Yogācāra- and Abhidharma-knowledgeable friends: is there any good discussion of *why* sparśa, manaskāra, vedanā, saṃjñā, & cetanā are universally present? There’s probably either something in the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, or only something by Sthiramati that’s untranslated...
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Replying to @NeuroYogacara @bsod_nams
Interesting question. I don’t have a textual reference. I have a guess: if the Yogacara account is an error theory of how the world seems when we are not Buddhas, then these are par for the course.
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Replying to @S__Ranganathan @bsod_nams
Bikkhu Bodhi says this about the 7 universal factors in Theravada Abhidharma (I’m not sure that it helps me
)pic.twitter.com/ifgyGoNu1o
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I can tell a semi-plausible story: at every point where I have an experience something impinges on the mind, triggering a feeling, which is rapidly categorized, evoking an intentional state, which shapes attention...rinse & repeat in the next kṣaṇa. But why only these 5?!
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I can imagine a way of seeing these as 5 aspects of the bidirectional character of affordances: sparśa-manaskāra for “perceptual” aspects, vedanā-cetanā for motivational aspects, & saṃjñā to label the affordance-structure for repeated use. My guess is no one says that though
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Replying to @NeuroYogacara @S__Ranganathan
This is really lovely, Bryce, and entirely the way I would think these categories ought to be motivated. I don't have a nifty textual passage to support it, or indeed, to refute it, but I'll keep digging around.
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Replying to @bsod_nams @S__Ranganathan
These thoughts were triggered by your talk last week. Along with a couple of discussions with Eyal, Cat, and Amit, it’s leading me to see a completely new way of framing my book project, in a way that’s more constructive and less a matter of recovering historical insights
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It’s definitely anchored to the historical texts...but I think I’m verging on a way of rethinking a representational, computational, and enactive account of the mind
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The Abhidharma is interpretive literature -- an attempt to make sense of what was taken to be the Buddha's word. I'd be cautious about seeing it as any kind of constructive psychological theory, though it may have elements of that as it evolved.
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Yes, I don't want to treat the historical sources as giving a psychological theory per se. but I find them incredibly useful for the kind of theory that I am trying to build! It's all a matter of tool-finding, mind-broadening, and world-expanding for me...
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Replying to @NeuroYogacara @evantthompson and
Offline psychoanalysis of that which has been passed down the lineages under selection mechanisms corresponding to some implicit consensus that it reveals the most profound and deep about the mind, and available to introspection. So this kind of stuff is like Extrospection.
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