth category deserves a remark, because it is the Indian epistemologist’s name for what the Great Perfection will say can be pointed out: a clear, non-conceptual knowing of how things are, arising from familiarity with the real.
The Yogācāra of Dharmapāla, as preserved in Xuanzang’s synthesis, saw that self-awareness invites an infinite regress, so it analysed each cognition into four parts: the object-aspect, the seeing-aspect, self-awareness, and the awareness of self-awareness. The fourth part’s job is to stop the regress by being aware of the third while being known by it in turn.
Here the vocabulary needs a distinction. Svasaṃvedana names the event or capacity of self-awareness. Svasaṃvedya names what is accessible to it, the self-knowable. In Dharmakīrti’s logic the self-knowable is cognition and its factors. In the contemplative literature it is the highest wisdom, which by nature can be known only by itself, from the Laṅkāvatāra’s inward noble wisdom to the dohās of Saraha, in which the supreme bliss is something one knows by being it. The epistemologists’ reflexivity and the contemplatives’ inwardly-known wisdom are not identical, but the Indian sources move easily between the two vocabularies, and the Great Perfection will take its place at their joint.
V. The Madhyamaka Objection and the Nyingma Answer
The objection came from the Madhyamaka, and it is one of the most beautiful passages in the Bodhicaryāvatāra. In the ninth chapter, Śāntideva has the Yogācārin claim that mind illuminates itself. He replies, quoting the Lord of the World: “Mind does not see mind; just as a blade cannot cut itself, so mind cannot see itself.” The Yogācārin tries the lamp, which illuminates itself. Śāntideva answers that a lamp is never seen to illuminate itself, because it is never obscured by darkness: to speak of self-illumination is to speak of a removal that has no occasion. The Yogācārin tries a crystal that appears blue without depending on anything else for its blueness, and Śāntideva dismantles that too. Finally the Yogācārin presents the memory argument: if there is no self-awareness, how could consciousness be remembered later? Śāntideva’s answer is the mouse that remembers a poison it once tasted. Memory arises through connection with another cognition. No reflexive awareness is needed. Candrakīrti presses the same objections in the sixth chapter of the Madhyamakāvatāra, and Tsongkhapa follows him in denying self-awareness even conventionally.
The great reply was Śāntarakṣita’s, and it is a Nyingma reply, because Śāntarakṣita founded Samye and is revered as the abbot-bodhisattva of the Ancient School. In the Madhyamakālaṃkāra he accepts self-awareness conventionally, and defines it in a way that defuses the sword. Consciousness, he says, is by nature the opposite of insentient matter. Its non-insentience is simply the reflexivity of its awareness. Because it is partless, it is not divided into agent, action, and object, and so there is no blade turned upon itself. Self-awareness is not one thing acting upon another thing that happens to be itself. It is the mere fact that knowing is lucid and not inert. Mipham follows him, qualifying that this is conventional, and that it is not a separate entity apart from cognition.
This is the doorway to the Great Perfection. The Great Perfection agrees with Śāntideva that sems cannot see sems, and that nothing found in analysis is a self-illuminating entity. It agrees with Śāntarakṣita that the lucid, non-inert nature of knowing is not an additional thing. But it does not say that this is a convention. It says that what recognition recognises is the ground itself. The Madhyamaka argument is right that no reflexive thing can be found. The Great Perfection’s claim is that rig pa is not a thing found by looking, and that it is not sems looking at sems. It is what is left when the looking relaxes. Śāntideva’s blade cannot cut itself, but rig pa is not a blade.
VI. The Garbha: Wisdom Already Within
A third current ran through the Mahāyāna, and it joined jñāna to the present moment of ordinary beings. The first reason the Ratnagotravibhāga gives (I.27) for saying that all beings possess the buddha-essence is that buddha wisdom (buddhajñāna) enters into the multitudes of beings. The commentary quotes the Avataṃsaka’s chapter on the arising of the Tathāgata: the Buddha, looking with the eye of a Buddha, sees that no being is without the wisdom of the Tathāgata in its body, yet that beings do not recognise it, though they are pervaded by it. The image of a scroll as vast as the world lying inside a single atom, which a man of wisdom splits open, belongs to the same passage. The Tathāgataguhya says the same: the wisdom of all Tathāgatas dwells in the bodies of all beings.
Nothing could more precisely prepare the pair rig pa and ma rig pa. The wisdom is there. Recognition is what is absent. The Śrīmālādevī had said that the dharmakāya covered by defilements is called the garbha. In the language of the Great Perfection, ye shes covered by non-recognition is the ground of a sentient being, and ye shes recognised is Buddhahood. The Ratnagotravibhāga also names the two aspects of a Buddha’s knowledge, the knowing of things as they are (yathāvad-bhāvikatā) and the knowing of things as many as they are (yāvad-bhāvikatā), which Tibetan renders ji lta ba mkhyen pa’i ye shes and ji snyed pa mkhyen pa’i ye shes. The fruit of the path will be understood in precisely these terms.
VII. Consciousness Turned into Wisdom
The Yogācāra also supplied the transformation that Secret Mantra would inherit. In the Mahāyānasūtrālaṃkāra and the Mahāyānasaṃgraha, Buddhahood is a revolution of the basis (āśrayaparāvṛtti) in which the eight consciousnesses become wisdoms. The storehouse consciousness turns into mirror-like wisdom. The afflicted mind turns into the wisdom of equality. The mental consciousness turns into the wisdom of discernment. The five sense consciousnesses turn into the wisdom that accomplishes activity. The Buddhabhūmisūtra adds the pure dharmadhātu as the fifth factor, and in the tantric systems of the five Buddha families this becomes the five wisdoms (ye shes lnga).
The Great Perfection will say that this transformation is not a manufacture. The five wisdoms are the ground’s own facets, and what looks like their transformation from the five poisons is their recognition. The storehouse and the ground are carefully distinguished: kun gzhi is the storehouse of habitual tendencies, and gzhi is the ground of both saṃsāra and nirvāṇa. It was the genius of the Yogācāra to see that a transformation of consciousness into wisdom was the issue. It was the Great Perfection’s boldness to say that the wisdom was never absent.
VIII. Secret Mantra: Wisdom as Being, as Bliss, as Consort, as Mantra
In Secret Mantra jñāna acquires a body, and several. In the generation stage the deity one envisions is the samayasattva, the pledge being, into which the wisdom being (jñānasattva, ye shes sems dpa’) is invited and dissolved. The wisdom is not imagined by the practitioner. It is the actual deity’s awakened knowing, and the ritual’s art is to let the two be inseparable. The consort is the jñānamudrā, ye shes phyag rgya. The nectar of the ritual is jñānāmṛta. The ḍākinī, in her highest aspect, is the jñānaḍākinī, and the great Tibetan queen of the Heart-Essence is Yeshe Tsogyal, “Queen of the Ocean of Wisdom”. The Heart-Essence of Jigme Lingpa has a central text called the Yeshe Lama, “the Guru of Wisdom”.
In the completion stage, the Anuttarayoga tantras speak of innate wisdom (sahajajñāna, lhan cig skyes pa’i ye shes) arising with the four joys, and the wisdom initiation is how the practitioner is first introduced to it. The Sarma completion stage describes how, as the winds dissolve, the subtlest mind of clear light dawns, and this is recognised as primordial wisdom. The Great Perfection will claim that this same wisdom can be pointed out directly, in life, without the sequence of dissolutions.
Vidyā, too, acquires its tantric life. In the lower tantras, vidyā and mantra are distinguished as female and male mantras, and the practitioner who has accomplished a vidyā is a vidyādhara. The Ancient School’s path of the four vidyādharas culminates, in the Great Perfection, in the vidyādhara of spontaneous presence (lhun grub rig ‘dzin). The word rig ‘dzin is thus a sustained pun, one that Indian tantra had made without any intention of making it: the holder of the mantra becomes the holder of awareness.
In Mahāmudrā, the emphasis is on the self-cognising wisdom: Tilopa teaches that it is beyond speech, to be known by rang rig ye shes. Gampopa teaches that thought is the dharmakāya, and that ordinary mind (tha mal gyi shes pa) is the path. In the Anuyoga, the unborn expanse is the primordial maṇḍala of Samantabhadrī, and wisdom (ye shes) is the natural maṇḍala of spontaneous presence. Expanse and wisdom are two faces of one ground.
IX. The Great Perfection: Ground, Recognition, and Ignorance
1. The ground and its wisdom
In the Great Perfection the ground (gzhi) has its own knowing. This is the ye shes of the ground (gzhi’i ye shes), also called self-originated wisdom (rang byung ye shes): it has not been produced by any cause, is not improved by the path, and is not damaged by delusion. It is the ground’s knowing quality as an ever-present nature. When the tantras speak of the five wisdoms as five coloured lights, white, yellow, red, green, and blue, they are describing the radiance of this wisdom made visible, the five lights in which the ground displays itself. The Heart-Essence says that the five poisons and the five wisdoms are this one energy, recognised or not.
2. Rig pa and ma rig pa
Rig pa is a different emphasis. It names the same knowing as recognition, as presence, the knowing that is aware of its own state. Vimalamitra’s Lamp Summarising Awareness defines it by three qualities: it is knowing, it is clear, and it is unchanging. The three qualities mirror the three of the ground: an empty essence, a cognisant nature, a compassion that is unobstructed. The tradition also calls it rig stong, awareness-emptiness.
The Great Perfection’s cosmology of the ground turns on this recognition. When the ground displays itself spontaneously, the display is unbidden and complete. The one who recognises it as its own display (rang snang) is liberated, and this recognition is Samantabhadra. The one who fails to recognise it takes it for something other (gzhan snang), and this failure of recognition is ma rig pa, which becomes the root of saṃsāra. The tradition distinguishes a co-emergent ignorance, the simple failure of recognition that arises with the display, from a conceptual ignorance, the afflicted elaboration built upon it. Ignorance is thus not a substance, nor a power, nor a second ground. It is the absence of recognition, and so it has no basis of its own.
3. Rig pa, sems, shes pa, rnam shes
The tradition keeps a delicate ladder of terms. Shes pa is knowing in general. Rnam shes is consciousness that divides aspects and takes objects. Sems is the ordinary mind that arises with ignorance, dualistic and object-seeking. Rig pa is the knowing recognised for what it is. Ye shes is the nature of that knowing. The oral formula is that when it is not recognised it appears as mind, and when it is recognised it is wisdom. This is not a claim that there are two entities. It is the Early Buddhist distinction between consciousness, to be understood, and wisdom, to be developed, restated for the ground.
4. Rang rig revisited
The Great Perfection’s rang rig is therefore not the epistemologists’ reflexivity. It is not a cognition cognising itself, not a third cognition watching the first two, not a witness standing apart, and not an object. When the tradition says that rig pa is self-knowing, it says first of all what it is not: it is not known by another, it is not known as an object, and it does not require a second awareness to establish it. It is a knowing that has no second. The Great Perfection’s vocabulary makes this almost grammatical, in a family of “self-” terms: rang rig, self-aware; rang gsal, self-luminous; rang byung, self-originated; rang shar, self-arising; rang grol, self-liberated. Each denies a second term, a cause, a light, an arising, a liberating agent that would stand outside the knowing.
Seen this way, the Madhyamaka argument and the Great Perfection are on the same side. Śāntideva was right that mind does not see mind. The Great Perfection says that the awareness it recognises is not mind. Śāntarakṣita was right that non-insentience is self-awareness. The Great Perfection says that this lucid non-inertness is not a convention but the ground. And svasaṃvedya, what can be known only by itself, is the right word for what a master can point to but cannot give: the pointing-out (ngo sprod, ངོ་སྤྲོད་) introduces the student to their own face, and the recognition is theirs alone.
5. Wisdom within movement
The Tantra of Self-Arisen Sound, the Sgra thal ‘gyur, gives the most remarkable formulation of how this knowing is present in the midst of ordinary mind. It says that the Lamps hold the basis of non-conceptual wisdom within the appearances of conceptual objects. Non-conceptual wisdom (mi rtog ye shes) is not what remains when concepts have stopped. It is held within the very appearances that conceptual mind takes as objects. Patrul Rinpoche’s commentary on Garab Dorje’s testament makes the same observation in practical terms: the arising of thoughts is exactly the same after the direct introduction. What changes is not that thoughts cease but that their ground is recognised. This is the point at which the Great Perfection’s teaching on the knowing coincides with its teaching on movement. Rig pa is not a quiet state. It is the knowing in which stillness and movement alike occur.
6. The wind of wisdom
The Great Perfection does not leave this knowing in the abstract. In the tantras of the visions, the natural radiance of awareness, its glow (rang gdangs), rides the wind of wisdom (ye shes kyi rlung) through the Crystal Tube channel to the eyes, and this is the physical road by which the visions arise. Karmic winds are moving, whereas the wind of wisdom is without movement in the sense of being immutable: it spreads through the body without fluctuation. The Lamp of Self-Arisen Discriminating Awareness (shes rab rang byung gi sgron ma), the fourth of the four lamps, is the state of awareness itself in which the visions are contemplated, and the tradition calls it a strict synonym of rig pa. The commentarial tradition lists its modes, which include abiding in the ground, apprehending visions in their nakedness, unceasing mindfulness, discriminating individually, and the three entrances of hearing, reflecting, and meditating. Rig pa, in other words, includes the discriminating faculty, but without the conceptual grasping that usually accompanies it.
X. Six Subtleties That Change Practice
Rig pa is not an act of attention. The attention one pays, the watching and monitoring, belongs to sems. Jigme Lingpa, in his instructions on mindfulness and introspection, distinguishes the effortful mindfulness (dran pa) of the gradual path, the very faculty that Śāntideva’s fifth chapter guards, from the distinctive mindfulness of the Great Perfection that is inseparable from rig pa. The first is a faculty one exerts. The second is not exerted, since it is the knowing itself.
Rig pa is not a state. It is not the absence of thought, and it does not depend on conditions. The non-conceptual wisdom is held within appearances, as the Tantra of Self-Arisen Sound says. A practitioner who understands the knowing as a calm state has understood a shamatha experience.
Rig pa is not an object. The attempt to see it is the blade turned on itself. One recognises, and this is why the introduction is a pointing-out and not a demonstration. The tradition says that to look for rig pa as a thing is the characteristic error, and that to relax the search is the characteristic remedy.
Ma rig pa is not a thing. Since ignorance is the failure of recognition, it has no ground, no cause, and no power. It does not have to be destroyed. It is dispelled the way darkness is dispelled by light, without an act of dispelling.
Ye shes is not accumulated. The two accumulations of merit and wisdom (ye shes kyi tshogs) are recited in every dedication, but wisdom, in the Great Perfection’s sense, is not built up but is spontaneously accomplished. The accumulation of wisdom is the recognition of what has always been spontaneously present.
The wisdom has two faces and the practitioner must know both. The knowing of things as they are and the knowing of things as many as they are belong to one wisdom. A practitioner who rests only in emptiness has not yet recognised the spontaneous presence, and the Great Perfection’s insistence on movement belongs here as well.
XI. The Path, Stage by Stage
Before recognition. For most of life knowing appears as sems, a subject turned toward objects. The Lamp of Self-Arisen Awareness is turned outward by the karmic winds, and its radiance is spent on what it investigates. One studies, one learns that mind cannot see mind, one learns from Śāntarakṣita that it is nonetheless lucid. This study is a necessary preliminary: it dismantles the picture of an inner eye looking at an inner object, which is the very picture that prevents recognition.
Direct introduction. Garab Dorje’s first statement, the direct introduction to one’s own nature, is the moment in which the knowing is recognised as itself. It is often experienced as a sudden relaxation: the knower and the known do not separate, and nothing is watching. This is what the tradition calls base-rigpa, the ground recognised for the first time. It is brief.
Stabilisation. The second statement, deciding upon this one thing, sets the work of making recognition continuous, in brief moments many times, until the recognition is no longer a moment. The tradition speaks of path-rigpa. Many experiences of bliss, clarity, and non-thought accompany this stage. They are not to be dismissed, because they are the radiance of the wisdom in the body, and they are not to be clung to. In the oral instruction of Tertön Gyurmed Ngakrabtsal, which I record as received teaching and not as a text I can cite, this stage has a physiological counterpart. In the earlier phase the channels of karmic movement lie outside the central channel, so that recognition holds in stillness and is carried off in movement. As the central channel enlarges, the karmic channels come to lie within it, and the movements of thought and feeling flow within the wisdom wind itself. The body registers what the mind has recognised: there is no elsewhere left to exile movement to.
Recognition within movement. At this stage the Tantra’s line becomes the practitioner’s experience: non-conceptual wisdom held within appearances of conceptual objects. A rage or a grief arises, and the knowing in which it arises is not interrupted. This is the third statement, confidence in liberation: whatever arises is liberated in the expanse of the awareness that knows it.
The visions. In Direct Crossing, ye shes becomes visible. The five wisdoms appear as the five lights. The four lamps arise, the visions pass through the four stages, and in the third, awareness reaching its full measure (rig pa tshad phebs), rig pa has fully matured: the vidyādhara of spontaneous presence is the practitioner whose awareness has come to its measure. In the fourth vision the display is exhausted into the expanse, and what remains is the youthful vase body.
The fruit. The two knowledges of a Buddha stand complete: the knowing of how things are and the knowing of how many they are. With them stand the three qualities that the tradition names for a Buddha: knowledge, compassion, and power (mkhyen brtse nus). Out of the expanse, without effort, the form bodies arise for the sake of beings. The wisdom that the Avataṃsaka said no being lacks is what the practitioner has recognised, and what the practitioner now shows others.
XII. Closing: The Knowing That Needs No Second
The tradition of Buddhist thought had a problem and an intuition. The problem was how knowing is known, since a second knower would need a third and a blade cannot cut itself. The intuition was that awakening is a kind of knowing that arises as light and that this light was never absent. Śāntideva’s refusal and Śāntarakṣita’s reply, Dharmakīrti’s reflexivity and the Laṅkāvatāra’s inward wisdom, the Sugatagarbha scriptures’ penetrating wisdom and the Yogācāra’s transformation of the basis, the tantras’ wisdom being and innate wisdom: these are not rival positions. They are a thousand years of approaching, from different sides, a single fact.
The Great Perfection says that fact plainly. There is a knowing that is not an act, that has no agent and no instrument. It is lucid because it is not inert. It is not known by another because there is no separate other. It was there before the practitioner looked, and it was there while the practitioner was lost, and it is there in the very loss, as the wisdom held within the appearances of thought. What the master points to and cannot give is svasaṃvedya, and what the student recognises, by themselves, is svasaṃvedana, which is not their act but the ground’s own self-knowing. In the language of the early discourses, knowledge arose and darkness departed. In the language of the Heart-Essence, awareness dawns by itself. They are the same dawn.
