A Mad Yogi’s Laugh: Longchenpa’s Critique of Mindfulness

This paper argues that the mad yogi’s laughter—an image of success in the Dzokchen practice of breakthrough (khregs chod)—reflects a radically unstructured attentional stance that constitutes a distinctive epistemic virtue. Contrasting this with two other images of attention, the skilled archer (endogenous, willful control) and the attentive listener (exogenous and open receptivity), and drawing on Longchenpa’s Treasury of Reality’s Expanse, this paper argues that this radically unguided stance is cultivated via the suspension of dran pa, or minding attention, that contorts the mind around objects as apparently determinate entities. The result is not epistemic deficiency but disclosure: Suspension of attentional framing reveals the very processes by which experience organizes itself into determinate contents. This is not a novel set of contents but a transformed relation toward attentional framing, a radical form of cultivating the virtues of epistemic humility and openness.