The Five Pure Lights

The most subtle dimension of the five elements is known as the “five pure lights.”

In the Dzogchen tradition there are many texts of teachings about the elements.

From the Zhang Zhung Nyan Gyud, the primary cycle of Dzogchen teachings in the Bön tradition, I am drawing from two main texts which go into detail about the five lights.

These are The Six Lamps and The Mirror of the Luminous Mind.

One teaching, which is partially a story, explains how the elemental energies, though always pure in themselves, come to be perceived as substantial. It is also the story of how, in the intermediate state (bardo) between death and birth, the individual goes toward either the delusions of samsara or the freedom of nirvana.

On another level, it is the description of what can be done, in any moment, to end ensnarement in karmic visions and remain in the natural state of mind. The teaching says something like this:

For each of us, everything begins with the primordial space, the Great Mother from which all things arise, in which all things exist, and into which all things dissolve.

In this space there is movement. What causes it, no one knows. The teachings only say “the winds of karma moved.” This is the movement of the subtlest level of lung or prana, the energy that pervades infinite space without characteristics or divisions. Inseparably united with the flow of prana is the flow of primordial awareness, pure and without identity. In this pure awareness five lights arise.

The five lights are aspects of primordial luminosity. These are the five pure lights, the most subtle level of the elements. We talk about the light and color of the five pure lights but this is symbolic. The five pure lights are more subtle than visible light, more subtle than anything perceived by the eye, more subtle than any energy measured or perceived by any means. They are the energies from which all other energies, including visible light, arise.

The white or colorless light is space; the green light is air; the red light is fire; the blue light is water; and the yellow light is earth. These are the five aspects of pure luminosity, the rainbow-like energies of the single sphere of existence.

If the five lights are experienced dualistically, as objects of a perceiving subject, they appear to grow more substantial. The five lights don’t become grosser, but through the distortions of dualistic vision the individual perceives them as grosser. As the elements seem to grow toward greater substantiality, they are further discriminated, and through their interactions they manifest all phenomena, including the subject and objects that make up all dualistic experience.

Eventually the five lights become the raw, natural physical elements and five inclusive categories of qualities belonging to external reality. They become the different dimensions of existence that are various realms in which beings with and without form exist.

Internally the five lights seem to thicken and form the organs, the five branches of the body, the five fingers of each hand, the five toes of each foot, the five senses, and the five sense fields. The five lights become the five negative emotions if we remain deluded, or the five wisdoms and the five buddha families if we recognize their purity.

This is not a story about a creation that happened in the distant past. It is about how we live as individual beings and about ignorance and enlightenment.

If the five lights are recognized as a non-dual, unceasing manifestation of the pure basis of existence (kunzhi), nirvana begins.

If the five lights are perceived dualistically and thought to exist externally, as objects of a subject, samsara begins.

The awareness does not become delusory or become enlightened—it remains non-dual and pure—but the qualities that arise in it can be either positive or negative.

If the awareness integrates and identifies with the pure qualities, a buddha arises from the base; if with the impure, a samsaric being arises. In this moment, right now, the process is ongoing.

Depending on whether we integrate our immediate experience with nondual awareness or cling to the false separation of ourselves as subjects experiencing external objects and entities, we will be in the non-dual natural state or in the deluded mind.

The story of the five lights can teach us how to work with experience. What manifests in experience usually begins on subtle levels and moves to grosser ones. This is true for any process that leads to new things or new entities, whether it’s the birth of an idea or the birth of a planet.

The physical body of an individual begins in desire that results in sex that brings two tiny cells together that develop into the full human body.

Language begins with pure sound and leads to meaning and all the philosophies and poetry of humans.

Physicists tell us that the universe is born from energy condensed in a dimensionless point, and a process of increasingly complex structures arise as stars, planets, and organisms.

Problems often begin from a misunderstanding such as a difference in religious or political ideas and result in arguments, life-long animosities, and even wars.

Karmic dispositions and conditioning determine the nature of the world we inhabit: What we experience externally is a projection of what is internal. This world is hell for some people, for others it is heaven.

Bön and Buddhist philosophy tell us that—beyond all these differences— all things and beings are empty of inherent existence and are finally entirely insubstantial. Modern physics agrees that matter is made of energy and space.

We can say that everything is insubstantial or empty, but of course, in our experience things are substantial and separate.

Stand in front of an oncoming truck insisting that it is an insubstantial phenomenon and you’ll be run over.

But, we must begin to change our minds about the condition of phenomena. When we continue to react to experience as if it is made of solid things and discrete substantial entities, the continuation of the ordinary world is assured.

This is not just abstract philosophy. If we react to our problems as if they are real and solid, they are so, in our experience.

But if we recognize them to be fleeting and mirage-like, a display of the sacred elemental energies in vast space, they are no longer problems.

Because the story of the five pure lights is not the story that science tells us, it can be mistaken for fantasy, for something not true—by which is usually meant that it is not fact.

The five pure lights can’t be measured or weighed; they aren’t facts in the way that a car is, or a rain storm. But facts are not truth. The spiritual teachings continually point this out. While we accept it as a fact that we exist surrounded by dead substantial things and living substantial entities, the dharma tells us that there are no substantial things nor are there separate, intrinsically existing entities. No one can show us love as a fact, but when we are in love there is no doubt that love is real.

The five elements are true the way love is true and also the way a car is true. A car is made from the elements: the hard earth of the metal, the water of the gas and oil, the fire of the combustion, the air that allows the gas to burn, and the space that allows the car to exist. Stop thinking of it as “car” for a minute and instead see it as the interplay of the five elements. This is how to think about the elements.

The story of the five lights and the stories later in the book are not meant to entertain, nor should they be thought of as factual. Rather, this story is truer than fact, and that’s why, if it is really understood, it can change the way we experience the world.

With a deep understanding of how the apparently solid world is actually the play of pure elemental light, peace can be found even in a troubled world, problems can be eradicated before they manifest, and ultimately the nature of the mind can be fully realized.

There is a sequence or flow to all things that arise. Knowing this, one knows how to stop negative processes and initiate and support positive processes.