#non-conceptualization

Husserl, like [the Yogācāran exegete] Dignāga, grounds the conceptual truths of his system in unassailable non-conceptual reality. But, as with Dignāga, a closer look reveals the sleight of hand that allows Husserl to pull this particular rabbit out of the hat. The claim that the “unresting flow of never recurring phenomena” given to us in “pure consciousness” is “indubitably given in reflective experience,” is a cheat, for as soon as Husserl introduces the notion of “reflection” we step back from the Lebenswelt—we retreat from the immediacy of pure consciousness—into the realm of concepts and meanings, and accordingly we forfeit whatever certainty we may once have had.

Kamalaśīla’s point is that to strive for no-thought, no mind, no conceptualization, is to be no better than the mindless denizens of the Heaven of Gods Without Conception—beings who ignorantly mistake insentience for the goal of spiritual practice. [Representing Chan,] Moheyan responds that it is precisely such ideas—ideas like a state of non-conceptualization, or a heaven wherein there are beings without sentience—that keep people bound to saṃsāra. The goal of practice is to let go of attachment to any and all discursive formations, to abandon conceptualization altogether, to reach a state of no mind. Is this tantamount to insentience, as Kamalaśīla believed? The Chan tradition—the tradition that rose to dominate Buddhism in China—was weaned on precisely this struggle.