Articles in two Buddhist magazines, one Zen the other Tibetan, and a recent, popular podcast mentioning papañcas have taken this somewhat obscure early teaching from the Pali Canon and brought it into a new awareness for mindfulness practitioners and those seeking to live more peacefully. (Pali is an ancient Indo-Aryan language, similar to Sanskrit, used only for recording Buddhist texts.)
papahcabkirata paja
“People delight in proliferation”
—Dhammapada 254 (circa 100 CE)
Papañca’s exact meaning might be said to hover somewhere between 1) to proliferate or spread out; 2) an illusion or an obsession; as 3) an obstacle or impediment.
The term is used to describe the tendency of the mind to spread out from and elaborate upon any sense contact that arises in our experience, layering it with mental embellishments and elaborations, all of which are illusory, most repetitive, sometimes obsessive, and which effectively block any sort of calm or clarity of mind. It’s not monkey mind, not just a busy mind, rather it is a particular mindstate, one which proliferates a phenomena into a “big” problem through series of semi-related ideas and perceptions.
Bhikkhu Bodhi, the great translator monk, calls papañca “the propensity of the…imagination to erupt in an effusion of mental commentary that obscures the bare data of cognition”. It is also translated as conceptual elaboration, referring to characterizations of the world assigned through language that can then cause suffering to arise.
A bit more about the word: The word papañca has had a wide variety of meanings in ancient Indian thought, but with only one constant meaning: in Buddhist philosophical discourse papañca always carries strong negative connotations, usually of falsification, delusion, and distortion. The word itself is derived from a root that means diffuseness, spreading in a way that blocks peacefulness. The Pali Commentaries define papañca as covering three types of thought: craving, conceit, and views (the antidotes are generosity and no-self; humility and modesty; and right views being no views). What differentiates papañcas from other Buddhist models of how we process sense contacts into self-aware narratives is that they always result in conflict.
The Pali discourses also note that papañcas function to slow the mind down in its escape from this realm of suffering. The term’s most general and obvious meaning is ‘proliferation’, in the sense of the multiplication of erroneous concepts, ideas, and ideologies which obscure the true nature of reality.
The word offers some interesting parallels to the postmodern notion of logocentric thinking (logocentric language posits things as externally existent to us), but it is important to note that the Buddhist belief in deconstructing language denies this, as does the modern scientific concept of emergence.
Making Mountains Where There Are None
Papañcas are bold and take hold of anyone who struggles to live peacefully, so it requires great care and awareness to rid ourselves of them through a deep understanding of their nature and function.
Fundamental to the process, if we seriously want to learn how to keep our mind and body peaceful, is understanding papañcas, the ever escalating mind-body, affective narratives that turn sense contacts into grand and complex emotions and stories that result in conflict, within ourselves and with others. Put another way, papañcas are the rabbit holes we drill down into when perceived events don’t go our way.
They appear when the mind runs away with itself and we get swept up out of the present moment as we buy into thoughts. This is called papañca. Papañca is most often translated as “proliferation.” We’ve all experienced it, and we do it all the time. Papañca is the way the mind hooks onto something and gets dragged off into it. Often, it’s a repetitive cycle or loop triggered by a sound, sight, thought, smell, taste, or feeling. For example, we have a thought about work we need to get done and find ourselves in a journey of the mind in which we have many thoughts arise about all of the things we need to do, and what will happen if we don’t get it done, and what people will think of us or do to us if it isn’t perfect, etc. Papañcas often cause our thinking mind to take us to rumination and trips down unhelpful rabbit holes, frequently ending in hostility to others. In fact, papañca is essentially a mental mapping of how we cause ourselves and others to struggle angrily in our interactions.
This concept plays a central role in the early Buddhist analysis of conflict. As might be expected, the blame for papañcas, for this conflict, lies within us, in the unskillful habits of the mind, rather.
Panancas Are a Dangerous Tendency of the Mind
Papañca is one of those delightful Pali words that rolls off the tongue (or bursts through the lips, in this case) and hits the nail on the head. It points to something so immediate, so pervasive, and so insidious that it deserves to join the English language and enter into common usage. The exact derivation of papañca is not entirely clear, but its sense hovers somewhere between the three nodes of 1) to spread out or proliferate; 2) an illusion or an obsession; and 3) an obstacle or impediment. The place where these three meanings converge in experience is not hard to locate. Sit down with your back straight and your legs folded around your ankles, close your eyes, and attend carefully to your experience. What do you see? Papañca.
This term is used to describe the tendency of the mind to 1) spread out from and elaborate upon any sense object that arises in experience, smothering it with wave after wave of mental elaboration, 2) most of which is illusory, repetitive, and even obsessive, 3) which effectively blocks any sort of mental calm or clarity of mind.
These are the narrative loops that play over and over in the mind, the trains of thought pulling out of the station one after another and taking us for a long ride down the track before we even know we’re aboard. Bhikkhu Bodhi, eloquent as always, calls papañca “the propensity of the worldling’s imagination to erupt in an effusion of mental commentary that obscures the bare data of cognition” (from note 229 in Majjkima Nikaya (MN)).
Does this sound familiar yet?
Vipassana meditation has to do with looking deeply into the mind and body to discern the various processes unfolding in each moment that fabricate the virtual world of our experience. The riot of conceptual proliferation is often the first thing one sees, because it is the shallowest and busiest part of the mind. For most of us, the monkey mind chatters incessantly as it swings from one branch to another, seizing first this thought, then that idea, then a host of miscellaneous associations, memories, and fantasies. The basic themes around which all this activity swirls, according to the insights of the Buddha, are craving, conceit, and views. We could watch this show all day and learn very little.
However, as the mind gradually steadies, upon the breath or some other primary object of attention, it gains some strength and becomes calmer. Then it is better able to see the stream of consciousness for what it is, a sequence of mind states unfolding one after another in rapid succession. As the foundations upon which mindfulness are established become more stable, one can look upon the flow of experience rushing by instead of being swept away by it. At this point we can begin to explore the inner landscape and, guided by the teachings of the Buddha, discover how things come to be as they are in our little world.
Mind, it turns out, is layered, nuanced, and deep. Working backwards from the surface toward its depths, we first notice that papañca, the perambulations of mental proliferation, are based upon thoughts. As the Honeyball Discourse (MN 18) puts it, “What one thinks about, that one mentally proliferates.” Mental proliferation is simply thinking run amok. While it is not necessarily a problem to think (though of course “right thought” is preferable to “wrong thought”), once we get to the level of mental proliferation we are seriously off course and nothing good can come of it.
Looking more closely, we can further discern that thinking is itself based upon perception. What one perceives, that’s one thinks about. Perception is the mental function that makes sense of what we are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, or thinking. It provides cognitive information about the objects of experience in the form of images, words, or symbols, which are learned in culturally specific ways. We see our world through, as, and by means of perceptions, and more often than not project them onto the world.
Way down under all these layers of mind is a simple moment of contact, the simultaneous coming together of a sense organ, a sense object, and a moment of consciousness that cognizes one by means of the other. This basic awareness is merely an episode of knowing, carrying no content or qualities of its own. All the color and texture of experience, so to speak, are provided by the other concomitant mental factors, such as feeling, perception, and the endless permutations of volitional formations. Awareness itself, if we can reach it under all the whirl and spin, is tranquil, luminous, and unadorned.
As the mind moves through the stages of assembling experience, from awareness to perception to conception to proliferation, it moves farther and farther into the realm of macro-construction. At each step we see less of things as they are and more of things as we construe them to be. Meditation practice works to reverse this process. In the phrases used in the early texts, one abandons obsessive perceptions and thoughts, cuts through mental proliferation, and rests at ease in nonproliferation. And it might not surprise us to hear that those who overcome papañca cross beyond grief and sorrow. However busy it looks from this side, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
“People delight in proliferation,
the Tathagata in nonproliferation.”
—Dbammapada 254
Here’s an example of a papanca:
Imagine a person named Sam who sees a colleague at work, Alex, walk by without saying hello. Immediately, Sam’s mind starts racing:
- Initial Perception: Sam sees Alex walk by without acknowledging him.
- First Thought: “Alex didn’t say hello to me.”
- Proliferation Begins: “Why didn’t Alex say hello? Is he mad at me?”
- Further Proliferation: “Maybe it’s because of that comment I made in the meeting last week. What if he told our boss about it?”
- Worry and Anxiety: “If our boss thinks I’m causing problems, I might not get that promotion. What if I lose my job?”
- Self-criticism: “Why do I always say the wrong thing? I must be really bad at my job.”
In this example, Sam’s mind has taken a simple, potentially neutral event (Alex not saying hello) and spun it into a complex web of worries, anxieties, and self-criticism. This is papanca in action. It shows how the mind can take a simple observation and create a cascade of thoughts that lead to mental and emotional suffering.
In Buddhist practice, mindfulness and meditation are used to observe and understand these patterns of mental proliferation. By doing so, individuals can learn to recognize when their mind is engaging in papanca and gently bring their attention back to the present moment, reducing the unnecessary mental suffering that results from these proliferations.
Than from externals. We are the culprit, papañca is the label.
More about papañcas can be found here in Dharma Talks by Thanissaro Bhikku https://www.audiodharma.org/series/16/talk/3019/