Tagged: papañca
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Polak - Language, Conscious Experience and the Self in Early Buddhism (2018)
1This article reconstructs early Buddhist thought to argue that ordinary conscious experience is fundamentally shaped by language and conceptualization, a process that creates an illusory Self which is the root of suffering. This cognitive distortion begins with *saññā* (apperception), a labeling function that, through its inherent link to language, imposes a discrete, manifold structure (*papañca*) onto reality. The mind's tendency to reify grammatical forms is then misapplied to personal pronouns, constructing a continuous "narrative self" that is mistakenly identified as a real agent—a "speaker and feeler" (*vado vedeyyo*). Drawing on parallels in Western philosophy and modern cognitive science, the text argues this delusion involves misinterpreting phenomenal consciousness (represented by the five *khandha-s*)—which is merely a limited, unified representation of vast, non-conscious bodily processes—as the actual source of agency and subjectivity. This fundamental error of identifying with a fictional, linguistically-generated entity is psychologically taxing, distorts the experience of time, and constitutes the core of human suffering.
Wynne - The ātman and its negation (2010)
2The famous Buddhist "No Self" (anātman) doctrine is largely absent from the earliest texts because the original teachings were founded on a different and more subtle philosophy than the later, standard interpretation. Early critiques, such as the "Not-Self" (anattā) teaching, are grounded in a principle of "epistemological conditioning," where fundamental concepts including "self," "existence," and even space-time are not ultimate realities but are dependently originated through cognitive processes. This is why the early texts pragmatically avoid direct ontological statements like "the self does not exist," instead guiding practitioners to see that identifying with conditioned phenomena is "unsuitable" and thereby transcend the very conceptual framework that creates a sense of self. The explicit "No Self" doctrine developed later, as seen in texts like the *Vajirā Sutta* and the Abhidharma, when this subtle philosophy gave way to a "reductionistic realism" that analyzes the person as a collection of essenceless components within an objectively real world, thus shifting the focus from a radical critique of conceptuality to the denial of a specific entity.