Varela et al on Mindfulness as Method

We hold with Merleau-Ponty that Western scientific culture requires that we see our bodies both as physical structures and as lived, experiential structures--in short, as both "outer" and "inner," biological and phenomenological. These two sides of embodiment are obviously not opposed. Instead, we continuously circulate back and forth between them. Merleau-Ponty recognized that we cannot understand this circulation without a detailed investigation of its fundamental axis, namely the embodiment of knowledge, cognition, and experience. (xv-xvi)

Papanca and Dependent Origination, Part 2

From Thanissaro Bhikkhu's translation of Paticca-samuppada-vibhanga Sutta: Analysis of Dependent Co-arising

Basic Chain of Dependent origination (also translated as dependent co-arising, co-dependent arising):

And what is dependent co-arising? From ignorance as a requisite condition come fabrications. From fabrications as a requisite condition comes consciousness. From consciousness as a requisite condition comes name-&-form. From name-&-form as a requisite condition come the six sense media. From the six sense media as a requisite condition comes contact. From contact as a requisite condition comes feeling. From feeling as a requisite condition comes craving. From craving as a requisite condition comes clinging/sustenance. From clinging/sustenance as a requisite condition comes becoming. From becoming as a requisite condition comes birth. From birth as a requisite condition, then aging & death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair come into play. Such is the origination of this entire mass of stress & suffering. (SN 12.2)

So:
ignorance-->fabrications
fabrications-->consciousness
consciousness-->namarupa (name and form)
namarupa-->six sense media
six sense media-->contact
contact-->feeling
feeling-->craving
craving-->clinging/sustenance
clinging/sustenance-->becoming
becoming-->birth
birth-->dukkha (aging & death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, despair)

Now, going back to papanca. Here's the sequence that Thanissaro Bhikkhu derives from the Ball of Honey sutta:

contact > feeling > perception > thinking > the perceptions & categories of papañca

So the overlap seems to be the movement from contact (with sense organ) to feeling. In DO, craving comes after feeling. In PAP, perception and thinking (which leads to categorizing) comes after feeling. Craving, I suppose, is a mind state? So both signal the movement from the body to feeling to mind states?

Ah, and in looking back at the entry on defining papanca that "craving" is considered to be one kind of papanca. Says Than Geoff:

The Pali Commentaries define papañca as covering three types of thought: craving, conceit, and views.

Defining papanca

Basically, papanca is the story-making habit of the mind, the process of making complex (part of abstract categories) that which is simple (basic sensory phenomena).

Here's Thanissaro Bhikkhu's note on the meaning of papanca:

Translating papañca: As one writer has noted, the word papañca has had a wide variety of meanings in Indian thought, with only one constant: in Buddhist philosophical discourse it carries negative connotations, usually of falsification and distortion. The word itself is derived from a root that means diffuseness, spreading, proliferating. The Pali Commentaries define papañca as covering three types of thought: craving, conceit, and views. They also note that it functions to slow the mind down in its escape from samsara. And, as our analysis has shown, it functions to create baneful distinctions and unnecessary issues. For these reasons, I have chosen to render the word as "complication," although some of the following alternatives might be acceptable as well: self-reflexive thinking, reification, proliferation, exaggeration, elaboration, distortion.

Papanca and Dependent Origination

What is the relationship between papanca and dependent origination? Both are chains of cause-and-affect (which is what the doctrine of kamma points to--causation). And some of the links in the chain overlap. But they aren't exactly the same. So that raises a question for me, one I'd like to have a better understanding of before giving this presentation.

For now, I want to record what Varela et al. say about causality and the pragmatism of Buddhism:

The Buddha was said to have discovered on the eve of his enlightenment not only the momentariness of the arising of the aggregates but also the entire edifice of causality--the circular structure of habitual patterns, the binding chain, each link of which conditions and is conditioned by each of the others--that constitutes the pattern of human life as a never-ending circular quest to anchor

Papanca

Ah, so what is papanca? I'm suggesting that observing, understanding papanca is a key to undertstanding, to being able to talk about the rhetoric of asignification. So what is it?

For one thing, it is a habit of mind. It is a habit of mind through which, basically, any sensory experience (and, for the Buddha, thinking was a sixth sensory experience) is added to: one thing leads to another, and soon we believe that person's sniff was a dismissal of our ideas. We're ready to fight. Here's how the Buddha put it:

If, monk, with regard to the cause whereby the perceptions & categories of complication assail a person, there is nothing there to relish, welcome, or remain fastened to, then that is the end of the obsessions of passion, the obsessions of resistance, the obsessions of views, the obsessions of uncertainty, the obsessions of conceit, the obsessions of passion for becoming, & the obsessions of ignorance. That is the end of taking up rods & bladed weapons, of arguments, quarrels, disputes, accusations, divisive tale-bearing, & false speech. That is where these evil, unskillful things cease without remainder.

According to the Sutta record, after uttering these somewhat obscure words, the Buddha then retired to his quarters, leaving many of his disciples scratching their heads. So they asked a senior monk who was good at explication what it was the Buddha meant. That monk, Venerable Maha Kaccana, explains the chain of reactions that lead to complications, or "papancizing." He begins with the eye and moves through all the sense doors, ending with thought:

Dependent on eye & forms, eye-consciousness arises. The meeting of the three is contact. With contact as a requisite condition, there is feeling. What one feels, one perceives (labels in the mind). What one perceives, one thinks about. What one thinks about, one complicates. Based on what a person complicates, the perceptions & categories of complication assail him/her with regard to past, present, & future forms cognizable via the eye.

Context/Exigency, Part 2

So my presentation responds to the call to consider "discord," "conflict"--and rhetoric's role in that. I'm looking at the Buddha's practice of avoiding quarreling, of viewing quarrels as a form of unwise speech, speech that does not contribute to the ultimate goal of Nibbana, or liberation--unbinding.

In the Ball of Honey Sutta, the Buddha announces his doctrine to be just that--the kind of doctrine in which one does not go on quarreling. Quarreling, for the Buddha, is the result of papanca, which is sometimes loosely translated as "mental proliferation," a specific habit of the mind that inevitably leads to a sense of a separate, consistent self (Burke's identity?). This sense of self is a conceit bases on comparison--"I" am the same as, not as good as, or better than, the other.

This ability to recognize papanca, to trace its arising and its path to conflict, is to uncover a non-signifying rhetoric, a rhetoric that is prior to division. It is this kind of rhetoric that rhetoric scholar Diane Davis has been calling for in recent years. In her recent RSQ article, "Identification: Burke and Freud on Who You Are," Davis makes this call:

It seems to me that Freud presents rhetorical studies with another, equally important task: to think the limits of reason by tracking the implications—for society, for politics, for ethics—of a radically generalized rhetoricity that precedes and exceeds symbolic intervention. It seems necessary today, at the very least, to begin exploring the sorts of rhetorical analyses that become possible only when identification is no longer presumed to be compensatory to division. (144-145)

So her call is the second part of what I see as the professional context for my presentation. Understanding papanca becomes a way to observe or to "know" in a non-rational way the "rhetoricity that precedes and exceeds symbolic intervention."

Context/Exigency

Here's the original CFP for the conference:

Conference Theme
RHETORIC: CONCORD AND CONTROVERSY

I have often and seriously debated with myself whether men and communities have received more good or evil from oratory and a consuming devotion to eloquence.

Cicero

But put identification and division ambiguously together, so that you cannot know for certain just where one ends and the other begins, and you have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric.

Kenneth Burke

In the de Inventione, Cicero recognizes two opposing dimensions of rhetoric, the one divisive and conflictive, the other irenic and unifying. Kenneth Burke, in characteristic fashion, converts this either/or into a both/and. For him, rhetoric simultaneously divides and unifies, separates as it identifies and dwells most naturally in the in-between space where sameness and difference ambiguously embrace one another. The theme of our conference calls these distinctions and confusions to mind. It asks, among many other things: Does rhetoric civilize? Or does it repress and control? Or both? Does it express the self? Or dissolve it into a cultural miasma? What is the price of community gained through the language of social control? What is the limit of dissent expressed through the language of difference and personal liberation? Where do diversity and sameness meet on the human tongue and in the human condition?

We welcome any and all papers that touch on this theme or that redefine it or reconstruct it or deconstruct it. We also welcome all other papers that deal with any aspect of rhetorical scholarship-historical, theoretical, critical, pedagogical, sophistical or Platonic, Aristotelian or Foucaultian. All are welcome to meet in Minneapolis, a space between the coasts, and a place where nice is the norm, but where nastiness has left it as the only spot in the U.S. where the number of senators has equaled the number of governors for half a year. Celebrate the confusion and the order of Minnesota and of the rhetorical world to which it belongs. Join us at RSA in May.