Papañca: Proliferation
Photo by Eric Tompkins
Do you find yourself silently commenting on and critiquing this life as it happens? There’s a Buddhist term for the seemingly endless chatter in our minds—papañca or proliferation.
Zuisei brings to life the teachings on papañca contained in the sutra “The Ball of Honey,” exploring how this proliferation comes to be and how we might relate to it skillfully.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard. See below for transcript.
Transcript
Transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Welcome, everyone. Good evening. I want to start with the article I mentioned last week, which appeared in The New Yorker. It's a review of a book called Chatter. It was written by an experimental psychologist named Ethan Kross. The gist of it is that our inner critic exists for a reason. We can learn to harness its energy and use it for our benefit. I confess that I have not read the book, so I'm really basing this on the review. But, there were some interesting points that I thought would be worthwhile to bring out. Before I do that let me introduce a Buddhist term that is germane to the subject, papañca. There is really no literal translation for it, but Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, an American Buddhist monk, has written an article on this and offered some possibilities to introduce it. He says, "Dependent on the eye and forms, eye consciousness arises. ” And so this is true of the other five senses—the ear, the nose, the tongue, body, mind. “When the three meet,” in this case, the sense of eye, form, and consciousness, “...there is contact."
I touched on this briefly before, so here's a cup. Right? Here's my hand, touch, and consciousness, and the three of them together create contact. The moment there is contact, there's a feeling. And starting with a feeling there's a notion of an agent, right? There's a me, in this case, the feeler. The agent acts on the object. So when we feel, we perceive, and we label in the mind. I immediately know this is a cup. What we perceive, we think about. We papañcize. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu says, “Through the process of papañca, the agent becomes a victim of his or her own patterns of thinking.” He says, “Based on what I papañcize, the perceptions and categories of papañca itself assail me with regard to past, present and future forms.”
So, it's a little abstract. So I feel this cup. This cup is nice. I love this cup. I don't really like my roommate’s cups because they're a little too big and I can't quite put my hand around them. They're a little crude, those cups. This one is kind of dainty. Plus, someone made this for me. My roommate made [those cups] for herself. She didn't make them for me. That's kind of stingy of her. I mean, she could have made me a cup, right? I mean, we've lived together for a couple of years now. For God's sake, why doesn’t she make me a cup? Papañca.
So, Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu says, “The root of the categories of papañca is the perception, I am the thinker. I am the one experiencing this cup. And from this self-reflective thought, I conceive a self. A thing corresponding to the concept of I and from this all these various categories arise: being not being, me not me, mine not mine, doer and done to.” So you see the process, right? When we identify with the one who's experiencing, based on feelings, based from contact with an object, some of those feelings will seem appealing, some of them won’t. Some of those that are appealing, we will want more of them. Some of those that are unappealing we will want to push away. From this arises desire and aversion— which is really just another form of desire. Desire for what is present, to not [be present], to be far away. Those desires come into conflict with the desires of others who are also papañcizing. From this internal process of objectification and comparison, conflict arises externally.
It's essentially saying, this is all in our heads. That's not quite a fair way to say it. It’s in our mind, it's in mind. All of the conflict that we see in the world arises out of that tiny, tiny word, me. Actually it’s even tinier, I, a hair's breadth of a word. All of that pain comes because I want and you want, and so often, those wants are different.
The translations Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu gives for papañca are objectification, self-reflexive thinking, reification, which is often used in Buddhism, proliferation, complication, elaboration, distortion. My favorite is proliferation because you get the sense that with that one little seed of a thought, all of a sudden, it begins to proliferate, it blooms, and it expands, if you let it, quite quickly. Complication, distortion, are also interesting because it implies this isn't really how things are. It implies there's another way of being, another way of seeing that doesn't create conflict. What is that? If this happens so quickly, so immediately, how is it possible to arrest that proliferation? Is that something that we wouldn't want? What I described is, in one sense, a little bit negative. But we can also think of creativity, imagination, and the proliferation that comes out of creative expression. It is not that all of it is negative.
Now, keeping all of this in mind, some of that review of Chatter says, “We are perpetually slipping away from the present into the parallel, nonlinear world of our minds. Our ‘default’ state is a rich zone of remembrance, musing and projection.” The reviewer says, “This is a quiet rejoinder to New Age wisdom because we're actually not designed to live in the moment.” We're not designed to live in the moment. Some of the experiments that Krause made bear this out. They show that the purpose of that inner dialogue is to create a kind of simulation. So we assess our progress. We tell ourselves stories about ourselves about others. We've spoken about this. And I often say that we tell stories in order to understand who we are. And so much of this dialogue is useful. But a lot of it is not, because we tend to focus on negative content.
I've often wondered about this, if it creates conflict within us, then why do we focus more on what is negative, on what we lack and on what we need to change? And I don't mean the things that need to change in ourselves and in the world, but those small and large dissatisfactions that take up all of our energy and our time. Why is it so difficult to be in the moment? Now, needless to say, all of this proliferation creates stress. It also takes up bandwidth in our brain. So as we're talking to ourselves about what we're experiencing, our neurons have a double job. They have to listen to the chatter and process it. They also have to complete the task that they've set out to complete. From a Buddhist perspective, our views, color, our experience. They completely shape our experience. If our internal dialogue is negative, our experience and our view will be negative as well. This seems like a no-brainer. So, why do we have such a hard time switching to joy? Why do we have to talk about it so much? I can't tell you how many times I've assigned it as a practice to people, deliberate practice. I've assigned it to myself, to deliberately turn toward and cultivate joy. You’d think that we would want to move toward it naturally. And that's not what happens. Personally, I think a lot of it does have to do with our inability to be present.
And so, we talk to ourselves for reassurance, for inspiration, for guidance and support. And we compare, we correct, we criticize, we evaluate, we disparage. As you can imagine, there is an antidote. And it's so simple that it's almost embarrassing. There's a sutra called the Madhupindika Sutta, The Ball of Honey. As the sutras always start, “Thus I have heard. The Blessed One lived among the Shakyas in Kapilvastu. One morning, he went on his alms rounds, he went into the Great Wood, and he sat down for the days abiding.” I really love that. He sat down for the day’s abiding. I was thinking, I'm going to start saying that when I sit down in front of my computer. I'm sitting down for the days abiding, not to get things done, not to rush through the work I have to do to get to what I really want to do, but to abide, to be in each moment of work, in each moment of my life. We say this all the time, don't we? But is that what we really do? Is that how we live?
And so the Buddha is sitting in the Great Wood, and he is teaching. He's there with his monks. And that day, there's a man there by the name of Dandapani, which means Stick-in-hand the sutra says, “who went roaming and rambling for exercise.” I guess he just happened upon the Buddha in the Great Wood. They exchange greetings, and then Dandapani stands to one side as a sign of respect. He asks the Buddha, “What is the contemplative doctrine? What sort of doctrine do you proclaim?”
It’s the sort of doctrine where one does not quarrel with anyone else in all of the cosmos, with its divas, it's maras, it’s Brahmas, with all of its contemplatives and brahmans, is royalty and it's common folk. It is the sort of doctrine where perceptions no longer upset the person, so they remain free of perplexity, of craving, of wanting to become and not become. This is my doctrine. This is what I proclaim. My teaching is for those who don't want to create conflict, who don't want to obsess and crave and make things complicated.
Do you know what Dandapani’s response was? He shakes his head, he wags his tongue, he raises his eyebrows so that his forehead has three wrinkled furrows, and he leaves leaning on his stake. I guess he didn't like the Buddha's response. Maybe he thought it was too general, too abstract, too unattainable. Maybe he thought, not for me, not in this lifetime.
That evening, the Buddha gets together with his monks, and he tells them what happened. And so they asked, well, what kind of person is this who's free of conflict? How, how do they do that? And he says that when they notice they are papañcizing. They see there's nothing for them to obsess over. There's nothing for them for them to relish, nothing to crave. They see the emptiness of each of these constructions, each of these elements. But in the middle of an argument with yourself or with someone else, it feels very real. Right? It is very real.
I'm still reading Yuval Harari, his book Homo Deus. And this line struck me, “The modern world positively requires uncertainty, and disturbance.” And I thought, that's it. That's it. So do we. So do we. The self at odds with itself exists? Do you see? A self at peace is in danger of not existing in the old way. The self knows this? What do you think it freaks out when you start to get quiet? The self doesn't want to be forgotten. It doesn't want to be seen through as the illusion that it is? No, of course not. It's hanging by a very, very tenuous thread. You could say that part of our work is to see it doesn't need to. It doesn't need to hang on because there's nothing to hang on to anyway. That's the whole point. That is what the Buddha saw. So he says that the person who recognizes they are papañcizing, that their thoughts and their feelings are proliferating, they get close. And then they get closer still. And then they see there's nothing there.
Soen Roshi, a Rinzai teacher, founder of Dai Bosatsu tells a story. Once during a sesshin he was waiting outside the bathroom. And he's waiting, and he's waiting, and he's waiting. And finally he knocks on the door. There's no answer. Gingerly he opens the door. There's nobody there. He just burst out laughing. He said, “Exactly. There's never anybody there.” Exactly. My own teacher has said to me, “Remind yourself of this truth.” There is realizing it, of course. But remind yourself, this too is empty.
So the Buddha says all this, and he gets up and leaves. The monks start thinking about it. They think, well he didn't really explain, so who is among us who might analyze the unanalyzed detailed meaning of this brief statement? They realize that the Venerable Maha Kapphina, one of the Buddha's students, could explain it, so they go to him. He says, “You're like people who are looking for the trees' hardwood, but instead you're looking at the branches and the leaves. You just had the Buddha in front of you, and now you're asking me? What are you thinking?”
And they say, “Well, you're right. But can you just tell us and not make things complicated?” [Zuisei laughs] That's actually what they say. Every now and then you see in the sutras very human moments like this. You can almost hear the scribe, chuckling, as they took this down. And so, Maha Kapphina agrees, and then he breaks it down, as Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu did. So, dependent on the eye and forms, eye consciousness arises. There is contact. There is feeling. There's perception. There's thought. I turn it into an object. There's the past, present and future—papañca.
He tells them what they can do about it. He says that with each one of these elements you can create a delineation, which is an interesting way to think about it. He's basically saying to notice that it [each element] has a kind of an edge to it. [Then] create space between each of these [elements]. I think it would be possible between contact and feeling, for example, or feeling and perception. It would be possible, but difficult. It happens almost instantaneously. But you can certainly create space between thought and objectification. It is that moment, every now and then when you see something, you hear something, you taste something directly. The moment before thought, the moment before you framed it, and said, Oh, it's this and I'm the one feeling and experiencing it. It's that moment. So, right there in that space that's where you have space to question the critic, the cynic, the judge, the voice that says that you're not smart enough, pretty enough, rich enough. Enough for what? That's the place where we can begin to ask, enough for what? Jeff Bezos is worth $184 billion, and it seems like it's still not enough. When is enough? What is enough and for whom?
Slow things down. So much of practice is slowing things down, allowing for that space, dwelling in the moment. We arrest our thoughts’ proliferation. We slow down papañca. When it doesn't have anything to feed on, it dies off. It needs nurturing. You probably forgot this already, but the sutra is called The Ball of Honey Discourse. Why is it called The Ball of Honey? At the end of Maha Kapphina’s explanation, the monks go back to the Buddha and tell him what happened. And he says, “I would have answered the same way. Good for Maha Kapphina.” Ananda, the Buddha's cousin and his attendant, is so delighted with this teaching, he says, “It's like a person tasting a bowl of honey and finding a sweet, delectable flavor.” And he says, “In the same way, someone who listens to this teaching to this discourse, and who understands its meaning, they experience confidence, they experience gratification. They're fulfilled.” He asks the Buddha, “What is the sutra called?” And the Buddha answers, “Well, why don't you remember it as The Ball of Honey Discourse?” And I thought, that's so beautiful, just like that [the Buddha] turns poison into ambrosia. He turns the bitter into the sweet. He doesn't even turn it. Really, with a few well chosen words, he shows what was always there and always present, but now, now we can actually taste it.
Explore further
01 : Madhupindika Sutta: The Ball of Honey translated by Thanissaro Bhikku
02 : How to Channel Your Mind’s Inner Chatter by Ethan Kross
03 : Papañcakhaya Sutta: The Ending of Objectification translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu