Dalai Lama Quote of the Week from Snow Lion Publications:I remember most vividly my first lesson on epistemology as a child, when I had to memorize the dictum "The definition of the mental is that which is luminous and knowing." Drawing on earlier Indian sources, Tibetan thinkers defined consciousness. It was years later that I realized just how complicated is the philosophical problem hidden behind this simple formulation. Today when I see nine-year-old monks confidently citing this definition of consciousness on the debating floor, which is such a central part of Tibetan monastic education, I smile.
These two features--luminosity, or clarity, and knowing, or cognizance--have come to characterize "the mental" in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist thought. Clarity here refers to the ability of mental states to reveal or reflect. Knowing, by contrast, refers to mental states' faculty to perceive or apprehend what appears. All phenomena possessed of these qualities count as mental. These features are difficult to conceptualize, but then we are dealing with phenomena that are subjective and internal rather than material objects that may be measured in spatiotemporal terms. Perhaps it is because of these difficulties--the limits of language in dealing with the subjective--that many of the early Buddhist texts explain the nature of consciousness in terms of metaphors such as light, or a flowing river. As the primary feature of light is to illuminate, so consciousness is said to illuminate its objects. Just as in light there is no categorical distinction between the illumination and that which illuminates, so in consciousness there is no real difference between the process of knowing or cognition and that which knows or cognizes. In consciousness, as in light, there is a quality of illumination.--from The Universe in a Single Atom: Convergence of Science and Spirituality by H.H. the Dalai Lama
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