Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The fleeting duration of a mental direct perceiver — just one sixty-fifth of a finger snap — anchors this 20-minute session by Khensur Rinpoche from his Awareness and Knowledge series. He opens by distinguishing the main mind from its associated mental factors: the main mind grasps only rough aspects of an object (a father’s face, the color red), while mental factors handle finer discrimination, feeling-tone, and labeling. He then illustrates how repeated familiarity can shift a cognizer from relying on another’s testimony to operating by its own power. The session closes on mental direct perceivers in ordinary beings: because they last only a single mind-moment, they cannot actually realize their object. Suited to students already working through foundational Buddhist epistemology.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 16 AK 1988-11-10.mp3
UUID: a112cafe-fbb4-493a-b27a-b733c829e5d6
Teacher: Khensur Rinpoche
Collection: Awareness and Knowledge 1988-1989 (Khensur Rinpoche)
Date: 1988-11-10
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 19.7 minutes
Words: ~787
So if technically, then we talk about minds and mental factors, talk about main minds and mental factors. So there’s the main mind, which is an eye consciousness, the main mind, which is an eye consciousness, and the associated mental factors. And these taken together, in the case of an eye consciousness, the main mind when it’s an eye consciousness, when this whole thing is taken together, this collection, it’s called an eye consciousness. So this whole collection is an eye consciousness which apprehends the father’s form. But more particularly, the main mind eye consciousness, it only understands rough aspects.
Main mind only understands rough aspects where the mental factors understand the more detailed aspects of the object. But the father’s face is only a rough aspect. Therefore, it can be understood by the main mind, eye consciousness. But it wouldn’t understand, it couldn’t understand it if it was the yellow color, not the yellow color, the white color or the red color of its father’s face. That more particular types of qualities would be understood by the mental factors.
But the mere fact of its being in its father’s face is able to be understood by the main mind, eye consciousness. So in this case where the eye consciousness apprehended the red, you know, it sees the red color of fire. It apprehends the red color of fire. The red color is the red color of fire. So, but it realizes, so that’s work, that’s its function.
But this associated factor of discrimination, So it simply knows red. It simply realizes red. And the discriminative factor knows, it says, Ah, that’s red. You know, it’s thinking, Ah, that’s red. It realizes red, in dependence upon this.
It discriminates the fact that this is red. And it doesn’t go anywhere, does it? Then they call it you. Do. If we begin to break it down a little bit, the eye consciousness apprehending red, it apprehends red and then its associated mental factor, for example, discrimination, discriminates, Ah, this is red.
The feeling would say, Oh, that’s nice red. So these are different functions of the mental factors. I don’t know if I got your answer in there somewhere or not. So, you know, it would work, you know, if, let’s say the father had a white face, and the eye consciousness apprehended just the white face, and it’s just the white, white color. It didn’t, but it didn’t understand whether this is the white color of its father’s face.
Just that whiteness would not be the final object of apprehension, just that whiteness. But through familiarity, it would come by seeing that particular white. It would be realized this is the white of my father’s face, the eye consciousness. And likewise, the eye consciousness which sees red, this is what I was asking about. You know, we said that was a prime cognizer induced by, when induced by the power of another.
If again and again you become familiarized with that object, that reddish color being associated with fire again and again and again, and then this would be an example of the object’s familiarity. And we could have, it could become a prime cognizer induced by its own power. You see a red color of fire. The eye consciousness could realize its object of apprehension would be the red color of the fire if it became familiar enough with the object. So in the case of ordinary people, ordinary human beings, ordinary persons, the mental direct perceiver only lasts the smallest of mind moments.
In a finger snap, there’s said to be sixty-five mind moments. So in the ordinary person, the duration of mental direct perceiver is only one of these. One mind moment, which is one sixty-fifth of a finger snap. So, and that is, for an ordinary person, it’s impossible for him to realize the object till the object appears to them. To that mental direct perceiver, it’s not long enough for him to actually realize this object.
So therefore, we cannot say that the mental direct perceiver is involved in realizing the object. So as we explained previously when discussing mental direct perceivers, there were three assertions with respect to how a mental direct perceiver is generated. There is alternating, three simultaneous, and at the end of the continuum. And at the end of the continuum, for example, when an eye consciousness perceives an object, at the end of this continuum of the eye consciousness there arises a single moment of a mental direct perceiver to which that object appears. But for an ordinary person, it’s such a short period of time that it is not able to realize its object.
Stop there.