[Buddha-l] Prapanca

[Bhavana House]

Dear Richard,
It seems to me that reading the Madhupindika Sutta (MN 18) and Thanissaro
Bhikkhu's introduction may help in understanding what papanca is.
Let me quote a short appetizer from that introduction:

In MN 18, the map is this:

  contact > feeling > perception > thinking > the perceptions & categories 
of papañca
In this last case, however, the bare outline misses some of the important 
implications of the way this process is phrased. In the full passage, the 
analysis starts out in an impersonal tone:

  Dependent on eye & forms, eye-consciousness arises [similarly with the 
rest of the six senses]. The meeting of the three is contact. With contact 
as a requisite condition, there is feeling.
Starting with feeling, the notion of an "agent" - in this case, the feeler - 
acting on "objects," is introduced:

  What one feels, one perceives (labels in the mind). What one perceives, 
one thinks about. What one thinks about, one "papañcizes."
Through the process of papañca, the agent then becomes a victim of his/her 
own patterns of thinking:

  Based on what a person papañcizes, the perceptions & categories of papañca 
assail him/her with regard to past, present, & future forms cognizable via 
the eye [as with the remaining senses].
What are these perceptions & categories that assail the person who 
papañcizes? Sn 4.14 states that the root of the categories of papañca is the 
perception, "I am the thinker."


Metta,
Itamar


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Richard Hayes" <rhayes at unm.edu>
To: "Buddhist discussion forum" <buddha-l at mailman.swcp.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 12:58 AM
Subject: Re: [Buddha-l] Prapanca


> 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
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