A Buddhist's guide to self-destruction: Jñānaśrīmitra on the structure of yogic perception

Abstract This article explores the structure of cultivated religious experience. For the Buddhist philosopher Jñānaśrīmitra (c. 980–1040), the religious experience of the Buddhist yogin (yogipratyakṣa) is not spontaneous or sporadic but must be intentionally and rationally cultivated. I argue that Jñānaśrīmitra's picture parallels certain contemporary constructivist accounts of religious experience, according to which the prejudices, expectations, and interpretative structures of the practitioner shape the character of the experience in question. Despite this, however, Jñānaśrīmitra maintains that religious experience is direct, non-conceptual, and ineffable. Even though cultivation begins by focusing on rationally understood, effable conceptual content (the Buddha's teaching of the Four Nobles' Truths, for instance), the yogin's relation to that content is transformed through cultivation (bhāvanā). Cultivation makes awareness-events with conceptual content vivid (spaṣṭa) in such a way that they lose their conceptual character, coming to affect the practitioner's mind as if they were external to it. In this way, precisely in virtue of beginning the process of cultivation with certain expectations about the Buddha's teaching, Buddhist yogins come to have a direct and non-conceptual experience of the breakdown of their own mental streams and the dissolution of the sense of self.

The transformative experience of Buddhist yogins is not something that just happens.It is not something that can be revealed to a person walking in nature or sitting alone, at the foot of a tree, mind stilled.It is not 'sporadic' or 'spontaneous', as William James and W. T. Stace suggested religious experience can be. 1 It is not even accessible to a person who has not put in a considerable amount of the right kind of work.Given the nature of our existential predicament, and given the structure of this transformative experience itself, it arises only after the intentional and sustained cultivation (bhāvanā) of certain truths.It must result from a 'methodical cultivation', as James put it; or, in terms Agnes Callard has used more recently, it is the result of a type of transformative activity rather than a transformative revelation. 2 At least, all this is what mainstream Buddhist epistemologists working in first-millennium India would have us believe.I'd like to consider here why they thought this was true and what their view might teach us about the rationality and structure of transformative religious experience. 3

Yogic perception
In Buddhism, the religious experience that transforms us is an experience that presents things as they truly are: as suffering, as impermanent, and so on.It is the experience of things as the Buddha taught them to be in his Four Truths of the Noble Ones, or Four Nobles' Truths (caturāryasatya). 4Buddhist epistemologists in the tradition of Dharmakīrti (c.550-650) 5 call this experience 'yogic perception', yogipratyaks ̣a. 6This is, first, a source of knowledge ( pramān ̣a).As such, it is trustworthy: it reliably leads a person to their goal.As a type of perception ( pratyaks ̣a), it is an episode of knowledge that is direct.Unlike other cognitive states like judgements or beliefs, perception's content is nonconceptual.It does not involve the subject-predicate structure typical of inferential knowledge (anumāna).While it might ground inferential knowledge and conventional ways of speaking and acting, its immediate content is inexpressible and totally unique.
Buddhists consider there to be a number of such types of perception, paradigmatically sensory perception.But an instance of perception is yogic if it results from a yogin's distinctive training; that is, as Dharmakīrti puts it, if it 'arises when the development of the cultivation of a real object is completed'. 7The yogin cultivates some objectmeditates on it, attends to it, brings it to mind again and again 8 until it finally becomes perfectly vivid (spas ̣t ̣a, sphut ̣a), as if it were an object of sensory perception right in the palm of one's hand. 9Such direct experience of a cultivated object, where that object is real, is an instance of yogic perception.The qualifier, 'real', is important: for Dharmakīrti and his tradition, it's taken for granted that the power of the imagination is such that anything can be made vivid after a long period of contemplation.If I think long and hard enough, I might have a vivid experience of pink elephants, but that doesn't count as yogic perception.The 'real object' cultivated in the course of developing yogic perception is one or another aspect of the Buddha's teaching that all things are suffering, impermanent, and so on.Awakening is brought about through the direct realization of the real things that are referred to by the Buddha's teaching.
This picture of yogic perception, however, poses a problem for Dharmakīrti's epistemology.As we'll see, in order to ensure that the object of yogic perception is real, Dharmakīrti claims that the practitioner needs to begin with inferential knowledge of the Four Nobles' Truths and only then undertake the cultivation of yogic perception.But inferential knowledge has conceptual content.So, we have a problem: how can that conceptual content give rise to the kind of non-conceptual content that is proper to yogic perception?What does this shift look like?
In what follows, I'll consider first the ways Buddhist epistemologists defended the rationality of cultivating yogic perception.Then, focusing on the account of the eleventhcentury philosopher Jñānaśrīmitra (c.980-1040), I'll turn to the structure of cultivation itself.This will help us better understand his solution to the problem yogic perception poses for Dharmakīrti's system.Finally, bringing these two points together, we'll see why the transformative experience that comes at the end of this cultivation, a direct experience of momentariness, cannot be revealed but can only result from the transformative activity of cultivation.

Rationality
Consider our existential predicament, as posed by Buddhists.Everything is in fact impermanent.Nothing lasts more than a moment.Yet we each experience ourselves as enduring selves: there is some meaningful sense in which I will be the same tomorrow as I am today.This experience need not be a belief in something metaphysically robust; the mere fact that I favour my own future happiness more than that of others betrays my belief that that future happiness will be 'my own', or will belong to a being with a special connection to the 'me' who acts now. 10 For Buddhists, this experience of self (satkāyadr ̣s ̣t ̣i, ātmadarśana, sattvadarśana, etc.) is the source of all our problems, our dissatisfaction, and our pain (duh ̣kha).It's the reason that, as the Buddha famously put it in the first of his Four Nobles' Truths, everything is suffering.Our desires for happiness will never be satisfied and yet, precisely in virtue of the experience of self, we cannot help but have such desires.And so our experience of self constitutes what's often referred to as 'ignorance' (avidyā): 11 not just a lack of knowledge, but a positive occlusion, a myopic lens that distorts the rest of our experience.
This experience of self is deeply ingrained.It is instinctual, a habit we have formed over the beginningless series of rebirths known as saṃ sāra.Because it is so deeply ingrained, and because it is a positive occlusion distorting our experience, a direct experience of impermanence, or an 'experience of selflessness' (nairātmyadarśana), cannot just reveal itself to us.If it could, it would reveal itself to us at every momentif the Buddha is right, we (and everything else) are always already selfless, after all.Instead, our ignorance fundamentally shapes our experience of ourselves and our world.And so for there to be some direct experience of impermanence, we need to remove the occlusion of ignorance.We need to change our experiential habits. 12or Dharmakīrtians, the cultivation of yogic perception is a crucial part of this change.Yet a prudent person ( preks ̣āvat) will act only after considering reasons for acting and the appropriateness of particular actions in relation to a desired goal.What will motivate such a person to cultivate yogic perception?One who has not understood that continued existence is suffering will not see this as rational behaviour.Only a person who has understood this Truth will seek to eliminate suffering and its cause.One begins, then, by listening to the Buddha's teaching and reflecting on it.When it has become clear that everything is suffering, a prudent person then comes to understand that its cause is the experience of self; that its antidote, the experience of selflessness, destroys that experience of self; and that it thus brings the cause of suffering, and so suffering, to an end. 13his understanding is the result of rational inquiry, yukticintā, or a process of inference, anumāna.It results from reasoning through the Four Nobles' Truthsin the first place, the truth that all things are impermanent (anitya).For Buddhist epistemologists and their non-Buddhist opponents, the theory of 'momentariness', ks ̣an ̣ikatva, or the view that anything that exists exists only a moment, became synonymous with the Buddha's teaching of impermanence in mid-to late first-millennium South Asia. 14So, in this milieu, a prudent person will undertake the cultivation of yogic perception only after proving for themselves that all things are momentary.This is an eminently conceptual exercise: it involves putting forward an argument in defence of the view that the property of momentariness can be predicated of all things, and then defending that argument against imagined (or in many cases real) objections.It results in the conceptually mediated knowledge that the theory of momentariness is true.As such, this knowledge provides the object of the practitioner's cultivation, grounding the subsequent yogic perception of momentariness as an instance of knowledge and not a mere hallucination.As we noted above, Dharmakīrti is quite clear that the cultivation of anything can result in a vividly manifest awareness-event. 15So, it is only in virtue of the inferential certainty that all things possess the property of momentariness that a subsequent direct awareness of momentariness might count as knowledge. 16here has revelatory experience gone in all this?Isn't it at least possible that, through the darkness of the experience of self, a glimpse of momentariness might shine through?Isn't it conceivable that the transformative experience of selflessness might sometimes be spontaneous?Unlike many other Buddhists, Buddhist epistemologists like Dharmakīrti thought not.Not only is the darkness almost inconceivably thick, making such spontaneous revelation difficult to imagine; the nature of transformative religious experience itself, the process of its development and its target, is such that it can only ever be trained.Let's turn to the structure of this process to see why.

Structure
We come now to the cultivation of yogic perception proper.As we've just seen, this is preceded by acquiring the inferential knowledge that all things possess the property of momentariness.Let's call this the preparatory stage in the cultivation of yogic perception. 17t the subsequent stage of the cultivation of yogic perception proper, one comes to know momentariness directly, and not just that all things possess this property.But now, the problem we saw at the start of this article rears its head.Yogic perception, according to Dharmakīrti, is an instance of non-conceptual knowledge that is attained at the completion of an active process of cultivation regarding some real object.How can one know, in a way that is not mediated by concepts, that all things possess the property of momentariness?Must not that knowledge involve at least that concept?
Yes and no.As Jñānaśrīmitra understands it in An Essay on the Definitive Proof of Yogic Perception (Yoginirn ̣ayaprakaran ̣a, or YNP), yogic perception might be thought of as postconceptual instead of non-conceptual. 18In the process of the cultivation of a property (dharmabhāvanā or tattvabhāvanā, in Jñānaśrīmitra's usage here), a stream of conceptual awareness-events come to act on each other so as to efface their conceptual character.At the completion of the process, the generic property is no longer present as such, or as predicated of things; instead, the repeated contemplation of the generic property has changed the mental stream of the practitioner.A non-conceptual knowledge that all things possess some property would indeed be incoherent.But that's not what's happening here.Instead, the cultivation of momentariness results in a non-conceptual awareness-event that is affected just by the mental stream itself.
In Jñānaśrīmitra's handling, this process is a bit convoluted.Yet he explains it with a pedestrian example: learning to like neem.Despite its being a popular dish in his native Bengal, Jñānaśrīmitra assumes that people will not naturally like the bitter flavour of cooked neem leaves. 19Cultivating the experience of neem as agreeable (or, more precisely, cultivating the property of agreeableness, with respect to neem) is thus comparable to cultivating a direct experience of momentariness: the experience of this property is not one we naturally have, but rather takes repeated effort.
As we think with Jñānaśrīmitra through his use of this example, we can distinguish three steps in the process of the cultivation of a property, even though Jñānaśrīmitra himself does not systematically distinguish these three steps. 20The process begins by imaginatively attributing to a thing a property that it doesn't have.Let's call this first step attribution. 21For whatever reasonperhaps because one's parents enjoy it and say that it's tastyone imagines that neem has the property of agreeableness ( priyatva) whenever one tastes it.One does this repeatedly.Over time, agreeableness becomes the manifest content of one's experience whenever one tastes neem.The neem itself fades from view: it is no longer the manifest content of the experience, no longer what the experience is really of.The experience is just of the neem's being agreeable. 22his happens because of the second step.In the process of (we might say) convincing oneself that neem bears this property, one habituates oneself to repeatedly turning attention away from the thing and towards agreeableness.Let's call this second step habituation.What it means for this attributed property, agreeableness, to be vividly manifest (sphut ̣ābhatā) at the end of this habituation is for an awareness-event that apprehends neem to have an agreeable phenomenal character automatically ( jhagiti), or without effort ( yatnam anapeks ̣ya). 23One has formed the habit of attending just to the attributed property, not to the thing.But this agreeableness isn't really part of the neem itself; neem doesn't really possess this property, or else everyone would find neem agreeable the same way we see its colour or taste its bitterness.Rather, agreeableness is just a property of certain awareness-events that arise in a continuum suitably habituated to turning attention towards that attributed property when neem is present.
Two steps in to Jñānaśrīmitra's example, we can pause to compare it to the case of momentariness.Suppose I am a prudent person.I should start by learning about suffering and its cause from the Buddha's teaching and coming to know, through inference, that everything is momentary.Then, if I sit at the foot of a mountain and contemplate even that as being momentary, repeatedly turning my attention towards momentariness in the presence of the mountain, awareness-events directed towards the mountain will come to be of the mountain's being momentary automatically, without effort.The manifest content of my experience as I gaze out on the mountain will be, simply, momentariness. 24So far, then, there is just this difference between the two cases: while I cannot establish through inference that neem bears the property of agreeableness, I can prove that the mountain, like all things, bears the property of momentariness.Otherwise, the two processes are the same.
In effect, this second step suggests a solution to the problem the theory of yogic perception poses for Dharmakīrti's epistemology.The shift from the conceptual knowledge of the truth that all things possess the property of momentariness, to an instance of nonconceptual awareness takes place as the yogin gradually redirects their attention towards their own awareness-events.When the attributed property is being predicated of the various objects of experience ('This neem is agreeable', 'Even that mountain is momentary', etc.), the awareness is plainly conceptual.But when the property alone is vividly manifest, it no longer appears as a property predicated of some distinct subject. 25There's just an awareness-event with some particular manifest content.The fact that this content happens to be a generic property is beside the point.Just insofar as its content is manifest, the awareness-event no longer bears the representational structure proper to conceptual awareness. 26ut the vivid manifestation of some generic property isn't the end of this process.Jñānaśrīmitra next comes to the third step.Let's call it perception.At the culmination of the second step, the manifest content of the experience is just the generic property in question.Now, one finally comes to be affected by that property.Returning to neem: something is agreeable just in case it causes pleasure.Jñānaśrīmitra tells us that that's what 'agreeableness' really means. 27A person can be said to find neem agreeable, then, as Jñānaśrīmitra puts it, if 'that object, as an auxiliary causal condition, produces pleasure in reliance upon that person's mental stream suitably prepared by cultivation, which is the material cause [of that pleasure]'. 28The manifest content of the experience is now just pleasure: not the neem, and not the generic property.The neem helps bring about this experience.But the primary cause of the experience of pleasure is 'the mental stream suitably prepared by cultivation' (cittasantānaṃ bhāvanāparis ̣kr ̣tam)which is to say, the mental stream that has gotten into the habit of attending to a particular property in the presence of certain things.The force of the stream of consciousness, the momentum of its habits, is really what causes pleasure.This happens, again, automatically ( jhagiti), without effort ( yatnam anapeks ̣ya), naturally (svarasatah ̣): a moment of awareness, when tasting neem, is caused by habituation to arise with agreeableness alone as its content; this in turn gives rise to an awareness-event that has pleasure as its phenomenal form. 29This happens with the same passivity we attribute to ordinary instances of sensory perception.Yet in this case, rather than passively perceiving external colours and shapes, it is one moment of the mental stream that affects the next.
Here's how the whole process works.The stream of consciousness is a series of causally related awareness-events.At the first step of the process, attribution, one attributes to certain things a property that is not immediately intersubjectively available, imagining that things have this property.At the second step, habituation, there is the effortful turning of attention away from the things and towards the property in question.Gradually, as one gets into this habit of attention, the manifest content of experience when in the vicinity of those things comes to be nothing but the property itself.The mind's phenomenal form when tasting neem becomes simply agreeableness.But all it means for something (here, a particular awareness-event) to be agreeable is for it to cause pleasure.The next moment in the mental series, then, is pleasure, caused not by the neem but by the preceding moment, itself the culmination of a gradual training of attention.This becomes so effortless that it is as if one perceives the propertyone is immediately receptive to it and affected by it as if it were outside oneselfdespite the fact that what really causes the perception is the preceding awareness-event.
Now consider momentariness.One first comes to know inferentially, at the preparatory stage, that everything is momentary.Then, one imaginatively attributes the property, momentariness, to any object of one's experience.One attends to that property whenever the attribution is made.Gradually, as one gets into this habit of attention, whatever objects one encounters, momentariness alone becomes the manifest content of the experience.At this point, the awareness is already non-conceptual.At the final step, perception, the mental stream takes on a force of its own: one moment of awareness, whose manifest content is momentariness, has its effect on the next.That effect is to give the next moment of awareness a fleeting, broken, disjointed form (trut ̣yadrūpa): that, we might say, is what 'momentariness' really means.One then experiences not a continuous self, but rather a discontinuous series of disjointed awareness-events.This does not happen in a vacuum.All the while, one is encountering through sensory perception the sorts of things one has always encountered.Now, however, something remarkable happens: one's experience, primarily caused by the force of one's own mental stream, now lines up with the way those things really are.From scriptural learning and rational inquiry at the preparatory stage, the yogin knows conceptually that the nature of things is fleeting, broken, disjointed.The form they would naturally present to us, were we not mired in ignorance, would be such.So, at the completion of the yogin's cultivation, the form of things is unchanged: they were always fleeting and continue to be so.But now, the cultivated mental stream of the yogin is aligned so as to experience that fleeting form too, as a result of its own momentum. 30ñānaśrīmitra gives a vivid illustration of what this experience is like and the effect it has on the yogin's behaviour.He writes: Therefore, when the cultivation of the property, momentariness, has come to completion, too, all that is experienced by the yogin takes on a fleeting form (trut ̣yadrūpa) that is quite distinct from the experience of beings like us.For us, experience tracks a very clear distinction between two iron balls that are in distinct places, 31 even though they are nearly identical, and conceptualization follows immediately in accordance with that experience and action takes place in accordance with it; it is the same for the yogin regarding two things that occur at distinct moments, with respect to the yogin's experience and subsequent conceptualization.And the yogin's mind is not tarnished by the blemish of desire and so on that arises out of the error of thinking that things are stable and so on.So (iti), the vivid manifestation of momentariness consists in just this much. 32f we were to place two identical iron balls on a table before us, we would have no trouble distinguishing them, and our judgements and activities would follow effortlessly from the experience of their distinction.Distinguishing two moments of things in the world is not so easy.We naturally assume each of those iron balls to be unchanging from moment to moment; in the same way, we take what we assume to be our selves to be continuous, without any sharp disjunction from one moment to the next.On Jñānaśrīmitra's account, however, yogins have cultivated momentariness so as to experience directly the disjointed nature of their own minds.
This experience has profound effects on the yogin's judgements and actions.In the first place, they effortlessly determine everything they encounter to be momentary in their subsequent conceptual awareness-events.Such spontaneous judgements, Jñānaśrīmitra says elsewhere, are 'impossible to obtain' without proper cultivation; it is a special mark of yogic perception that it results in such judgements without a moment's reflection or doubt. 33Further, the untrained desire things and seek satisfaction that they think will be their own precisely because they do not see the difference between distinct moments of things or of their own mental streams.But yogins labour under no such delusion.They see the difference between every moment of consciousness as plainly as we see the difference between the iron balls, and so any form of prudential desire can't begin to arise.The direct experience of momentariness thus brings about dispassion or desirelessness (vairāgya): for Dharmakīrtians, one of the fundamental characteristics of buddhahood.

Cultivated transformative experience
We're now poised to see why, for these philosophers, the liberative knowledge of the way things really are that is gained by Buddhist yogins must result from a process of cultivation and cannot simply be revealed.One cannot know what it's like to experience momentariness without actively engaging in the threefold process of cultivation I've outlined here, comprising attribution, habituation, and perception.This is so because the experience of momentariness is finally caused by the cultivated mental stream itself, not by momentary things.This is part of the reason, I think, that Jñānaśrīmitra chooses the agreeableness of neem as his example.He could well have chosen a more straightforward case of perceptual learning: learning to see subtle facets in gems, for instance, or to taste subtle flavours in wine. 34Learning to perceive the gem's facets or the wine's flavours only requires the training of sensory perception: the facets or flavours are there, but, without practice, one does not know how to discern them and attend to them.Jñānaśrīmitra, however, insists that yogic perception is fundamentally distinct from sensory perception, trained or otherwise.It is not just training attention towards things that are in principle available to the senses.Yogic perception is rather the result of training attention towards attributed properties.By considering the cultivation of the agreeableness of neem, a property that he and his opponents agree is not in fact a property of the thing in question, he is able to highlight the mind's central role in the process of cultivation.The experience of pleasure when tasting neem might have the object, neem, as an auxiliary causal condition, but it is really caused by the mental stream itself when it is cultivated as having a certain property.
So, too, is the experience of momentariness.Coming to know through inference that things are momentary does not have any effect on my experience, just as someone telling me that neem is agreeable won't make its taste pleasurable. 35And things, for Jñānaśrīmitra, are always already imparting their fleeting form to the senses, yet that too does not give me a direct experience of momentariness.So we need to locate the cause of the experience elsewhere than in testimony, inference, or sensory experience.Consideration of the process of cultivation shows us that we can only locate this cause in the suitably cultivated mental stream itself.It's just that, in the case of momentariness, inference provides us with the added certainty that things do in fact correspond to the disjointed way one's mind finally takes experiential shape. 36here are many ways we might think about transformative religious experience.We might consider it to be spontaneous, sporadic, or revealed, overwhelming a person without warning, giving them phenomenal knowledge unlike any they had ever had, and thereby causing them to reshape the rest of their life.It is often described this way, but it may never really be so simple.Constructivists have argued for decades now that any religious experience involves both stimuli of one sort or another and the prejudices, expectations, and interpretative structures of the perceiver, and that those interpretative structures are operative not just after the fact but before and during the experience. 37hey give the experience form, shaping its phenomenal content from the start.Jñānaśrīmitra would, I think, agree: not that religious experience is conceptual, as some constructivists argue, but more precisely that it is brought about by the active work of the mind rather than spontaneously revealed.For Jñānaśrīmitra, it is the result of a transformative activity, engaged in intentionally by prudent persons convinced that a certain experience is necessary in order to bring about desirelessness and an end to suffering.It takes the long and focused cultivation of imagined, attributed properties and the gradual rehabituation of attention.Because its cause is ultimately just the practitioner's mental stream itself undergoing this active process, the transformative experience of momentariness can only ever be cultivated.

[The problem]
[Objection:] [. ..]What sense does it make to say that the property (dharma) of a thing is made vividly manifest, but the thing (vastu) is not?For cultivation encompasses both.Or else, what is the vivid manifestation of a property alone like for one who is not in contact with the property-possessor (dharmin)?This painting in the sky surely will bring no assurance even to the humble farmer.

[An initial solution]
[Reply:] This is not a problem, for it is observed that there is the vivid manifestation (sphut ̣ībhāva) of a property alone, even for one who is not in contact with the vivid manifestation of the property-possessor.It's just that that vivid manifestation doesn't take place without an association ( pratyāsatti) with the thing.Vivid manifestation is just the manifestation of this or that phenomenal form in a person's awareness automatically, without depending on any effort towards reaching the object of that person's thought.However, dependence upon an association with the thing does not vanish just because of its being a property (dharmatvād eva). 38It is like the case of agreeableness ( priyatva). 39To explain: First, agreeableness is repeatedly cultivated regarding, for instance, the taste of neem, and it is observed to become manifest.But it is not the case that neem has such a property.So, through the cultivation of that property, neem too (whether at its place of origin or on the tip of the tongue (rasanāgrasan ̇gi) 40 ) is vividly manifestfor so long as one's practice of a conflicting cultivation is not perfected.And it is not the case that the vividly manifest agreeableness is apprehended separately, independent of the experience of the neem; rather, whenever there is the experience of neem, agreeableness automatically becomes the object of the experience, and so there is neither distaste for neem as before, nor indifference to it.This alone is the meaning of the vivid manifestation of a property.For even when a thing, such as [a love-sick man's] beloved, has become vividly manifest [as he has cultivated the mental image of her], it is not the case that the vivid manifestation of a property (tattva) is established at that same time. 41In the same way, the vivid manifestation of a thing is not established at that same time due to the cultivation of a property, even though both [things and properties] do not deviate from each other.What is the problem here?
[Is the cultivated property a property of awareness?] [Objection:] Agreeableness is not a property of the external thing because it is not intersubjectively shared and because it is based on cultivation.
[Reply:] But what then has this property?A property like agreeableness is impossible to deny insofar as it is experienced for oneself ( pratyātmavedya).
[Objection:] It belongs to awareness.[Reply:] What kind of reasoning is this that says that the cultivated agreeableness of an external thing is vividly manifest as belonging to awareness?The content of the cultivation takes the form, 'This neem is excellent', 42 not, 'The awareness of neem is excellent'.Further, 43 if there were really the vivid manifestation of just awareness itself as being agreeable, a person would never experience anything disagreeable, for it is not the case that awareness is only sometimes present, as external objects are.
[Objection:] There is the manifestation of agreeableness only on the part of some awareness-events.[Reply:] But what makes this distinction?If it is made by habituation, then the distinction will apply only where there is habituationthat is, only regarding the external object.If the distinction does not require that, because there would be nothing to be associated with or separated from, the mind alone would become the support [of the property, agreeableness,] and so there would be no distinction at all [between agreeable and disagreeable awareness-events].But [if there is such a distinction only] given the external object, neem of a particular kind is made the object of cultivation, so there is no over-extension.In that case, only an awareness-event that has as its scope (gocara) the cultivated neem is closely associated ( pratyāsanna) [with neem].So, there is a distinction [between agreeable and disagreeable awareness-events].But if that is so, this follows: When one thing is cultivated with a particular form, then, setting aside that thing, something else in close association with it would become manifest.So, it would absurdly follow that a man who cultivates the image of his beloved would have the vivid manifestation not of his beloved but only of her father, or other family members who have a close association with her.
[Objection:] An intentional object (vis ̣aya) has some special close association with an awareness-event that possesses that intentional object.[Reply:] Even so, when neem is cultivated as being agreeable, it is the awareness of neem that manifests as agreeable.So, as before, the neem would not be agreeable at all.With respect to snakes and so on, which are not agreeable, it is only the certainty regarding them (insofar as it is the condition for avoiding them) that is agreeable, not the snakes.This case would be the same.So, cultivation would be pointless.

[A more promising hypothesis]
Or else your hypothesis might be this: 'Due to the power of cultivation, an awareness-event having neem as its intentional object (tadvis ̣ayaṃ jñānam) arises simply as having an agreeable phenomenal form ( priyākāram eva)'.If this were so, then it will follow that the statement, 'The taste of neem is cultivated as agreeable', would mean that the awareness having that as its object is cultivated as having an agreeable phenomenal form.The vivid manifestation of agreeableness (tasya) is the manifestationautomatically ( jhagiti), without effort ( yatnam anapeks ̣ya)of an agreeable phenomenal form when in the vicinity of that object, neem (tadvis ̣aya-), on the part of an awareness-event that apprehends it; it is not the direct manifestation of an object alone that is not in the vicinity.In the same way, 'A mountain and so on, too, is cultivated as momentary', means that an awareness with such things as its object is cultivated as having a momentary phenomenal form.The manifestation of that, too, is the arising of a momentary phenomenal form when in the vicinity of the mountain on the part of the awareness that apprehends it; but it is not the case that a mountain, too, that is not in the vicinity becomes manifest.And this very 44 cultivation of a property depends on word-meaning, so there is no harm done to the real things at stake.

[What the cultivation of a property really amounts to]
However, in reality (vastutas), agreeableness is simply the property of bringing about pleasure (sukhakaratva).In that case, if a person cultivates agreeableness with respect to a certain object, that object, as an auxiliary causal condition, produces pleasure in reliance upon that person's mental stream suitably prepared by cultivation, which is the material cause.This being established, there is not agreeableness with respect to everything. 45ut the property of bringing about pleasure 46 is a property of only that mental stream, and so there is no fault that it occurs to everyone.That property, moreover, occurs only due to habituation (abhyāsād eva).In the same way, [the same thinking] should be applied also in the case of mental properties like compassion and so on (kr ̣pādis ̣u mānases ̣u dharmes ̣u).Due to the cultivation of rescuing others who are sufferingwhich takes the form, 'I will save those who suffer'there is the vivid manifestation [of compassion], which is just the awareness of that (tajjñānaṃ ) 47 that arises automatically in the presence of that object and is the cause of a rush of action in accordance with it.In the same way, in the case of the cultivation of a skull as pure, 48 the vivid manifestation of indifference (nairghr ̣n ̣ya) alone should be experienced when coming upon a skull.However, it is not the case that there is the manifestation [of such mental properties] together with some thing to which it is related, whether or not that thing is closely associated.As I said in my Proof of Omniscience, 49 'This excellence achieved by awakening, compassion, and so on does not in any way require effort directed towards the presence of its object; it naturally (svarasatah ̣) unfolds for each being'.
Therefore, when the cultivation of the property, momentariness, has come to completion, too, all that is experienced by the yogin takes on a fleeting form (trut ̣yadrūpa) that is quite distinct from the experience of beings like us.For us, experience tracks a very clear distinction between two iron balls that are in distinct places, 50 even though they are nearly identical, and conceptualization follows immediately in accordance with that experience and action takes place in accordance with it; it is the same for the yogin regarding two things that occur at distinct moments, with respect to the yogin's experience and subsequent conceptualization.And the yogin's mind is not tarnished by the blemish of desire and so on that arises out of the error of thinking that things are stable and so on.So (iti), the vivid manifestation of momentariness consists in just this much.
Notes 21.This step, I think, is usefully thought of in terms of constructivist accounts of mystical experience.Attribution takes up and applies the new conceptual content that will serve to recondition the mind.We'll come to this point in the conclusion.See Katz (1978) for a classic defence of this view.Compare Katz's statement on yoga, too, which (regardless of what Patañjali would think) Dharmakīrtians would happily accept: 'Properly understood, yoga [. ..] is not an unconditioning or deconditioning of consciousness, but rather it is a reconditioning of consciousness, i.e. a substituting of one form of conditioned and/or contextual consciousness for another, albeit a new, unusual, and perhaps altogether more interesting form of conditioned-contextual consciousness' (Katz (1978), 57).Compare the recent discussion in P. Connolly (2019), 37-43.22.As Jñānaśrīmitra puts it, 'It's not the case that a separate, vividly manifest agreeableness is apprehended independently of the experience of neem; rather, whenever there is an experience of neem, agreeableness is automatically the intentional object of that experience'.YNP 325.6-8: na ca sphut ̣ībhūtaṃ priyatvam api tat ̣astham upalabhyate nimbādyanubhavam anapeks ̣ya, kiṃ tu yadā yadā nimbādyanubhavah ̣ tadā tadā jhagiti priyatvam anubhavavis ̣ayah ̣.Note that, as Jñānaśrīmitra revises this view at YNP 325.27-326.2, he will move from the language of priyatva being an anubhavavis ̣aya to its being an ākāra.Note, too, that Woo (2006) reads the paragraph starting at YNP 325.27 as a long objection in his Korean translation of the text.(My thanks to Bhiks ̣u Hejung of the University of Hamburg for this observation.)I take it instead that Jñānaśrīmitra is just entertaining a hypothesis (kalpanā) here and that he would, to an extent, accept the view of things presented at YNP 325.27-326.5.This paragraph of Jñānaśrīmitra's YNP presents what we might understand as the second step of the process of cultivation, whereas the following paragraph, beginning with vastutas, presents the causal story of this cultivation's effect on the practitioner's mental stream.23.YNP 326.1-2:   sphut ̣ābhatāpi tasya tadvis ̣ayopanidhau tadgrāhijñānasya jhagiti yatnam anapeks ̣ya priyākārasphuran ̣am, na vis ̣ayasyaivāsannihitasya sāks ̣ādbhāvah ̣.
The vivid manifestation of agreeableness (tasya) is the manifestationautomatically, without effortof an agreeable phenomenal form when in the vicinity of that object, neem (tadvis ̣aya-), on the part of an awareness-event that apprehends it; it is not the direct manifestation of simply an object that is not in the vicinity.
In the same way, 'A mountain and so on, too, is cultivated as momentary', means that an awareness with such things as its object is cultivated as having a momentary phenomenal form.The manifestation of that, too, is the arising of a momentary phenomenal form when in the vicinity of the mountain on the part of the awareness that apprehends it; but it is not the case that a mountain, too, that is not in the vicinity becomes manifest.

25.
Compare Dunne (2006), 512-513, where he writes: And as a mental event, that phenomenal content [of even conceptual awareness-events] is a real mental particular that can be known in its nature as a mental event through reflexive awareness (svasaṃ vitti).In relation to that reflexive awareness, however, the content no longer appears to stand for something else; that is, it is no longer conceptual.In other words, as that which is known through reflexive awareness, every cognitioneven every conceptual cognitionis a mental particular.
As such, it is a viable object of perception in Dharmakīrti's system.26.In the background here is Jñānaśrīmitra's distinction between content that is a direct appearance ( pratibhāsa) and content that is determined (adhyavasita).See McCrea (2022); Tomlinson (2022).McCrea (2022), 558-559, gives a concise statement of the distinction: All awareness, both conceptual and nonconceptual, consists in the appearance of a certain image (ākāra) in our consciousness.Conceptual awareness is that which, through the process of determination, takes one or more of the cognitions containing these phenomenal images to be intentionalthat is, to contain or present images of something other than themselves.All such intentional determinations are erroneousnothing exists apart from the mental images themselvesbut all worldly activity and belief, and all language, relies inescapably upon these ultimately false determinative projections.
27. See YNP 326.6: vastutas tu priyatvaṃ nāma sukhakaratvam.28.YNP 326.6-7: yadvis ̣aye yasya priyatvabhāvanā taccittasantānaṃ bhāvanāparis ̣kr ̣tam upādānam upādāya sa vis ̣ayah ̣ sahakārī sukham utpādayati.In full: 'If a person cultivates agreeableness with respect to a certain object, that object, as an auxiliary causal condition, produces pleasure in reliance upon that person's mental stream suitably prepared by cultivation, which is the material cause.' 29.Compare Dharmakīrti's discussion of the cultivation of mental properties (cittadharma) like compassion, PV 2.120-131ab.There, in the course of arguing that mental properties can be cultivated to a practically infinite degree (unlike other skills, like jumping), Dharmakīrti stresses the way mental properties take on a momentum of their own when they are cultivated, becoming the very nature of the practitioner's mind.Particularly relevant are vv.124-126:kāṣṭapāradahemāder agnyāder iva cetasi / abhyāsajāḥ pravartante svarasena kṛpādayaḥ // tasmāt sa teṣām utpannaḥ svabhāvo jāyate guṇaḥ / taduttarottaro yatno viśeṣasya vidhāyakaḥ // yasmāc ca tulyajātīya-pūrvabījapravṛddhayaḥ / kṛpādibuddhyas tāsāṃ saty abhyāse kutaḥ sthitiḥ // Compassion [and other mental properties (cittadharma), like pity, dispassion, and desire], arising due to cultivation in the mind, act through their own inclination (svarasena), just like fire and so on applied to things like wood, mercury, and gold.Therefore, a quality (gun ̣a) [like compassion] that is produced on the part of those [practitioners] becomes the nature (svabhāva) [of their mind].Thus, each further effort produces greater intensity.Since thoughts of compassion and so on multiply out of former seeds that are of the same kind, how could a limit be placed upon them when they are cultivated?Compare Nagatomi (1957), 129-135.Nagatomi there helpfully discusses the examples in v.124, comparing Prajñākaragupta's and Manorathanandin's interpretations.30.See YNP 330.1: tad evaṃ yogijñāne tattvabhāvanādhikārād arthākāro 'rthakr ̣ta eva.'This being so, the phenomenal form of the object, which [appears] in the yogin's awareness due to the power of the cultivation of a property, is made by the object itself.'It may appear as if Jñānaśrīmitra is contradicting himself here, saying that the phenomenal form of the object is (1) made just by the object itself and (2) due to the power or sovereignty (adhikāra) of the cultivation of some property (tattva), but I do not think this is the case.Jñānaśrīmitra has argued in the preceding that it really is the object alone that imparts its momentary, fleeting form on the senses; the problem is that the mind, without suitable cultivation, does not itself take on that form, and so the mind has to be cultivated such that it does.Compare the conclusion at YNP 329.16-19:   yāvat tena śakyam adhigantuṃ svākārārpan ̣asahaṃ sahakāri vastu tāvad itarajanāsādhāran ̣atrut ̣yadrūpatayā tasya gocarībhavati.tathā ca sati vastvākāro vastukr ̣ta eva na bhāvanājanita iti na visaṃ vādaśan ̇kā.
Insofar as the yogin is able to understand that the thing, the auxiliary causal condition, is able to impart its own phenomenal form, the thing becomes the scope of the yogin's experience as being a fleeting form that is not common to other people.And it being so, the phenomenal form of the thing is made by the thing alone; it is not born from cultivation.So there is no worry about the yogin's perception being misleading.I am summarizing here my understanding of a very complex discussion about the relation between indriyajñāna and yogijñāna.See YNP 327.8-329.27;compare SS 22.27-23-8.For Prajñākaragupta's understanding of this problem in relation to omniscience, which is in the background of Jñānaśrīmitra's account, see Shinya Moriyama  (2014), 55-74.31.Read atyantasadṛśe 'pi golakadvaye bhinnadeśe with the correction in Franco (2008), against atyantasadr ̣śe 'pi bhinnadeśa-in Thakur (1959).32.YNP 326.16-20: tasmāt ks ̣an ̣ikatvadharmābhyāse'pi prakars ̣agāmini yāvad anubhavitavyam anena tāvat trut ̣yadrūpam asmadādidarśanavilaks ̣an ̣am eva.yathāsmākam atyantasadṛśe 'pi golakadvaye bhinnadeśe i paṭutarabhedānukāri darśanaṃ vikalpaś ca jhagity eva tathā syāt, anuṣṭhānaṃ vā tadanurūpam, evaṃ yoginaḥ kṣaṇabhedini bhāvadvaye darśanavikalpau.sthairyādibhramodbhavarāgādikalaṅkānaṅkitaṃ cāsya ceta iti iyatī tasya sphuṭābhatā.i As noted just above, I've corrected the text here in accordance with Franco (2008).33.See YNP 328.6-8: bhedapaks ̣e i 'pi na tāvat sthairyetarasphur ̣an ̣akr ̣topālambha-saṃ bhavah ̣ indriyajñānenāpi vastu sarvātmanā gr ̣hnatā trut ̣yadrūpasyaiva grahan ̣āt.adhyavasāyo hi ii pūrvaṃ durlabhah ̣. sa saṃ prati bhāvanābalāvalambinā manasā āsāditapāt ̣avena ghat ̣ita iti viśes ̣ah ̣. i Read bhedapaks ̣e with the manuscript, as per Franco (2008), and Ratnakīrti's SS, against bhedakapaks ̣e in Thakur's edition.ii Read hi with the manuscript, as per Franco (2008), and Ratnakīrti's SS, against 'pi in Thakur's edition.Cf.SS 22.31-23.2:Regarding the position that there is a difference [between sensory awareness and yogic-awareness], too, it is not possible to object that what is made manifest [in sensory perception] is something enduring and what is made manifest [in yogic-awareness] is something momentary because sensory awareness, toowhich apprehends a substantial thing in its entiretyapprehends only a fleeting form.For the determination [that things are momentary] is impossible to obtain before [cultivation]; that now