First Principle

If you asked my teacher Segyu Rinpoche about Vajrayana Buddhism, he would likely start here:

The mind is luminous and knowing.

He would explain that the mind can be awake, clear, and radiant—shining with an almost palpable brilliance.

What blocks this nature is the accumulation of inner patterns, stories, and habits that cause us distress. We can think of this like clouds blocking the sun. To shine, he would say, we must dissolve those blocks. Vajrayana Buddhism is directed to that end. Its goal is to unlock the mind’s luminous, knowing potential by removing the patterns that block it.

We could stop right there. We could simply accept as true that the mind’s nature is luminous and knowing, and our aim is to release that nature.

Except Buddhist thinking is not about automatically accepting things as true. Its defining philosophy, called the Middle Way, examines the nature of truth, or reality. I won’t pretend understanding the Middle Way is easy, but I think it offers a perspective well worth our attention.

One of the Middle Way’s first and best-known expressions is Nāgārjuna’s Root Verses on the Middle Way, written around the second or third century CE. It spawned a two-thousand-year-old philosophical tradition with many schools and viewpoints. It offers less a set of answers than a way of thinking.

That way of thinking begins with the observation that, in our ordinary view, there is one truth. Something is either true or it isn’t.

The Middle Way shifts this view by speaking of truth at two levels. One is pragmatic. Does this truth serve a function? Is it a good paradigm? Does it have explanatory power? Does it point to something even if it isn’t the final account of what that is? The other level of truth is more philosophical. Is this truth ultimately real, beyond any doubt or question?

The first level of truth, the pragmatic level, is often puzzling to us at first. We don’t think of truth as something pragmatic. We think of it only at the second level, as something definitive, beyond question or doubt. If every Buddhist idea were understood as definitive truth, Buddhism would be just another claim to certainty.

But it isn’t.

According to the Middle Way, there can be pragmatic truth. Truth-for-a-purpose, we might call it. And there can be ultimate, unquestionable, beyond-doubt truth.

A key to understanding the Middle Way—the reason I call this the first principle—is recognizing when we are talking about pragmatic, truth-for-a-purpose truth and when we are talking about ultimate, beyond-any-doubt truth.

In the case of the luminous and knowing nature of the mind, a bedrock idea of Vajrayana Buddhism, this is a pragmatic truth. A truth-for-a-purpose.

So if you respond with, “I don’t believe that the mind is luminous and knowing,” you might be correct. But you might be responding to something that wasn’t claimed. The claim isn’t that the luminous nature of mind is the ultimate expression of the way things are. The claim is that it has a pragmatic purpose. That it has explanatory power. That it is pointing to something helpful.

Seen as truth-for-a-purpose, the mind’s luminous and knowing potential asks a different question: What happens if I relate to my mind as though its deeper capacity is clarity, openness, and radiance, rather than believing its habitual patterns constitute what I am?

I personally can’t tell you that the mind’s nature is luminous and knowing. I simply don’t know. I can tell you that treating the mind as luminous and knowing has proven very useful in my life. That way of thinking has helped to ground and free my mind from the patterns that create inner disturbance.

If the luminous and knowing nature of the mind is truth-for-a-purpose, you might wonder what, in the Buddhist view, is ultimate, beyond-any-doubt truth. That question will lead us into an exploration of the deep interconnectedness of phenomena and the limits of conceptual thought.

Truth-for-a-purpose is central to the Middle Way because it helps us hold things less rigidly. We can more easily recognize the provisional nature of the perspectives and stories that shape our experience. As the grip of those perspectives and stories loosens, we become more open to a different kind of experience—one with more room for spontaneity, joy, and, in the words of the Vajrayana masters, luminosity.