[Buddha-l] Prapanca

[Richard Hayes]

On Tuesday 12 February 2008 14:25, Jamie Hubbard wrote:

> This is pretty close to what Min Kiyota gave us grad students lo those
> decades ago: mental diarrhea, trying to capture, I believe, the
> "prolifferation" aspect of papanca.

In grammatical texts, as I recall, prapanca is the name of the activity that 
one does when one's views are challenged. It seems to refer to a kind of 
intellectual damage control that takes the form of trying one's best to 
discredit counterexamples, to impugn counterarguments to one's position, to 
mount counterattacks and to find further support for one's own view. It seems 
to be an activity that one engages in mostly when challenged, which may 
account for why it is sometimes translated as "obsession". There does seem to 
be an element of obsessive defensiveness, as well as mere proliferation, 
involved.

My own impression from its use in the Pali and Sanskrit texts I've worked with 
is that in Buddhist usage, the term does not refer to anything very specific 
at all. It seems to be mostly an general abusive term, a negative label for 
whatever thinking one doesn't approve of. It's a Buddhist way of being 
dismissive without having to do any real work; just label something as 
prapanca and walk away with a smug self-congratulatory expression on one's 
Original Face. (It's a bit like the use of the term "Republican" as used on 
budha-l.)

Perhaps the closest equivalent to "prapanca" in American colloquial English 
is "negative campaigning" or "swiftboating". 


-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes