Concept & Reality 1.4—Apophatic Periphraxis
Channel: Consciousness Research Centre
Date: 2015-10-28

This series is classified Vivartha-vāda | Rāja-yoga | Suśupti | Ājñā-cakra

Please refer to the documentation: http://wp.me/P4JMQ7-pw
*Apophasis* means talking about a subject that remains tacit, unspoken. *Periphraxis* refers to circumlocution, indirection or euphemism.

An example of apophasis is the KITE essay (see video).
An example of periphraxis is a woman complaining that she 'doesn't have anything to wear,' when her real concern is that her wardrobe makes her look fat.

Another example of both apophasis and periphraxis is this series: if you haven't watched our previous video series, especially Matrix Learning, Apophatic Antifragility and the previous videos in this series, much of what we say here won't make sense. That is because this video treats that material as apophatic, and you lack the required background and context.

Similarly, discussions of the Buddha's teaching also will not make much sense unless you read, study and practice the Theravāda Suttas, which are themselves apophatic with regard to nibbāna. Nibbāna is given in the Suttas as an axiomatic, undefined and indefinable term. Nibbāna transcends everything—including being, nonbeing, conceptual thinking and language—even consciousness.

The Buddha's teaching is thus both apophatic and periphrastic, especially with reference to nibbāna. This is one of the factors that imbue it with deep, transcendent antifragility, as we discuss in our series Apophatic Antifragility.

Note that papañca is almost always periphrastic and/or apophatic. It's hardly ever about what it superficially seems to be about; the origin or referent is missing. There's a vacuum in the center of the vortex of conceptual thought. This is not anyone's doing; it arises spontaneously from the nature of language itself. But the Buddha's teaching is intentionally periphrastic, a device—and that makes all the difference.

Grammatical forms are especially subject to papañca. Verbs are said to 'conjugate'—a term reminiscent of biological proliferation—from roots into a variety of 'tenses'; while nouns 'decline' from the nominative (subjective) to the accusative (objective), with a variety of gender, number, possessive, dative and other 'cases' depending on the specific language.

From Concept and Reality:
"... the expansion or diffusion of thought as envisaged by papañca tends to obscure the true state of affairs, inasmuch as it is an unwarranted deviation giving rise to obsession. This particular nuance in the meaning of the term becomes obvious when papañca is used to denote verbosity or circumlocution (periphraxis). In fact it is probably this latter sense found in common usage, that has assumed a philosophical dimension with its transference from the verbal to the mental sphere."

"Like the legendary resurrected tiger which devoured the magician who restored it to life out of its skeletal bones, the concepts and linguistic conventions overwhelm the worldling who evolved them. At the final and crucial stage of sense perception (phassa or contact), the concepts are, as it were, invested with an objective character.
"This phenomenon is brought about mainly by certain peculiarities inherent in the linguistic medium. As a symbolical medium, language has an essential public quality about it. This public quality has necessitated the standardization of the symbols (words) as well as of the patterns of their arrangement (grammar and logic), and these, therefore enjoy a certain degree of stability. Thus the letter, as the smallest unit of language, was called an aksara (stable or durable) and language itself was associated with God and eternity by the ancient Indian philosophers.

"Now, the vague percepts, which are already tainted with a notion of stability owing to the limitations of the sensory apparatus, become fully crystallized into concepts in the realm of ideation. Nouns, abstract nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs—in short, the whole repertoire of language—assumes a certain substantial character by virtue of its relative stability. It is probably this particular phenomenon that is hinted at by such oft-recurring phrases in the Suttas as thāmasā parāmassa abhinivissa voharanti: “Having seized tenaciously and adhering thereto, they declare...” and takkapariyāhata: “Hammered out on the anvil of logic...” cited in connection with dogmatic theories, which themselves are called diṭṭhijāla: “veritable networks of views”.

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