Here's another translation by the same venerable: "4: Phenomena as made up of and manifested by
momentary mental states ..."
See if this is not true. All our sense-perceptions and thoughts,
are really momentary, mental states arising and fading... we think
what we perceive are truly existing objects, and that mind is the
'I', the perceiver, of those objects... but there can be no knowing
without the sense faculty and the object, there is no such thing as
a 'knowing' without something being known - even if that object is
a mental object... it just wouldn't make sense to speak of knowing
without something known, so there cannot be knowing apart from the
known in the same way there is no wind apart from the activities of
blowing, or a river apart from the activities of flowing... so all
that we perceive is simply this fact, this activity and
dependently-originated functioning of knowing, awaring, seeing,
hearing, tasting, touching, smelling, thinking. Knowing/awareness
cannot be separated from the object of knowing, and it cannot be
separated from all the causes and conditions that manifest this
moment of knowing. Because mind is not some perceiver behind the
perceived, everything being perceived is in fact mind, or a mental
perception... 'Mind' and 'Awareness' is realized to be simply a
label collating the various mental perceptions and modes of
consciousness. We realize that in seeing there is just the
experience, the vivid mental-perception of seen, without a separate
agent or seer.
And this fact of awareness, this luminosity, is the essence of
all mental states - without which, nothing at all can be
experienced. And this arising consciousness (visual consciousness,
ear consciousness, etc etc... up to mental consciousness),
depending on our sense faculties and sense objects, does not have
an independent existence of its own, so it is a function, a display
of dependent origination, so what we see, hear, smell, are really
'constructed mental Appearances' - they are not truly there,
independent of the meeting of causes and conditions.
In truth, there is nothing that is not a moment of mental
perception, much like a dream, and there isn't a true 'I'
perceiving 'that'... there is no 'I' apart from this mental
perception, so there is simply a vivid mental perception,
everything is just a mental perception, and that mental state is in
essence luminous clarity. And it is in nature void or empty of any
substantial substance - it cannot be located as something inherent
or independently existing... certainly the display and the
experience cannot be denied, but upon investigation we realize it
is just like a dream or a TV show. Try looking at where a thought
arise, abide, and ceases to, and it is discovered that thoughts,
like all appearances, are simply a coreless and vivid mental
appearances, without an independent existence locatable somewhere.
What is constructed, what is dependently originated, turns out to
be empty and unborn - there is no independent essence of seeing,
hearing, etc to be found or located somewhere... there is no
independent essence of mind, of experience, of whatever we see - it
is a merely dependently originated mental appearance, that turns
out to be empty (yet vivid and luminous). In other words, all
constructed mental appearances, like a dream, turns out to be in
reality unborn.
Everything seems very objectively real until you realize that it
is just a mental perception without real substance there! Apart
from being just this shimmering, vivid, and yet empty, transient
and dissolving mental perception... like a shimmering, flickering
mirage, a rainbow, a dream.
To realize this and abandon all our clingings and false
projections of an inherent reality, is liberation.
If any of this is not clear I can clarify....