Papañca: Object—Creating

The differentiation between right and wrong is an especially meaningful one for us. With that comes success, failure, praise, blame, reward or punishment: there’s a big charge around getting it right or getting it wrong.  Meanwhile direct experience – thoughts, sensations, emotions – is just what happens. It’s not based on right or wrong. Its sole fundamental quality is that it just happens.

Our consciousness, however, has the potential to differentiate that experience, in order to know it and determine a response. The process begins with ‘Here I am and there’s that over there.’ Consciousness, or ‘viññāna’, is based on various forms of sense contact, such as seeing, hearing and touching, and it differentiates ‘This is happening to me. There’s a thing out there that’s doing this to me.’ The thing in question derives from sensory input, but the ‘me’ sense derives from the mind: when the eyes are closed there’s just me, and with the eyes open there’s a me and a that.

So there’s a synthesis between the mental consciousness and the external senses, through which the first differentiation occurs and the matrix of consciousness and ‘name and form’ is set up as the model of experience.  In this, ‘name’ is the how ‘I’ attend or apprehend or am affected. In the language of the scriptures that name, or naming is nāma. And what it names is ‘form’, rūpa, the sensed object. So ‘dependent on name-and-form is consciousness and consciousness is dependent on name-and-form.’ Without being conscious there isn’t an awareness of form, and consciousness itself depends on there being something to see, hear, think, etc.

Based on this primary differentiation, other qualities arise – perceptions and feelings such as ‘man’, ‘friend’, ‘hostile’, ‘loveable’, ‘uncertain’ – all the ways in which we place adjectives on experience. Adjectives arise. From those adjectives, arise verbs – that is inclining and focusing – and then these verbs produce nouns. The sense of ‘disagreeable’ becomes something I disagree with and that generates a disagreeable object that carries the quality of being offensive.

For instance, I may find something you say offends my attitudes; I experience an inclination to reject that, and you become someone I dislike. Your other qualities, say, your chronic ulcer, your humor, your love for your children etc., do not register in the way I create you. 

There are a lot of problems that occur because of this object-creating – or papañca, to use the Buddhist terminology.

This reflection by Ajahn Sucitto is from the article, “Healing the Cracks.”