Two Notions of Non-Conceptuality in Buddhist Meditative Practice

Abstract: This article examines two accounts of how Buddhist meditative practice has been seen as cultivating non-conceptual mental states. The first, exemplified in recent work by Evan Thompson, drawing on Dharmakīrti, views the representational contents of certain meditative states as non-conceptual. The second, found in Yogācāra texts like the Mahāyānasaṃgraha , suggests that meditation cultivates a type of awareness that is non-conceptual ( nirvikalpajñāna ). I argue that while there are strong epistemological and phenomenological arguments against any representational contents being non-conceptual, the view that awareness itself is non-conceptual can avoid these problems. Non-conceptual awareness is best understood, I suggest, as having a reflexive structure akin to later notions of selfawareness ( svasaṃvedana ), which simultaneously establishes it as non-conceptual and vouchsafes it against the challenges facing non-conceptual content accounts. I thus offer a preliminary defense of the view that certain meditative practices cultivate an awareness in which the reflexive, non-conceptual nature of consciousness is revealed.