Wordless awareness mind

Wordless awareness is silent, non-verbal, non-discriminative and choiceless awareness.  Despite being choiceless, it possesses the intuitive and analytical faculty to immediately apprehend the true nature of stimuli when it comes into contact with them, without being attached to them.   It is the innate faculty to know instantaneously what is occurring in the environment and the internal world without any word arising in the mind about this knowledge.

The wordless awareness faculty consists of four functions – ultimate seeing, ultimate hearing, ultimate touch and ultimate cognition – that allow a human being to see, hear, and feel things “as they are” in the “here and now”.  It is our potential for enlightenment, or our Buddha nature, and is the catalyst that enables spiritual realizations.

The wordless awareness mind is also called the true mind (V: chân tâm) or holy mind (V: tâm bậc thánh) in Zen Buddhism terminology.   Sometimes, Zen Buddhism gave it an entity and called it “the boss” (V: ông chủ) or the true self (V: chân ngã ). The Buddha called it the clear water pond (V: hồ nước trong).

Refer to the text “The Three Aspects of Knowing” for more details

P & S: buddhitā, V: tánh giác