Unframed: Attention, Agency, and Awareness in Longchenpa's Chos dbyings mdzod

Summary

The dissertation explores the philosophy of meditation through Longchenpa’s Chos dbyings mdzod, highlighting that awareness unframed represents a unique form of freedom. It argues for the dissolution of structured consciousness to allow natural spontaneity and creativity. The work critiques traditional notions of agency and attention, proposing that successful practice involves a radical absence of directedness. This challenges contemporary understandings of mindfulness, advocating for an approach centered on spontaneous thought rather than skill mastery.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This dissertation is a study of the philosophy of meditation. It undertakes a philosophical investigation of Longchenpa’s Chos dbyings mdzod (Treasury of Reality’s Expanse), a seminal work at the intersection of philosophy, contemplation, and poetry by one of Tibet’s greatest poets and philosophers. Centering on breakthrough practice (khregs chod), it argues that awareness unframed is a form of freedom distinct from skill mastery or expertise. Instead, the practice allows one’s natural spontaneity, expressiveness, and creativity to break out of the ossified structures of consciousness, attention, action, and language in which it is ordinarily bound. Our existential problematic is that we ordinarily construct ourselves as agents and subjects in ways that stake consciousness to the poles of subject–object, thereby perpetuating saṃsāra. To be free is to let these structures dissolve so that awareness springs forth in its natural spontaneity and expressiveness. Longchenpa’s critique of systems that concretize and obscure such natural expressiveness is radical in its reach, extending to how we act, attend, speak, and think. In this, his work stands as a significant contribution and intervention to how we think about Buddhist awakening and contemplation, as well as such fundamental philosophical categories as agency, attention, and language use. Part One traces three interpenetrating forms of directedness—agential intention, intentionality as the directedness of a subject toward objects, and referential language—arguing that the Chos dbyings mdzod systematically disrupts all three through the poetic work of the text as an enactment of breakthrough practice. A central and controversial contribution is the translation of dmigs pa as “framing object,” that which confers structure upon consciousness, delivering and solidifying the subject–object duality characteristic of saṃsāric delusion. The practice of breakthrough, thus, is a practice of being without such framing objects and, ultimately, without directedness or normative guidance. A puzzle then arises: How do we intentionally engage such a practice without intentionality? The solution lies in problematizing our status as agents, which is more complex, layered, and fluid than usually supposed, and in understanding the practice, as instantiated in the text, as a work of attention in which the practitioner’s intentionality is externalized and transmuted such that a mode of radical non-directedness breaks out of the structures of practice. The text itself enacts this disruption through poetic language: chorused meanings, ecological similes, and an eschewal of literal reference that collapses the expectation that language picks out stable, discrete things. This disruption of referential language through aesthetic work, I contend, serves to disrupt and ultimately dissolve our other forms of directedness. Part Two undertakes a sustained investigation of the term “dran pa” throughout the Chos dbyings mdzod, the Lung gi gter mdzod, and Tenpe Wangchuk’s commentary. It argues that dran pa—customarily translated as “mindfulness”—functions in Longchenpa as a mode of minding attention that isolates and picks out objects in ways that enable conceptualization. It is thus a form of attentional guidance that must be put aside in the practice of breakthrough. In this, dran pa is distinct from what is usually termed mindfulness in modern contemplative, psychological, and cognitive scientific contexts. One possible rejoinder is that, although dran pa differs from modern mindfulness, contemporary practices often emphasize meta-awareness in ways akin to breakthrough. While some sort of meta-awareness is certainly present in breakthrough, the critique of Part Two differentiates distinct forms of meta-awareness and their roles in specified philosophical and cultural contexts. The upshot is that minding attention (dran pa) is not replaced by a refined attentional skill but absent from breakthrough when successful. This radical absence of guidance should reshape how we think about contemplation and realization within it. The image of success is not skill mastery or expertise—which rely on the structures of guidance Longchenpa seeks to dissolve—but a radical spontaneity and “crazy wisdom” embodied as resonant care (thugs rje). The implications of this move for spontaneity over skill include norms of attention and epistemology in its emphasis on exploratory and open awareness rather than increased focus on pre-selected objects. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates that Longchenpa’s Dzokchen philosophy is a radical conversation partner to modern philosophy and contemplative studies because of his insistence on the intertwined nature of our modes of taking up the world and the liberatory possibilities of non-guided, spontaneous thought and being.

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