Later in all this online papañca i came across this page and first was quite sceptical. What to do?! Yet another heretic from the island...Nevertheless i got hooked on the biography of Bhante Ñānavimala and then for the sake of curiosity downloaded "The heretic Sage".
In that book on page 6 we read
which did ring a bell, and delighted me. Now I had to look up this thread, where [luckily] no strong opposition is held against this translation, maybe I am able to participate with something more.It is commonly known that the root ñā stands for ‘knowledge’. Why is it said‘vijānāti’ when it could have easily been said ‘jānāti’? Most translations just use ‘knows’. But vijānāti means ‘discriminatively knows’. What is the main job of viññāṇa? We can clarify from the Mahāvedalla Sutta. There we get the phrases yaṃ sañjānāti taṃ vijānāti and yaṃ vijānāti taṃ pajānāti. ‘What one perceives, that one discriminates’ and ‘what one discriminates, that one knows’.
In the Thai forest tradition, the masters [in whom i have faith] speak of pure knowing [after the fourth Jhāna ].
In my understanding that fits pretty well, since defiled knowing/"papañca knowing"/expanded knowind/ayoniso manasikāra stops after awakening, what remains is this pure consciousness.
Best wishes from the forest.
