A Buddhist's guide to self-destruction: Jñānaśrīmitra on the structure of yogic perception

Abstract

This article explores the structure of cultivated religious experience. For the Buddhist philosopher Jñānaśrīmitra (c. 980–1040), the religious experience of the Buddhist yogin (yogipratyakṣa) is not spontaneous or sporadic but must be intentionally and rationally cultivated. I argue that Jñānaśrīmitra's picture parallels certain contemporary constructivist accounts of religious experience, according to which the prejudices, expectations, and interpretative structures of the practitioner shape the character of the experience in question. Despite this, however, Jñānaśrīmitra maintains that religious experience is direct, non-conceptual, and ineffable. Even though cultivation begins by focusing on rationally understood, effable conceptual content (the Buddha's teaching of the Four Nobles' Truths, for instance), the yogin's relation to that content is transformed through cultivation (bhāvanā). Cultivation makes awareness-events with conceptual content vivid (spaṣṭa) in such a way that they lose their conceptual character, coming to affect the practitioner's mind as if they were external to it. In this way, precisely in virtue of beginning the process of cultivation with certain expectations about the Buddha's teaching, Buddhist yogins come to have a direct and non-conceptual experience of the breakdown of their own mental streams and the dissolution of the sense of self.

The transformative experience of Buddhist yogins is not something that just happens. It is not something that can be revealed to a person walking in nature or sitting alone, at the foot of a tree, mind stilled. It is not ‘sporadic’ or ‘spontaneous’, as William James and W. T. Stace suggested religious experience can be.¹ It is not even accessible to a person who has not put in a considerable amount of the right kind of work. Given the nature of our existential predicament, and given the structure of this transformative experience itself, it arises only after the intentional and sustained cultivation (bhāvanā) of certain truths. It must result from a ‘methodical cultivation’, as James put it; or, in terms Agnes Callard has used more recently, it is the result of a type of transformative activity rather than a transformative revelation.² At least, all this is what mainstream Buddhist epistemologists working in first-millennium India would have us believe. I'd like to consider here why they thought this was true and what their view might teach us about the rationality and structure of transformative religious experience.³

Yogic perception

In Buddhism, the religious experience that transforms us is an experience that presents things as they truly are: as suffering, as impermanent, and so on. It is the experience of things as the Buddha taught them to be in his Four Truths of the Noble Ones, or Four Nobles' Truths (caturāryasatya).⁴ Buddhist epistemologists in the tradition of Dharmakīrti (c. 550–650)⁵ call this experience ‘yogic perception’, yogipratyakṣa.⁶ This is, first, a source of knowledge (pramāṇa). As such, it is trustworthy: it reliably leads a person to their goal. As a type of perception (pratyakṣa), it is an episode of knowledge that is direct. Unlike other cognitive states like judgements or beliefs, perception's content is non-conceptual. It does not involve the subject-predicate structure typical of inferential knowledge (anumāna). While it might ground inferential knowledge and conventional ways of speaking and acting, its immediate content is inexpressible and totally unique.

Buddhists consider there to be a number of such types of perception, paradigmatically sensory perception. But an instance of perception is yogic if it results from a yogin's distinctive training; that is, as Dharmakīrti puts it, if it ‘arises when the development of the cultivation of a real object is completed’.⁷ The yogin cultivates some object – meditates on it, attends to it, brings it to mind again and again⁸ – until it finally becomes perfectly vivid (spaṣṭa, sphuṭa), as if it were an object of sensory perception right in the palm of one's hand.⁹ Such direct experience of a cultivated object, where that object is real, is an instance of yogic perception. The qualifier, ‘real’, is important: for Dharmakīrti and his tradition, it's taken for granted that the power of the imagination is such that anything can be made vivid after a long period of contemplation. If I think long and hard enough, I might have a vivid experience of pink elephants, but that doesn't count as yogic perception. The ‘real object’ cultivated in the course of developing yogic perception is one or another aspect of the Buddha's teaching that all things are suffering, impermanent, and so on. Awakening is brought about through the direct realization of the real things that are referred to by the Buddha's teaching.

This picture of yogic perception, however, poses a problem for Dharmakīrti's epistemology. As we'll see, in order to ensure that the object of yogic perception is real, Dharmakīrti claims that the practitioner needs to begin with inferential knowledge of the Four Nobles' Truths and only then undertake the cultivation of yogic perception. But inferential knowledge has conceptual content. So, we have a problem: how can that conceptual content give rise to the kind of non-conceptual content that is proper to yogic perception? What does this shift look like?

In what follows, I'll consider first the ways Buddhist epistemologists defended the rationality of cultivating yogic perception. Then, focusing on the account of the eleventh-century philosopher Jñānaśrīmitra (c. 980–1040), I'll turn to the structure of cultivation itself. This will help us better understand his solution to the problem yogic perception poses for Dharmakīrti's system. Finally, bringing these two points together, we'll see why the transformative experience that comes at the end of this cultivation, a direct experience of momentariness, cannot be revealed but can only result from the transformative activity of cultivation.

Rationality

Consider our existential predicament, as posed by Buddhists. Everything is in fact impermanent. Nothing lasts more than a moment. Yet we each experience ourselves as enduring selves: there is some meaningful sense in which I will be the same tomorrow as I am today. This experience need not be a belief in something metaphysically robust; the mere fact that I favour my own future happiness more than that of others betrays my belief that that future happiness will be ‘my own’, or will belong to a being with a special connection to the ‘me’ who acts now.¹⁰ For Buddhists, this experience of self (satkāyadṛṣṭi, ātmadarśana, sattvadarśana, etc.) is the source of all our problems, our dissatisfaction, and our pain (duḥkha). It's the reason that, as the Buddha famously put it in the first of his Four Nobles' Truths, everything is suffering. Our desires for happiness will never be satisfied and yet, precisely in virtue of the experience of self, we cannot help but have such desires. And so our experience of self constitutes what's often referred to as ‘ignorance’ (avidyā):¹¹ not just a lack of knowledge, but a positive occlusion, a myopic lens that distorts the rest of our experience.

This experience of self is deeply ingrained. It is instinctual, a habit we have formed over the beginningless series of rebirths known as saṃsāra. Because it is so deeply ingrained, and because it is a positive occlusion distorting our experience, a direct experience of impermanence, or an ‘experience of selflessness’ (nairātmyadarśana), cannot just reveal itself to us. If it could, it would reveal itself to us at every moment – if the Buddha is right, we (and everything else) are always already selfless, after all. Instead, our ignorance fundamentally shapes our experience of ourselves and our world. And so for there to be some direct experience of impermanence, we need to remove the occlusion of ignorance. We need to change our experiential habits.¹²

For Dharmakīrtians, the cultivation of yogic perception is a crucial part of this change. Yet a prudent person (prekṣāvat) will act only after considering reasons for acting and the appropriateness of particular actions in relation to a desired goal. What will motivate such a person to cultivate yogic perception? One who has not understood that continued existence is suffering will not see this as rational behaviour. Only a person who has understood this Truth will seek to eliminate suffering and its cause. One begins, then, by listening to the Buddha's teaching and reflecting on it. When it has become clear that everything is suffering, a prudent person then comes to understand that its cause is the experience of self; that its antidote, the experience of selflessness, destroys that experience of self; and that it thus brings the cause of suffering, and so suffering, to an end.¹³

This understanding is the result of rational inquiry, yukticintā, or a process of inference, anumāna. It results from reasoning through the Four Nobles' Truths – in the first place, the truth that all things are impermanent (anitya). For Buddhist epistemologists and their non-Buddhist opponents, the theory of ‘momentariness’, kṣaṇikatva, or the view that anything that exists exists only a moment, became synonymous with the Buddha's teaching of impermanence in mid- to late first-millennium South Asia.¹⁴ So, in this milieu, a prudent person will undertake the cultivation of yogic perception only after proving for themselves that all things are momentary. This is an eminently conceptual exercise: it involves putting forward an argument in defence of the view that the property of momentariness can be predicated of all things, and then defending that argument against imagined (or in many cases real) objections. It results in the conceptually mediated knowledge that the theory of momentariness is true. As such, this knowledge provides the object of the practitioner's cultivation, grounding the subsequent yogic perception of momentariness as an instance of knowledge and not a mere hallucination. As we noted above, Dharmakīrti is quite clear that the cultivation of anything can result in a vividly manifest awareness-event.¹⁵ So, it is only in virtue of the inferential certainty that all things possess the property of momentariness that a subsequent direct awareness of momentariness might count as knowledge.¹⁶

Where has revelatory experience gone in all this? Isn't it at least possible that, through the darkness of the experience of self, a glimpse of momentariness might shine through? Isn't it conceivable that the transformative experience of selflessness might sometimes be spontaneous? Unlike many other Buddhists, Buddhist epistemologists like Dharmakīrti thought not. Not only is the darkness almost inconceivably thick, making such spontaneous revelation difficult to imagine; the nature of transformative religious experience itself, the process of its development and its target, is such that it can only ever be trained. Let's turn to the structure of this process to see why.

Structure

We come now to the cultivation of yogic perception proper. As we've just seen, this is preceded by acquiring the inferential knowledge that all things possess the property of momentariness. Let's call this the preparatory stage in the cultivation of yogic perception.¹⁷ At the subsequent stage of the cultivation of yogic perception proper, one comes to know momentariness directly, and not just that all things possess this property. But now, the problem we saw at the start of this article rears its head. Yogic perception, according to Dharmakīrti, is an instance of non-conceptual knowledge that is attained at the completion of an active process of cultivation regarding some real object. How can one know, in a way that is not mediated by concepts, that all things possess the property of momentariness? Must not that knowledge involve at least that concept?

Yes and no. As Jñānaśrīmitra understands it in An Essay on the Definitive Proof of Yogic Perception (Yoginirṇayaprakaraṇa, or YNP), yogic perception might be thought of as post-conceptual instead of non-conceptual.¹⁸ In the process of the cultivation of a property (dharmabhāvanā or tattvabhāvanā, in Jñānaśrīmitra's usage here), a stream of conceptual awareness-events come to act on each other so as to efface their conceptual character. At the completion of the process, the generic property is no longer present as such, or as predicated of things; instead, the repeated contemplation of the generic property has changed the mental stream of the practitioner. A non-conceptual knowledge that all things possess some property would indeed be incoherent. But that's not what's happening here. Instead, the cultivation of momentariness results in a non-conceptual awareness-event that is affected just by the mental stream itself.

In Jñānaśrīmitra's handling, this process is a bit convoluted. Yet he explains it with a pedestrian example: learning to like neem. Despite its being a popular dish in his native Bengal, Jñānaśrīmitra assumes that people will not naturally like the bitter flavour of cooked neem leaves.¹⁹ Cultivating the experience of neem as agreeable (or, more precisely, cultivating the property of agreeableness, with respect to neem) is thus comparable to cultivating a direct experience of momentariness: the experience of this property is not one we naturally have, but rather takes repeated effort.

As we think with Jñānaśrīmitra through his use of this example, we can distinguish three steps in the process of the cultivation of a property, even though Jñānaśrīmitra himself does not systematically distinguish these three steps.²⁰ The process begins by imaginatively attributing to a thing a property that it doesn't have. Let's call this first step attribution.²¹ For whatever reason – perhaps because one's parents enjoy it and say that it's tasty – one imagines that neem has the property of agreeableness (priyatva) whenever one tastes it. One does this repeatedly. Over time, agreeableness becomes the manifest content of one's experience whenever one tastes neem. The neem itself fades from view: it is no longer the manifest content of the experience, no longer what the experience is really of. The experience is just of the neem's being agreeable.²²

This happens because of the second step. In the process of (we might say) convincing oneself that neem bears this property, one habituates oneself to repeatedly turning attention away from the thing and towards agreeableness. Let's call this second step habituation. What it means for this attributed property, agreeableness, to be vividly manifest (sphuṭābhatā) at the end of this habituation is for an awareness-event that apprehends neem to have an agreeable phenomenal character automatically (jhagiti), or without effort (yatnam anapekṣya).²³ One has formed the habit of attending just to the attributed property, not to the thing. But this agreeableness isn't really part of the neem itself; neem doesn't really possess this property, or else everyone would find neem agreeable the same way we see its colour or taste its bitterness. Rather, agreeableness is just a property of certain awareness-events that arise in a continuum suitably habituated to turning attention towards that attributed property when neem is present.

Two steps in to Jñānaśrīmitra's example, we can pause to compare it to the case of momentariness. Suppose I am a prudent person. I should start by learning about suffering and its cause from the Buddha's teaching and coming to know, through inference, that everything is momentary. Then, if I sit at the foot of a mountain and contemplate even that as being momentary, repeatedly turning my attention towards momentariness in the presence of the mountain, awareness-events directed towards the mountain will come to be of the mountain's being momentary automatically, without effort. The manifest content of my experience as I gaze out on the mountain will be, simply, momentariness.²⁴ So far, then, there is just this difference between the two cases: while I cannot establish through inference that neem bears the property of agreeableness, I can prove that the mountain, like all things, bears the property of momentariness. Otherwise, the two processes are the same.

In effect, this second step suggests a solution to the problem the theory of yogic perception poses for Dharmakīrti's epistemology. The shift from the conceptual knowledge of the truth that all things possess the property of momentariness, to an instance of non-conceptual awareness takes place as the yogin gradually redirects their attention towards their own awareness-events. When the attributed property is being predicated of the various objects of experience (‘This neem is agreeable’, ‘Even that mountain is momentary’, etc.), the awareness is plainly conceptual. But when the property alone is vividly manifest, it no longer appears as a property predicated of some distinct subject.²⁵ There's just an awareness-event with some particular manifest content. The fact that this content happens to be a generic property is beside the point. Just insofar as its content is manifest, the awareness-event no longer bears the representational structure proper to conceptual awareness.²⁶

But the vivid manifestation of some generic property isn't the end of this process. Jñānaśrīmitra next comes to the third step. Let's call it perception. At the culmination of the second step, the manifest content of the experience is just the generic property in question. Now, one finally comes to be affected by that property. Returning to neem: something is agreeable just in case it causes pleasure. Jñānaśrīmitra tells us that that's what ‘agreeableness’ really means.²⁷ A person can be said to find neem agreeable, then, as Jñānaśrīmitra puts it, if ‘that object, as an auxiliary causal condition, produces pleasure in reliance upon that person's mental stream suitably prepared by cultivation, which is the material cause [of that pleasure]’.²⁸ The manifest content of the experience is now just pleasure: not the neem, and not the generic property. The neem helps bring about this experience. But the primary cause of the experience of pleasure is ‘the mental stream suitably prepared by cultivation’ (cittasantānaṃ bhāvanāpariṣkṛtam) – which is to say, the mental stream that has gotten into the habit of attending to a particular property in the presence of certain things. The force of the stream of consciousness, the momentum of its habits, is really what causes pleasure. This happens, again, automatically (jhagiti), without effort (yatnam anapekṣya), naturally (svarasataḥ): a moment of awareness, when tasting neem, is caused by habituation to arise with agreeableness alone as its content; this in turn gives rise to an awareness-event that has pleasure as its phenomenal form.²⁹ This happens with the same passivity we attribute to ordinary instances of sensory perception. Yet in this case, rather than passively perceiving external colours and shapes, it is one moment of the mental stream that affects the next.

Here's how the whole process works. The stream of consciousness is a series of causally related awareness-events. At the first step of the process, attribution, one attributes to certain things a property that is not immediately intersubjectively available, imagining that things have this property. At the second step, habituation, there is the effortful turning of attention away from the things and towards the property in question. Gradually, as one gets into this habit of attention, the manifest content of experience when in the vicinity of those things comes to be nothing but the property itself. The mind's phenomenal form when tasting neem becomes simply agreeableness. But all it means for something (here, a particular awareness-event) to be agreeable is for it to cause pleasure. The next moment in the mental series, then, is pleasure, caused not by the neem but by the preceding moment, itself the culmination of a gradual training of attention. This becomes so effortless that it is as if one perceives the property – one is immediately receptive to it and affected by it as if it were outside oneself – despite the fact that what really causes the perception is the preceding awareness-event.

Now consider momentariness. One first comes to know inferentially, at the preparatory stage, that everything is momentary. Then, one imaginatively attributes the property, momentariness, to any object of one's experience. One attends to that property whenever the attribution is made. Gradually, as one gets into this habit of attention, whatever objects one encounters, momentariness alone becomes the manifest content of the experience. At this point, the awareness is already non-conceptual. At the final step, perception, the mental stream takes on a force of its own: one moment of awareness, whose manifest content is momentariness, has its effect on the next. That effect is to give the next moment of awareness a fleeting, broken, disjointed form (truṭyadrūpa): that, we might say, is what ‘momentariness’ really means. One then experiences not a continuous self, but rather a discontinuous series of disjointed awareness-events. This does not happen in a vacuum. All the while, one is encountering through sensory perception the sorts of things one has always encountered. Now, however, something remarkable happens: one's experience, primarily caused by the force of one's own mental stream, now lines up with the way those things really are. From scriptural learning and rational inquiry at the preparatory stage, the yogin knows conceptually that the nature of things is fleeting, broken, disjointed. The form they would naturally present to us, were we not mired in ignorance, would be such. So, at the completion of the yogin's cultivation, the form of things is unchanged: they were always fleeting and continue to be so. But now, the cultivated mental stream of the yogin is aligned so as to experience that fleeting form too, as a result of its own momentum.³⁰

Jñānaśrīmitra gives a vivid illustration of what this experience is like and the effect it has on the yogin's behaviour. He writes:

Therefore, when the cultivation of the property, momentariness, has come to completion, too, all that is experienced by the yogin takes on a fleeting form (truṭyadrūpa) that is quite distinct from the experience of beings like us. For us, experience tracks a very clear distinction between two iron balls that are in distinct places,³¹ even though they are nearly identical, and conceptualization follows immediately in accordance with that experience and action takes place in accordance with it; it is the same for the yogin regarding two things that occur at distinct moments, with respect to the yogin's experience and subsequent conceptualization. And the yogin's mind is not tarnished by the blemish of desire and so on that arises out of the error of thinking that things are stable and so on. So (iti), the vivid manifestation of momentariness consists in just this much.³²

If we were to place two identical iron balls on a table before us, we would have no trouble distinguishing them, and our judgements and activities would follow effortlessly from the experience of their distinction. Distinguishing two moments of things in the world is not so easy. We naturally assume each of those iron balls to be unchanging from moment to moment; in the same way, we take what we assume to be our selves to be continuous, without any sharp disjunction from one moment to the next. On Jñānaśrīmitra's account, however, yogins have cultivated momentariness so as to experience directly the disjointed nature of their own minds.

This experience has profound effects on the yogin's judgements and actions. In the first place, they effortlessly determine everything they encounter to be momentary in their subsequent conceptual awareness-events. Such spontaneous judgements, Jñānaśrīmitra says elsewhere, are ‘impossible to obtain’ without proper cultivation; it is a special mark of yogic perception that it results in such judgements without a moment's reflection or doubt.³³ Further, the untrained desire things and seek satisfaction that they think will be their own precisely because they do not see the difference between distinct moments of things or of their own mental streams. But yogins labour under no such delusion. They see the difference between every moment of consciousness as plainly as we see the difference between the iron balls, and so any form of prudential desire can't begin to arise. The direct experience of momentariness thus brings about dispassion or desirelessness (vairāgya): for Dharmakīrtians, one of the fundamental characteristics of buddhahood.

Cultivated transformative experience

We're now poised to see why, for these philosophers, the liberative knowledge of the way things really are that is gained by Buddhist yogins must result from a process of cultivation and cannot simply be revealed. One cannot know what it's like to experience momentariness without actively engaging in the threefold process of cultivation I've outlined here, comprising attribution, habituation, and perception. This is so because the experience of momentariness is finally caused by the cultivated mental stream itself, not by momentary things.

This is part of the reason, I think, that Jñānaśrīmitra chooses the agreeableness of neem as his example. He could well have chosen a more straightforward case of perceptual learning: learning to see subtle facets in gems, for instance, or to taste subtle flavours in wine.³⁴ Learning to perceive the gem's facets or the wine's flavours only requires the training of sensory perception: the facets or flavours are there, but, without practice, one does not know how to discern them and attend to them. Jñānaśrīmitra, however, insists that yogic perception is fundamentally distinct from sensory perception, trained or otherwise. It is not just training attention towards things that are in principle available to the senses. Yogic perception is rather the result of training attention towards attributed properties. By considering the cultivation of the agreeableness of neem, a property that he and his opponents agree is not in fact a property of the thing in question, he is able to highlight the mind's central role in the process of cultivation. The experience of pleasure when tasting neem might have the object, neem, as an auxiliary causal condition, but it is really caused by the mental stream itself when it is cultivated as having a certain property.

So, too, is the experience of momentariness. Coming to know through inference that things are momentary does not have any effect on my experience, just as someone telling me that neem is agreeable won't make its taste pleasurable.³⁵ And things, for Jñānaśrīmitra, are always already imparting their fleeting form to the senses, yet that too does not give me a direct experience of momentariness. So we need to locate the cause of the experience elsewhere than in testimony, inference, or sensory experience. Consideration of the process of cultivation shows us that we can only locate this cause in the suitably cultivated mental stream itself. It's just that, in the case of momentariness, inference provides us with the added certainty that things do in fact correspond to the disjointed way one's mind finally takes experiential shape.³⁶

There are many ways we might think about transformative religious experience. We might consider it to be spontaneous, sporadic, or revealed, overwhelming a person without warning, giving them phenomenal knowledge unlike any they had ever had, and thereby causing them to reshape the rest of their life. It is often described this way, but it may never really be so simple. Constructivists have argued for decades now that any religious experience involves both stimuli of one sort or another and the prejudices, expectations, and interpretative structures of the perceiver, and that those interpretative structures are operative not just after the fact but before and during the experience.³⁷ They give the experience form, shaping its phenomenal content from the start. Jñānaśrīmitra would, I think, agree: not that religious experience is conceptual, as some constructivists argue, but more precisely that it is brought about by the active work of the mind rather than spontaneously revealed. For Jñānaśrīmitra, it is the result of a transformative activity, engaged in intentionally by prudent persons convinced that a certain experience is necessary in order to bring about desirelessness and an end to suffering. It takes the long and focused cultivation of imagined, attributed properties and the gradual rehabituation of attention. Because its cause is ultimately just the practitioner's mental stream itself undergoing this active process, the transformative experience of momentariness can only ever be cultivated.

Abbreviations

NB

Nyāyabindu of Dharmakīrti. See Malvania (1971).

NBṬ

Nyāyabinduṭīkā of Dharmottara. See Malvania (1971).

PV

Pramāṇavārttika of Dharmakīrti. See Miyasaka (1971/1972).

SS

Sarvajñasiddhi of Ratnakīrti. See Thakur (1975); translated in Goodman (1989).

YNP

Yoginirṇayaprakaraṇa of Jñānaśrīmitra. See Thakur (1959); compare Woo (2006) and Franco (2008).