Insight and Ascertainment: The Meditation of Vipaśyanā in Kamalaśīla’s Philosophy of Mind

Abstract

In a triad of practice manuals collectively titled The Process of Meditation (Bhāvanākrama I, II, III), the eight century Indian Buddhist philosopher Kamalaśīla singles out vipaśyanā (insight meditation) to be of particular importance on the early stages of the Buddhist path. This paper provides a reconstruction of vipaśyanā based on how it is depicted in that work. I make two primary claims. First, vipaśyanā is a technique for facilitating the direct perceptual ascertainment of a select set of properties, and second, it accomplishes this by reconditioning the practitioner’s conceptual habitation. I further enrich this reconstruction by suggesting a series of stages that a practitioner progresses through, based on a list of intrinsically and extrinsically epistemic cognitions that Kamalaśīla gives in his Commentary on the Compendium on Reality (Tattvasaṃgrahapañjikā). I end the paper with a potential method to use during meditation for altering one’s conceptual habitation. Kamalaśīla does not explicitly state these claims, but they can be inferred based on the theories on cognition found in both Kamalaśīla’s other works as well as the works of the Pramāṇavāda philosophers who influenced him. This reconstruction of vipaśyanā thus remains consistent with Kamalaśīla’s own philosophical commitments, and is, I argue, the best way to explain the cognitive function of vipaśyanā given those commitments.