Two Notions of Nonconceptuality in Buddhist Meditative Practice

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