..續本文上一頁a formation and as such it vanishes. If a hundred formations appear, all hundred of them vanish. There is no permanence to them substantial enough for us to trust.

　　So then. What is it that keeps supplying us with these things or keeps forcing them out on us

　　 What is it that keeps forcing this thing and that out to fool us

　　 This is where we come to what the Buddha calls the pabhassara-citta: the original, radiant mind. ”But monks, because of the admixture of defilement,” or ”because of the defilements that come passing through” — from sights, sound, smells, tastes, tactile sensations; from rupa, vedana, sañña, sankhara, and viññana, that our labels and assumptions haul in to burn us — ”the mind becomes defiled.” It”s defiled with just these very things.

　　Thus investigation is for the sake of removing these things so as to reveal the mind through clear discernment. We can then see that as long as the mind is at the stage where it hasn”t ventured out to become engaged in any object — inasmuch as its instruments, the senses, are still weak and undeveloped — it is quiet and radiant, as in the saying, ”The original mind is the radiant mind.” But this is the original mind of the round of rebirth — for example, the mind of a newborn child whose activities are still too undeveloped to take any objects on fully. It”s not the original mind freed from the cycle and fully pure.

　　So while we investigate around us stage by stage, the symptoms of defilement that used to run all over the place will be gathered into this single point, becoming a radiance within the mind. And this radiance: Even the tools of super-mindfulness and super-discernment will have to fall for it when they first meet with it, because it”s something we have never seen before, never met before, from the beginning of our practice or from the day of our birth. We thus become awed and amazed. It seems for the moment that nothing can compare to it in magnificence.

　　And why shouldn”t it be magnificent

　　 It has been the king of the round of rebirth in all three worlds — the world of sensuality, the world of form, and the world of formlessness — since way back when, for countless aeons. It”s the one who has wielded power over the mind and ruled the mind all along. As long as the mind doesn”t possess the mindfulness and discernment to pull itself out from under this power, how can it not be magnificent

　　 This is why it has been able to drive the mind into experiencing birth on various levels without limit, in dependence on the fruits of the different actions it has performed under the orders of the ephemeral defilements. The fact that living beings wander and stray, taking birth and dying unceasingly, is because this nature leads them to do so.

　　This being the case, we have to investigate it so as to see it plainly. Actually, radiance and defilement are two sides of the same coin because they are both conventional realities. The radiance that comes from the convergence of the various defilements will form a point, a center, so that we can clearly perceive that ”This is the center of the radiance.” When any defilement appears, in correspondence with that state or level of the mind, a very refined stress will arise in the center we call radiant. Thus radiance, defilement, and stress — all three — are companions. They go together.

　　For this reason, the mind possessing this radiance must worry over it, guard it, protect it, maintain it, for fear that something may come to disturb it, jar it, obscure its radiance. Even the most refined adulteration is still an affair of defilement, about which we as meditators should not be complacent. We must investigate it with unflagging discernment.

　　In order to cut through the burden of your concerns once and for all, you s…

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