The question
In English-language Dzogchen teaching, the nature of mind is called non-conceptual. Meditation is said to be free of conceptual thought, and rigpa is said to be beyond concepts. These phrases translate the Tibetan rtog pa, rnam rtog and rtog med, and behind them the Sanskrit vikalpa, kalpanā, parikalpa and nirvikalpa.
Many practitioners hear “conceptual” as “analytical” or “rational”. They conclude that the path leads away from reasoning, study and precise thought, towards a spirituality of feeling and silence. The Indian and Tibetan sources say something very different, and the difference decides what successful practice becomes.
The history of the word runs from the Vedas through the Pāli discourses, the Abhidharma, the Prajñāpāramitā, the Noble Nāgārjuna, the Yogācāra masters, the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, the logicians, Kamalaśīla, the Secret Mantra and the Tibetan translators, to the Omniscient Longchenpa and Mipham the Great. It is traced here in chronological order, as far as the dating of the sources allows.
The root kḷp in the Veda and the Upaniṣads
The root kḷp means to be fit, to correspond, to be in order. Its causative, kalpayati, means to arrange, fashion, put in order.
Its earliest weighty use is cosmogonic. The hymn on the origin of the world that closes the Ṛgveda (10.190.3) says:
sūryācandramasau dhātā yathāpūrvam akalpayat |
divaṃ ca pṛthivīṃ cāntarikṣam atho svaḥ ||
“The Arranger fashioned sun and moon as before, and heaven and earth, the middle space and the light.”
To kalpayati is to bring a world into ordered existence. From this sense come the later nouns:
kalpa, the ritual procedure of the Kalpasūtras and the ordered span of an aeon
saṃkalpa, the mind’s arranging of itself towards a goal
The Upaniṣads give saṃkalpa great weight. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka (1.5.3) counts it among the forms of the mind: desire, resolve, doubt, faith and the rest are “all this, mind”. The Chāndogya (7.4.1) says that saṃkalpa is greater than mind. Through resolve the worlds are formed and held in place.
From its beginning, then, the root carries a double sense. It means to correspond with what is, and to fashion what will be. The later Buddhist and Yogic uses of vikalpa draw on both.
The prefix vi means apart, asunder, in different directions. In Pāṇini’s grammar vikalpa is the technical term for an optional rule, one that may apply in one way or another. A vikalpa is the setting of alternatives: this or that. The mind that operates by vikalpa arranges what appears into options, separations and contrasts.
The Pāli discourses: conceiving and constructing
The earliest Buddhist sources, the Pāli discourses, use several related words.
Kappa in the Aṭṭhakavagga. The Aṭṭhakavagga of the Suttanipāta is generally regarded as among the oldest strata of the canon. Its verses praise the sage who “does not construct” (na kappeti), who holds no constructed views (pakappitā diṭṭhi), and who does not set any fashioned teaching before himself. Kappa here is the construction of positions: the mind building a standpoint and taking its stand on it. The sage of the Aṭṭhakavagga is not described as one who has stopped thinking. He has stopped building a place to stand.
Maññanā, conceiving. The deepest early analysis does not use kḷp at all, but the root man, to think or conceive. The first discourse of the Majjhima Nikāya, the Mūlapariyāya Sutta, describes how the ordinary person:
perceives earth as earth
having perceived it, conceives it (maññati)
conceives “in earth”, “from earth”, “earth is mine”
delights in earth
The Tathāgata, by contrast, “directly knows earth as earth” (abhijānāti) and does not conceive it. The discourse repeats this pattern for every class of phenomena, up to nibbāna itself.
The Dhātuvibhaṅga Sutta (MN 140) names the root of all conceiving: “‘I am’ is a conceiving” (asmī’ti maññitam etaṃ). Conceivings, it says, are a disease, a boil, a dart. The sage at peace is the one who has gone beyond all of them.
This is the clearest early statement of what later traditions call vikalpa. The Buddha does not set direct knowing against thinking. He sets it against conceiving: the mind’s addition of “mine”, “in”, “from” and “I am” to what is directly known. The contrast is between abhijānāti, knowing fully, and maññati, conceiving. Direct knowing is more exact than conceiving, not less.
Vitakka and papañca. Vitakka is the movement of the mind towards an object, a factor of the first absorption that is stilled in the second. Saṅkappa, intention, is the second limb of the noble path, right intention.
The Madhupiṇḍika Sutta (MN 18) describes how perception leads to thought, thought to proliferation (papañca), and proliferation to “the reckonings of proliferated perception” that assail a person in past, present and future. The problem identified is proliferation, the multiplication of constructions, rather than the simple movement of thought.
The Abhidharma
The Pāli Abhidhamma defines vitakka as abhiniropana, mounting the mind onto its object. Buddhaghosa adds that it is like striking a bell, vicāra like its resonance.
In the northern Abhidharma, Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośa (fourth to fifth century CE) defines vitarka as the coarseness of mind and vicāra as its subtlety. In the commentary on verse 1.33 he distinguishes three kinds of vikalpa:
vikalpa by nature, which is vitarka itself
recollective vikalpa, which depends on memory
discriminating vikalpa, which depends on discernment (prajñā)
Sense perception is called avikalpaka only because it lacks the second and third kinds. It still has the first.
Two points follow. First, “free of vikalpa” was a technical term with several precise meanings, and these must not be confused. Second, prajñā itself, in this classification, is a kind of vikalpa. It is the discerning activity of mind, without which no liberation is possible.
The same tradition gives us the term pratyavekṣaṇā, Tibetan so sor rtog pa, “examining each thing individually”. From it comes the name of the fourth of the five wisdoms of the buddhas: pratyavekṣaṇājñāna, the discriminating wisdom of Amitābha, which knows every particular distinctly. The Tibetan uses rtog pa for this wisdom. Whatever the opposite of rnam rtog is, it cannot be the absence of discernment, for discernment is one of the qualities of buddhahood.
Early Mahāyāna
The Prajñāpāramitā sūtras repeatedly tell the bodhisattva not to conceive (na manyate). This echoes the Mūlapariyāya Sutta. The bodhisattva does not conceive form as form, in form or from form; does not conceive the thought of awakening; does not conceive even the perfection of wisdom. The Vajracchedikā adds that the notion (saṃjñā) of a self, a being, a living one or a person does not arise in a bodhisattva.
None of this is directed against reasoning. The Prajñāpāramitā is a literature of relentless examination: every dharma is examined until its self-nature is found to be empty.
The Kāśyapaparivarta gives the image that later became central. When two sticks are rubbed together, fire arises, and the fire burns the sticks. In the same way, discerning examination (bhūtapratyavekṣā) gives rise to the faculty of wisdom, and that wisdom consumes the examination. The sticks have to be rubbed. Without them there is no fire.
The Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra, one of the foundational scriptures of Yogācāra, is precise about the technical use of the term in meditation. Its chapter on calm abiding and insight speaks of four objects of meditation:
the image accompanied by vikalpa (savikalpapratibimba), the object of insight
the image free of vikalpa (nirvikalpapratibimba), the object of calm abiding
the limit of things
the accomplishment of the purpose
Here “free of vikalpa” means simply “not being examined”: the stable object of śamatha, held without analysis. This is the closest the classical literature comes to the modern sense of non-conceptual as non-analytical. The sūtra places it at the level of calm abiding, as one of two complementary methods. It is not the wisdom that liberates.
The Noble Nāgārjuna
In the Root Verses on the Middle Way (second century CE), the Noble Nāgārjuna places vikalpa at the origin of saṃsāra (18.5):
karmakleśakṣayān mokṣaḥ karmakleśā vikalpataḥ |
te prapañcāt prapañcas tu śūnyatāyāṃ nirudhyate ||
“Liberation comes from the exhaustion of action and affliction. Action and affliction come from vikalpa. These come from elaboration, and elaboration ceases in emptiness.”
Four verses later (18.9) he defines reality as “known from no other, peaceful, not elaborated by elaborations, free of vikalpa, without distinct meanings” (aparapratyayaṃ śāntaṃ prapañcair aprapañcitam | nirvikalpam anānārtham etat tattvasya lakṣaṇam ||).
The Noble Nāgārjuna’s method is reasoning of the strictest kind. Every verse of the Root Verses is an argument. What he identifies as the root of action and affliction is vikalpa: the construction of things with inherent existence where there is only dependent arising. Reasoning is the means by which vikalpa is undone. When reasoning has shown that nothing it examines has a self-nature, the constructing stops. Reasoning is not refused; it is completed.
Yogācāra: unreal imagination
The Yogācāra masters of the fourth and fifth centuries gave vikalpa its widest scope.
The Madhyāntavibhāga, attributed to Maitreya and transmitted by Asaṅga, opens with abhūtaparikalpo ‘sti, “unreal imagination exists”. In it duality is absent; in it emptiness is present. A later verse (1.8) defines its extent: unreal imagination is the minds and mental factors of the three realms. Every cognition of ordinary experience is included: sense perception, feeling, desire, absorption.
Vasubandhu’s Thirty Verses (17 and 20) state the doctrine in its classic form:
vijñānapariṇāmo ‘yaṃ vikalpo yad vikalpyate |
tena tan nāsti tenedaṃ sarvaṃ vijñaptimātrakam ||
yena yena vikalpena yad yad vastu vikalpyate |
parikalpita evāsau svabhāvo na sa vidyate ||
“This transformation of consciousness is vikalpa. What it imagines does not exist; therefore all this is mere representation.”
“Whatever thing is imagined by whatever vikalpa, that is the imagined nature, and it does not exist.”
Here the modern reading becomes impossible to sustain. Vikalpa is not a style of thinking that one might choose to avoid. It is the structure of every ordinary cognition, analytical or not: the appearance of a knower facing a known, together with all that the knower takes the known to be. An animal fleeing a predator, an infant reaching for its mother, a meditator resting contentedly in a pleasant calm: all of these are vikalpa in the Yogācāra sense. Feeling is full of it. Silence is full of it. The quietest state of mind is full of it as long as it is held by someone as an object.
Asaṅga’s Mahāyānasaṃgraha devotes a chapter to non-conceptual wisdom (nirvikalpajñāna). It begins by stating what that wisdom is not:
the mere absence of mental attention
the state of the second absorption and above, where vitarka and vicāra have ceased
the cessation of perception and feeling
the insentience of matter
the conceptual apprehension “this is suchness”
Each exclusion is a correction in advance of a later misunderstanding. A mind that has stopped attending, a mind in deep absorption, a mind in cessation, a mind like a stone, a mind that holds the correct idea: none of these is non-conceptual wisdom.
The Pātañjalayogaśāstra
The Pātañjalayogaśāstra, the Yogasūtra together with the commentary traditionally ascribed to Vyāsa, is generally dated to around 400 CE. It belongs to the same period as Asaṅga and Vasubandhu, and it shares much of the vocabulary of Buddhist meditation theory. Its definition of vikalpa (1.9) is therefore best read alongside the Buddhist sources of its time, not before them:
śabdajñānānupātī vastuśūnyo vikalpaḥ
“Vikalpa follows upon verbal knowledge and is empty of a real object.”
The definition distinguishes vikalpa from error (viparyaya). Error is a false cognition of a real thing; vikalpa has no thing at all and exists only as the wake of words. Vyāsa’s examples:
“consciousness is the nature of the Puruṣa”, where the genitive divides what is undivided
“the arrow stands”, where the mere absence of motion is spoken of as an activity
Vyāsa notes that such constructions are used constantly in ordinary speech.
More important for practice is the Yogasūtra’s account of meditative absorption (1.42–43):
tatra śabdārthajñānavikalpaiḥ saṃkīrṇā savitarkā samāpattiḥ ||
smṛtipariśuddhau svarūpaśūnyevārthamātranirbhāsā nirvitarkā ||
“There, absorption mixed with the vikalpas of word, meaning and cognition is absorption with vitarka. When memory is purified, the mind is as though empty of its own form, and only the object shines forth: this is absorption without vitarka.”
This is the most explicit statement in the classical literature of what freedom from vikalpa positively is. In absorption with vitarka, three things are blended in a single cognition: the word “cow”, the object cow, and the idea of cow. In absorption without vitarka the blending ends. The cognition no longer holds itself up as a separate form, and the object alone shines (arthamātranirbhāsā). Freedom from vikalpa here is the opposite of vagueness. It is the object present with nothing added.
The logicians
Dignāga (c. 480–540) defines perception as free from construction (kalpanāpoḍha). He defines construction as the joining of name, class, quality, action and substance to what appears (nāmajātyādiyojanā).
Dharmakīrti (seventh century), in the Nyāyabindu, defines construction as “a cognition whose appearance is fit to be joined with verbal expression” (abhilāpasaṃsargayogyapratibhāsā pratītiḥ kalpanā). The definition goes further than Dignāga’s: a cognition is construction even before any word is spoken, if what appears in it is the kind of appearance that words attach to.
For Dharmakīrti, perception free of construction is abhrānta, unerring. It is the means of knowledge that grasps the particular itself (svalakṣaṇa). Construction grasps only a general image built by exclusion (apoha), the exclusion of what is other.
Inference, which is construction, can lead to truth. It does so indirectly, and its object is never the thing itself. In the Buddhist theory of knowledge, then, freedom from construction is the very standard of reliability. It is the direct contact of knowing with what is.
Gauḍapāda
The Māṇḍūkyakārikā of Gauḍapāda, generally placed around the sixth century and deeply marked by Buddhist thought, applies the same vocabulary within Vedānta. “The Self, the shining one, imagines itself by itself through its own māyā” (2.12, kalpayaty ātmanātmānam ātmā devaḥ svamāyayā).
Of the distinctions taught for the sake of instruction, Gauḍapāda says (1.18): “Vikalpa would cease if it had been imagined by anyone; this teaching is for the sake of instruction; when one knows, there is no duality.” Vikalpa here is the whole appearance of a world divided into subject and object, imagined by no one and dissolving in knowledge.
Kamalaśīla and the debate at Samye
The question whether freedom from vikalpa means freedom from analysis was argued out in Tibet itself, at Samye, at the end of the eighth century. According to the Tibetan accounts, the Chinese teacher known as Hwashang Mahāyāna taught that awakening comes from not thinking and not attending to anything. The Indian master Kamalaśīla answered him.
In his Stages of Meditation, Kamalaśīla argues that the mere absence of attention cannot be non-conceptual wisdom. A person who has fainted is free of attention without being wise. Non-conceptuality that has not been produced by discerning examination is mere suppression, and it leaves the roots of vikalpa intact. He cites the Kāśyapaparivarta’s image of the two sticks.
Tibetan tradition has regarded the outcome of this debate as decisive. The modern understanding of “non-conceptual” as “non-analytical” repeats almost exactly the position that the Tibetan tradition rejected at its foundation.
The Secret Mantra
The Secret Mantra uses construction deliberately. In the creation stage the deity, the palace and the maṇḍala are envisioned in precise detail, and Tibetan teachers call this dag pa’i rnam rtog, pure construction. The impure construction of an ordinary body and world is replaced by the pure construction of the deity and the maṇḍala, as one thorn is used to remove another.
In the completion stage, according to the Ārya tradition of the Guhyasamāja, the winds dissolve into the central channel. The eighty natural constructions (prakṛti, Tibetan rang bzhin brgyad cu’i rtog pa) cease. They are grouped under the three appearances of white, red and black, which precede the dawning of the Clear Light. These eighty are not thoughts in the ordinary sense. They are states such as fear, attachment, joy, doubt and indifference, the basic movements of the mind associated with the winds.
The Tibetan translators
The translators of the imperial period fixed the Tibetan equivalents in the great lexicon of the early ninth century:
rnam par rtog pa for vikalpa
rtog pa for vitarka and for kalpa in the sense of ritual procedure
kun tu rtog pa for saṃkalpa and parikalpa
kun brtags for parikalpita, the imagined nature
so sor rtog pa for pratyavekṣaṇā, discerning examination
The aeon, kalpa, became bskal pa.
The Tibetan verb rtog pa itself means to examine, investigate, consider. Its stems are brtags and brtag, with the imperative rtogs. In most dialects it sounds the same as rtogs pa, to realise. Tibetan teachers have often noted that rnam rtog, construing, and rtogs pa, realisation, are pronounced alike: one is seen through by the other.
The Tibetan masters
The epistemological tradition. The tradition founded by Chapa Chökyi Senge and given its classical form by Sakya Paṇḍita (1182–1251) defines rtog pa as sgra don ‘dres rung du ‘dzin pa’i zhen rig: a determining awareness that apprehends the sound-image and the meaning-image as fit to be mixed. This is Dharmakīrti’s definition made exact. A conceptual cognition holds the generic image of a word and the generic image of an object as if they were one. It is “determining” (zhen rig) because it takes its image for the thing.
The Omniscient Longchenpa. The Omniscient Longchenpa (1308–1364), in the Treasury of Words and Meanings and the Treasury of the Supreme Vehicle, explains the arising of saṃsāra from the ground through three kinds of ignorance:
the ignorance of single identity (bdag nyid gcig pa’i ma rig pa), the simple non-recognition of the ground’s radiance as one’s own
co-emergent ignorance (lhan cig skyes pa’i ma rig pa), which arises together with awareness
imputing ignorance (kun tu brtags pa’i ma rig pa), which takes what appears as self and other
The third is named with the Tibetan for parikalpa. Imputing, construing, the work of vikalpa, is not the deepest root of delusion. Beneath it lies a non-recognition that has no content at all.
This has a decisive consequence for practice. Even the complete cessation of construing does not by itself amount to liberation, for the co-emergent non-recognition may remain. A thought-free state without recognition is the ālaya, the ground of all habitual tendencies, which the Omniscient Longchenpa repeatedly distinguishes from the dharmakāya. The ālaya holds every seed of construing and will sprout them again. The dharmakāya is rigpa, vidyā, knowing itself: empty, luminous, and aware of itself.
The Omniscient Longchenpa also distinguishes mind, sems, which has the nature of construing, from wisdom, ye shes, which is the luminous ground in which construing arises and is freed. He describes constructions as the display of the expanse, arising and dissolving like clouds in the sky. The purpose is not to prevent their arising but to recognise the space they arise in.
Mipham the Great. Mipham the Great (1846–1912) takes up the Samye debate directly in the Beacon of Certainty. He writes that the Great Perfection does not consist in merely not thinking. Without certainty (nges shes) born from examination, a practitioner who rests in the absence of thought is following the meditation of Hwashang. He distinguishes:
the analytical meditation of the paṇḍita, which examines until certainty is found
the resting meditation of the yogin, which rests in what certainty has revealed
The resting does not replace the examining; it depends on it. Mipham also insists that certainty is itself a conceptual cognition, and an indispensable one. What is to be transcended is the grasping that takes constructions for reality. The discerning intelligence that sees through that grasping is not.
For the practitioner
The modern reading of “non-conceptual” asks the practitioner to stop analysing. The sources ask for something more demanding: to see, at every level, how the mind adds to what is.
At the coarsest level, vikalpa is the commentary that runs through the day: plans, judgements, rehearsals. Its stilling is the first experience of calm. It is real and valuable. In the Saṃdhinirmocana’s terms it belongs to śamatha.
At a finer level, vikalpa is naming. A colour appears, and before any word is spoken it has become “the red car”, “my car”, “the car I need to have serviced”. Dharmakīrti calls this cognition fit to be joined with words. It continues in perfect silence.
At a deeper level, vikalpa is conceiving in the sense of the Mūlapariyāya Sutta: “in me”, “from me”, “mine”, “I am”. A practitioner who says “my practice is deepening”, “my mind is quieter”, “I have had an experience of emptiness” is conceiving in exactly this sense. The quieter the mind, the more subtle and more convincing the conceiving can become.
At the deepest level, vikalpa is the unreal imagination of the Yogācāra: the appearance of a knower facing a known, present in every ordinary cognition however silent. Beneath even this, according to the Omniscient Longchenpa, lies the co-emergent non-recognition from which it springs.
Freedom from vikalpa at all these levels is not an absence of mental activity. It is the condition described in the Mūlapariyāya as direct knowing (abhijānāti). It is what the Yogasūtra describes as the object shining alone, and Dharmakīrti as unerring perception. The Great Perfection calls it rigpa.
In that condition thoughts may arise. Discernment works, often with greater precision than before, for it is no longer distorted by the needs of a self. What has stopped is the adding: the “mine”, the “I am”, the solidity, the story, the world held apart from the one who knows it.
The translation
The English word “concept” comes from the Latin concipere, to take together. In European philosophy a concept is a general idea under which many particulars are gathered. In current speech “conceptual” means abstract, theoretical, intellectual, the opposite of the concrete and the felt.
The word was adopted as the standard rendering of rtog pa and rnam rtog in the English translations of the second half of the twentieth century. It came largely from the epistemological training of the monastic colleges, where rtog pa is defined in Dharmakīrti’s terms. In that narrow context it is defensible.
It was received, however, by a Western culture that had its own longstanding opposition between reason and experience, intellect and intuition, head and heart. In that culture “non-conceptual” was heard as “non-intellectual”. It became a warrant for a spirituality that distrusts thinking, which is the very position the Tibetan tradition rejected at Samye.
The Sanskrit and Tibetan terms do not support this. Vikalpa is division and construction: the mind supplying distinctions, options and objects where none exist. Parikalpa is imagining. Maññanā, its earliest Buddhist counterpart, is conceiving in the sense of making “mine” and “I am”. None of these is reasoning. All of them are found as fully in feeling, silence and devotion as in argument.
English renderings closer to the sources would be:
“construing” or “fabrication” for vikalpa and rnam rtog
“imagining” for parikalpa
“thought” for vitarka
“intention” for saṃkalpa
Nirvikalpa and rtog med would then be “free of (mental) construing” or “(mentally) unfabricated”. In the specific epistemological sense of Dharmakīrti, where a general image is joined to a word, “conceptual” can be kept, with the meaning made explicit.
The difference is not academic. “Become non-conceptual” invites a practitioner to stop thinking. “Become free of construing” invites them to notice, in every moment and in every state, including the quietest, where something is being added to what is. This is what the sources ask of a practitioner. Its fruit is not a mind emptied of intelligence but rigpa itself, in which discerning wisdom and the space of the dharmadhātu are not two.
