Tibetan Philosophy of Mind and Contemplative Science

Tibetan Buddhist accounts of mind draw on the technical psychological vocabulary of Indian Abhidharma — its analysis of momentary mental events (chitta and chaitasika), the forms of consciousness, and its taxonomy of afflictive and virtuous mental factors — while layering onto this Indian foundation the subtle-body physiology and tantric contemplative categories developed in Vajrayana and, especially, the Dzogchen concept of a fundamental ground (gzhi) of awareness underlying and predating the arising of any specific dualistic mental state. Central to this tantric and Dzogchen psychology is the notion of the "clear light" (od gsal) nature of mind, held to become directly, if briefly, accessible during ordinary states such as deep dreamless sleep and orgasm, and, with particular soteriological importance, during the dissolution process of physical death itself, when the coarser levels of consciousness are said to dissolve in sequence, leaving, for a limited time, a subtle clear-light awareness that an adequately trained practitioner can recognize and use as an opportunity for liberation, a process elaborated in the Bardo Thodol cycle revealed by the tertön Karma Lingpa and in the parallel "six yogas" and "phowa" (consciousness transference) literatures of the Kagyu and other tantric lineages. This model treats death not primarily as an object of fear to be avoided in thought, but as the single most powerful naturally occurring opportunity for recognizing the mind's fundamental nature that an ordinary being's life cycle presents.