This panel explores meditations as practices of becoming, investigating how emotion, imagination, and attention are marshaled within distinct Buddhist meditation practices to cultivate specific soteriological, ethical, and epistemic visions of character. Resisting the tendency to ask what "meditation in general" contributes to philosophy, our papers pursue specificity, attending closely to how Buddhist philosophers have theorized these practices within their own frameworks. The first paper examines how macabre visualizations in Indian Buddhist traditions can cultivate "retrofit" emotions that are, despite appearances, fitting and rational. The second investigates vividness (sphuṭatva) in works on yogic perception, arguing that vividness and knowledge-hood (prāmāṇya) are distinct issues requiring separate treatment. The third argues that the suspension of minding attention (dran pa) in Dzokchen breakthrough practice constitutes a distinctive epistemic virtue of radical humility and openness. Together, the papers advance richer, more specific understandings of how Buddhists have theorized about cultivation and transformation.
Meditative visualization of corpses, cremation grounds, and the incorporation of foul bodily substances pervades the history of Indian Buddhism. Some of these macabre visualizations aim to cultivate disgust (aśubha bhāvanā) for benign objects; others, rooted in Tantric traditions, invoke similar imagery to eliminate disgust for foul, putrid objects. If disgust is fitting when it accurately evaluates its object as contaminating or putrid, both types of visualization seem to generate misfit emotions. Yet philosophers who discussed these practices saw the resulting emotions as fitting and rational. Taking their justifications seriously can inform contemporary philosophical conversations around emotional cultivation and rationality. I argue that some cultivated emotions are best understood as “retrofit” emotions with a complex structure, and that imaginative simulation has an important role to play in emotional retrofitting.
This paper examines the role of vividness (sphuṭatva) in Jñānaśrīmitra’s and Ratnakīrti’s works on yogic perception. I argue that, for them, vividness does not, strictly speaking, play any epistemic role. Rather, its role is affective and motivational. An awareness-event’s degree of vividness is measured not in terms of how closely it corresponds to the way things are (after all, even hallucinations might be vivid), but in terms of how it motivates certain thoughts and actions. When an awareness-event gives rise to certain judgments, speech, and behavior automatically, it counts as vivid. The question of whether it counts as an instance of knowledge is another matter—one having to do with 1) the relation between the awareness-event in question and its object, and 2) the practical efficacy of the thoughts and actions it motivates. An awareness-event’s vividness and its knowledge-hood (prāmāṇya), then, are distinct issues that need to be treated separately.
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.
| John Dunne | jddunne@wisc.edu | View |