Event date: 16:30–18:30 (EST) Friday, 17 January, 2025 | 05:30–07:30 (Taiwan) Saturday, 18 January, 2025
Organizer: Princeton University
Tracing contemplative philosophy from Dharmakīrti in India up to the contemporary Chag-Dzog traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, one can tell a contemplative and philosophical narrative that leads from Dharmakīrti’s thought to the nondual theories and practices of contemporary Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen. That narrative begins with an emphasis on the epistemic primacy of experience and the search for a metaphysics of consciousness resting heavily on the role of “reflexive awareness” construed as the “empty luminosity” of the mind. In the Indian context, an attractive conclusion to the Dharmakīrtian approach is a type of pure awareness in which both epistemic and metaphysical concerns resolve in an experience of cessation. Yet in the Tibetan context, this outcome proved so unattractive that cessative experiences were seen as disastrous sidetracks on the road to awakening. This lecture examines why the Chag-Dzog traditions arrive at such an aversion to “blank mind” states and what this tells us about the primacy of experience, the nature of consciousness, and the problem of agency in the awakened state of a Buddha.
Lecture Report: “Reflexivity, Luminosity, and Cessative Sidetracks”
Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series
Princeton University, January 17, 2025, at 16:30–18:30 EST
Keynote Lecture by Professor John D. Dunne (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Response by Professor Bronwyn Finnigan (Australian National University) and Professor Thomas Metzinger (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz)
Supported by the Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation, this lecture was hosted by the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion at Princeton University as part of the Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series on Buddhism. It served as the keynote address of the conference “Agency and Experience: Buddhist and Cognitive Perspectives.” Professor John D. Dunne of the University of Wisconsin-Madison delivered the keynote lecture entitled “Reflexivity, Luminosity, and Cessative Sidetracks,” with responses from Professor Bronwyn Finnigan of the Australian National University and Professor Thomas Metzinger of Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, who joined online. The event was introduced by Professor Jonathan Gold, who welcomed participants and thanked the Tzu Chi Charity Foundation for supporting both the conference and the lecture series. Welcoming remarks were also offered by Professor Rey-Sheng Her of Tzu Chi University. Three scholars from Princeton’s organizing committee, Molly Crockett, Nadav Amir, and Jonathan Gold, were acknowledged for their work in assembling the conference.
Prof. John D. Dunne is Distinguished Professor of Contemplative Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also holds a co-appointment in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and serves as a faculty member of the Center for Healthy Minds. His work focuses on Buddhist philosophy and contemplative practice, especially in dialogue with cognitive science and psychology. He is the author of Foundations of Dharmakīrti’s Philosophy and numerous articles on Buddhist epistemology, reflexive awareness, and the intersection of Buddhist thought with cognitive science. He is also a Fellow of the Mind and Life Institute. The keynote was drawn from a sixteen-thousand-word essay he had written for the occasion, portions of which had been shared in advance with the two respondents.
Prof. Bronwyn Finnigan is Associate Professor in the School of Philosophy at the Australian National University and was serving as Visiting Associate Professor in Princeton’s Philosophy Department at the time of the lecture. Her research engages philosophy of mind, moral psychology, and ethics in Western and Buddhist philosophical traditions, with particular focus on Buddhist moral psychology, the nature of fear and anxiety, and the role of self-concepts in mindfulness research. She has a book under contract with Cambridge University Press on varieties of mindfulness. She noted that one of her earliest publications as a graduate student had developed ideas from an earlier article by Professor Dunne, entitled “Thoughtless Buddha, Passionate Buddha,” which she described as a remarkable piece of graduate work.
Prof. Thomas Metzinger is Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Philosophy at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. He is the author of Being No One and The Ego Tunnel, whose recent book was warmly recommended by Professor Dunne in his opening remarks. His work on the phenomenal self-model has become a major reference point for philosophical and scientific discussions of consciousness, self, and subjective experience. He has maintained a formal meditation practice for forty-eight years.
An Opening Story: Cessation in the Field
Professor Dunne opened with a personal anecdote that he said at least one person in the room could corroborate, since that person had been there. In 1994, teaching on the Antioch Buddhist Studies Program in India, he had worked alongside Raji, a celebrated vipassanā teacher who came every year to teach undergraduate students from the United States. The year was particularly hot, and the teaching took place on the roof of the Burmese Bihar. Not far away, a sadhu had buried himself underground to prove that he could attain a form of samādhi in which everything stopped, including his breath. Total cessation of mind, cessation of breath, cessation of all activity. This image, Professor Dunne said, crystallised the phenomenon he would be exploring for the next fifty minutes: the profound cultural and philosophical attraction that cessative states have exerted across the Buddhist world, and the question of whether that attraction might be leading contemporary contemplative science in a problematic direction.
Two Qualms
Before turning to his philosophical argument, Professor Dunne laid out two related concerns that had motivated his inquiry.
The first was what he called the “barking up the wrong tree” problem. If the goal of studying cessative states in laboratory settings is to understand the nature of consciousness, there is something paradoxical in the methodology. Cessation, by definition, is the absence of the thing one is trying to understand. As he put it: is it like studying a circuit with no electricity running through it? Is it like a dance with nobody moving? If consciousness is a dynamic, self-illuminating process, examining its most minimal and contentless expression may simply not be the right experimental design. He noted this concern was increasingly relevant given recent ventures such as a West Coast startup called Journey, which at the time of the lecture was advertising the ability to bring users to a jhāna state within five days. He expressed curiosity about how that would turn out.
The second and larger qualm was what he called the “moth to a flame” problem. Is there something about cessation, something almost anaesthetic in its appeal, that draws people to it not for epistemic reasons but for psychological ones? Is the contemporary surge of interest in minimal and contentless states partly a cultural phenomenon rather than a purely scientific one? Professor Dunne said he would not pursue this second qualm in depth during the lecture, leaving it open as a question for the respondents and the audience, but he introduced it as a background concern that shaped his interest in the Chag-Dzog critique.
Four Categories of Cessation
Moving to his analytical framework, Professor Dunne proposed four heuristic categories of cessation. The first is the cessation of thoughts and conceptuality. The second is the cessation of sensory perception, encompassing what the Yogācāra tradition calls the six active consciousnesses, from eye-consciousness through to mind-consciousness. The third is the cessation of the phenomenality of consciousness itself, the luminosity or prabhāsvara quality that undergirds awareness even when no object is present. The fourth is the cessation of physiological processes, including respiration. These categories exist on a spectrum, and different Buddhist traditions mark their soteriological goals at different points along it. In non-Tantric contexts, the paradigmatic cessative endpoint is nirodha-samāpatti, the attainment of cessation, which Paul Griffiths had analysed in his 1986 book Being Mindless, a work Professor Dunne recommended warmly despite noting that it had received far fewer citations than it deserved.
The Ontological Trap: Sarvāstivāda
The main philosophical argument of the lecture traced what Professor Dunne called the “attractor state” quality of cessation through four major phases of Sanskrit Buddhist thought. He began with what he termed the ontological trap, as represented by the Sarvāstivāda tradition.
In the Sarvāstivāda framework, saṃsāra is the flowing together of substantially real, causally conditioned elements, the five aggregates, each fixed in their essential nature by their causal history. The fundamental driver of this system is ignorance, which is always part of the causal history of these conditioned elements. Since the elements cannot be transformed without violating their fixed natures, liberation can only consist in their cessation. There is no exit from saṃsāra through transformation; there is only escape through stopping. This is the trap: once you accept the Sarvāstivāda metaphysics, cessation becomes the only available soteriological option.
Nāgārjuna’s Response and Its Unexpected Destination
Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka philosophy appears to dissolve the trap by denying that phenomena have fixed essential natures. Things are empty of inherent existence, and it is ignorance that makes them appear fixed. Remove the ignorance through the wisdom that sees emptiness, and transformation becomes possible. Nirvāṇa is now described as “unlocated,” abiding neither in saṃsāra nor in full cessation.
But Professor Dunne argued that Nāgārjuna’s system, when pressed by the commentator Candrakīrti, circles back to cessation through a different door. Working through Nāgārjuna’s verse that karma and affliction cease through concepts, and concepts cease through fabrication (prapañca), and fabrication ceases in emptiness, Candrakīrti concluded that the experience of emptiness is an experience in which the activity of the mind itself ceases. A Buddha’s realization, on this account, is a realization in which nothing is happening mentally. Candrakīrti is left having to explain how Buddhas can still engage compassionately with the world while residing in what is effectively a cessative state, a problem he addresses through complex accounts of non-conceptual cognitive functioning that Professor Dunne described but did not detail. The point was that even Madhyamaka, which seemed to offer a way beyond cessation, arrived back at a version of it.
Professor Dunne illustrated the stakes of this issue with a famous episode from the Vimalakīrti Sūtra. Śāriputra, who in the sūtra represents a conservative early Buddhist perspective, cannot see the Buddha field because his mind is, in the words of a divine being, “filled with cesspools.” The Buddha touches his toe to the ground and the world is momentarily transformed into a spectacular paradise, before collapsing back. The episode illustrates the Mahāyāna claim that what one sees reflects the state of one’s mind, but it also raises the question of what a Buddha’s ongoing experience of the world actually consists in, a question that cessative accounts of enlightenment make increasingly difficult to answer.
Yogācāra, Dharmakīrti, and Reflexive Awareness
Yogācāra philosophy appeared to offer a more constructive alternative. Rather than locating the problem in the fixed or unfixed nature of phenomena, or in conceptual fabrication as such, it identified the root of suffering in a specific illusion: the illusion of subject-object duality. Eliminate that illusion, and what remains is said to be ineffable but accessible, continuous with ordinary experience but free of its distorting overlay. This led to the Dharmakīrtian concept of reflexive awareness, svasaṃvedana.
Professor Dunne explained svasaṃvedana with an example he had apparently used with audiences before: seeing a double rainbow in Austria. When you see something as beautiful and absorbing as a double rainbow, you are not attending to your own affect in that moment; you are looking at the rainbow. But later, when asked how you felt, you can report accurately that you felt awe, even though you never directed attention to that feeling as an object. The awe was present in the experience without being presented as an object. This always-present subjectivity that underlies experience without becoming its focus is what Dharmakīrti means by self-reflexivity. The metaphor is light: just as a lamp illuminates whatever is in the room without being a separate object in that room, consciousness illuminates its contents through the bare, intransitive act of presenting.
Professor Dunne drew a grammatical analogy to make this precise: in Romance languages, transitive verbs can be made intransitive through a reflexive pronoun. In Spanish, one says se habla español rather than hablo español, making the knowing a happening rather than a directed action. Svasaṃvedana does the same thing to the verb “to know.” It converts the transitive “I know that” into an intransitive “there is knowing.” This intransitive knowing, he argued, is what the Tibetan tradition invokes when it speaks of the luminous, self-aware quality of the mind.
The problem, however, is that recognising svasaṃvedana requires eliminating the conceptual and dualistic overlay that ordinarily obscures it. And here the commentator Śākyabuddhi, a highly influential thinker in the Dharmakīrtian tradition, identified a logical difficulty: if self-reflexive awareness is already present in every moment of ordinary experience, why can ordinary beings not simply perceive it directly? His answer required concluding that recognising svasaṃvedanademands a state devoid of ordinary phenomenal content. We are back, once again, to cessation. As Professor Dunne put it: we had a good option, we didn’t have to go there, but we went there anyway.
The Chag-Dzog Critique: Why Cessation Is Dangerous
Having established cessation as a recurring attractor state across four major phases of Sanskrit Buddhist philosophy, Professor Dunne turned to what he called the Chag-Dzog critique. The compound term “Chag-Dzog” combines Chag-chen (Mahāmudrā) and Dzog-chen (Dzogchen), and the texts he drew upon come from a seventeenth-century Tibetan teacher whom he described as probably a somewhat marginal figure in his own milieu, not engaged in sectarian rivalry with other traditions but criticising his own fellow practitioners.
The text Professor Dunne read from contains instructions for śamatha in the Chag-Dzog tradition. He read a passage directly: “When you can just see the mind’s nature, you should cultivate stability, relaxing body, speech, and mind. Do not pursue the fluctuation of thoughts of the past and future. Look directly at the mind with the mind. Sights, sounds, smells, and such: don’t stop the six consciousnesses and do not pursue them. Whatever appears, whatever arises, rest in it, all intently, lucidly, nakedly. Practice with proper intensity and relaxation. If there’s too much intensity, the practice is contrived. Too much relaxation, and one is seized by thoughts. Instead, be merely undistracted.”
Immediately after these instructions, the text warns: “These days, some practitioners of śamatha consider a thoughtless state in which the six consciousnesses are stopped to be an excellent practice. But this is just called the absorption in cessation, and it is said to be a fault and a sidetrack of meditation. It is explained that it causes, as its result, rebirth in the form realm as a being without sañña, or as a nāga, or an animal. It is definitely not a path to liberation.”
The nāga rebirth, Professor Dunne noted, is associated in Tibetan thought with pride and anger, though he acknowledged he was still working on understanding precisely why this particular consequence is invoked. What is clear is that the absorption in cessation is identified as inhibiting vipaśyanā, the development of insight into the nature of the mind, and that this inhibition is the most critical failure: not merely a failure to progress, but an active obstruction.
A second anecdote in the text recounts the encounter between the practitioner Yan Ben Tbo and the master Vira. Yan Ben Tbo boasts of a samādhi so stable he can remain in it for several days without thoughts of food or water. Vira replies: through that kind of thing, you will be reborn as a nāga. I don’t need any of that. A similar exchange occurs in the Milarepa literature, where a practitioner claims the ability to sustain thoughtless meditation for many days, and Milarepa laughs and says: You cannot get liberation by squeezing sand.
The Chag-Dzog text that Professor Dunne’s teacher had also given him contains an even more explicit passage from a commentary: “If one remains in that state for a long time, then the faith, pure appearance, compassion, and confidence in karmic causality that were previously present in one’s mind will all wither and disappear. That blank thoughtless state itself is ignorance. That is delusion’s cause.”
Professor Dunne offered two reasons why the Chag-Dzog traditions found cessation so problematic. First, dynamic consciousness is actually required to understand the nature of consciousness. Stopping it is not studying it; it is studying its absence. Second, there appear to be genuine behavioural and ethical consequences: practices that aim at thoughtlessness tend to erode compassion, faith, and sensitivity to karmic causality. These are empirical claims, Professor Dunne noted, that he genuinely wondered whether contemporary research might be able to investigate.
He closed his lecture with the teaching that his teacher’s teacher, Tögyal Rinpoche, had cited as the summary of the entire Chag-Dzog approach to practice, attributed to Milarepa: “Appearances don’t bind you. Experiences don’t bind you. Clinging binds you. Cut the clinging.” This, Professor Dunne proposed, is the corrective to the cessative attractor: the problem has never been the presence of appearances, but the clinging to them. Liberation consists in releasing that clinging, not in eliminating the appearances themselves.
Response by Professor Bronwyn Finnigan
Professor Finnigan opened by situating her response within what she described as its broader significance: the Chag-Dzog traditions’ strong normative resistance to cessative practice raises a question with implications well beyond sectarian Buddhist debate. Should contemporary Buddhists, or anyone adopting Buddhist-derived practices, engage in practices aimed at generating such states?
Her response developed in two movements. In the first, she challenged the suggestion that Sanskrit Buddhist philosophy had uniformly arrived at cessative conclusions. To do so, she offered a close reading of Vasubandhu’s Trisvabhāvanirdeśa, the Three Natures Treatise, focusing on its celebrated simile of the magician and the elephant. In the simile, a magician performs an incantation that causes an elephant to appear before an audience. The audience takes the elephant to be real, which, in the context of ancient India where trained war elephants represented mortal danger, produces genuine terror. The magician’s illusion is a simile for the imaginary nature (parikalpitasvabhāva), the illusory subject-object duality through which we ordinarily apprehend the world. The fact that the illusion arises dependent on the magician is a simile for the dependent nature (paratantrasvabhāva). What, then, is the perfected nature (pariniṣpannasvabhāva), the goal state?
To make this vivid for her students, Professor Finnigan offered a thought experiment: imagine attending a magic show with someone you love very much, perhaps your mother. The magician invites a volunteer, your mother raises her hand, and she is brought onto the stage, placed into a box, and apparently sawed in half. If you do not know this is a trick, the experience is terrifying. Then an assistant leads you to the edge of the stage and shows you your mother tucked safely into the box, the fake legs waggling around. The relief is immediate. You return to your seat. You still see the magician apparently sawing your mother in half, but the experience has been entirely transformed. You might even laugh. The appearances have not changed, but your relationship to them has changed completely, because you know the truth.
This is what Professor Finnigan described as the first and, in her view, philosophically preferable interpretation of Vasubandhu’s perfected nature: a state of philosophical realisation in which appearances continue but are no longer mistaken for mind-independent realities. Dualistic experience persists, but clinging ceases because one knows the appearances to be constructed. This interpretation does not require cessation of phenomenal content. It requires transformation of how content is held.
The second interpretation, however, finds passages later in the Trisvabhāvanirdeśa that appear to suggest that the appearances themselves also disappear in the perfected state, leaving only an undifferentiated, boundless suchness with no subjects, no objects, and no differentiated content of any kind. Professor Finnigan noted that this second option is what Professor Dunne had identified as the attractor state in Indian Buddhist philosophy, and she agreed with his reading. Her point was to show that within Yoga cāra itself, competing interpretations exist, and that preferring the non-cessative interpretation has strong textual support from one of its most foundational texts.
In the second part of her response, Professor Finnigan asked what philosophical criteria might help contemporary practitioners choose between these competing approaches. She examined the question from two distinct angles.
First, evaluating against the goal of mental health and wellbeing. Non-dual and cessative practices have attracted considerable therapeutic interest, and there is robust evidence that rumination, involving repetitive negative self-referential thinking with both valence bias and self-bias, plays a central role in the development and maintenance of depression and anxiety. Practices that decrease rumination consistently improve mental health outcomes. But different practices target rumination through different mechanisms. Cognitive behavioural therapy targets the valence and self-bias directly, aiming for a realistically positive self-concept. Mindfulness-based interventions reduce self-related processing more broadly. Non-dual awareness practices aim to restrict all thinking. Professor Finnigan argued that the last strategy might function like a hard reset on a computer caught in a faulty circuit: effective in short doses, but unlikely to outperform targeted interventions over the long term, and certainly not capable of sustaining the sustained engagement with lived needs and relationships that long-term wellbeing requires.
Second, evaluating against the goal of Buddhahood or the Bodhisattva ideal. Here the problems with cessation become more acute. A Buddha is conventionally understood as exemplifying profound wisdom and boundless compassion, adapting teaching through upāya, skilful means, to the specific needs of different audiences. This adaptability requires discriminating awareness of who is being helped and what they need. Non-dual awareness, by definition, is characterised by the absence of differentiated content, subjects, and objects. How could such a state generate the knowledge required to identify suffering and respond to it appropriately?
The Bodhisattva ideal, as expressed in Śāntideva’s famous verse from the Bodhicaryāvatāra, “As long as space abides and as long as the world abides, so long may I abide, destroying the sufferings of the world,” similarly presupposes the ongoing capacity to perceive suffering, to track its diminishment, and to know when one’s task is complete. A mode of liberation characterised by the absence of all differentiated content could not sustain this commitment without invoking supernatural mechanisms that cannot be empirically verified.
Professor Finnigan concluded with three questions for anyone considering whether to adopt cessative practices: What goals do you seek to achieve? How do these practices facilitate those goals? And do your answers rely on assumptions that extend beyond what naturalistic cognitive science can verify?
Response by Professor Thomas Metzinger
Professor Metzinger began by reflecting on what it means to honour a great tradition. Not by wearing funny clothes, bestowing titles, or simply redescribing inherited frameworks, he said, but by taking the tradition seriously as an ongoing epistemic project and building conceptual bridges from it to the best current philosophy and empirical science. He offered three such bridges.
The first bridge was phenomenal transparency, a concept he traced back to George Edward Moore’s 1903 paper, which, he noted, was more than 120 years old but remained remarkably apt. Moore had observed that consciousness functions like glass: we see through it to the objects it presents, rather than noticing the medium of presentation. He had even used the term “emptiness” to describe the character of this transparency, writing that consciousness is “as if before us a mere emptiness,” yet “can be distinguished if we look attentively enough, and if we know there is something to look for.” Phenomenal transparency, in Metzinger’s terminology, is the condition in which only content properties are available to attention; the carrier properties of consciousness, its representational character as a medium, are invisible. The phenomenology is one of immersion, realness, and mind-independence. This is the neurological basis of what Candrakīrti had called the entrapment of “childish beings” in naive realism: we are deeply embedded in a world model that presents itself as direct access to a mind-independent world, with no access to the earlier processing stages that constructed it.
The first application of transparency in Metzinger’s framework is the phenomenal self-model. When a system operates under a phenomenally transparent self-model, it generates, by necessity, the phenomenology of identification and ownership: the felt sense that there is a real, located self that is the author and locus of experience. Phenomenal opacity, by contrast, allows the system to perceive the constructed character of its own self-representation, recognising the self-model as a model rather than as reality.
The second bridge was what Metzinger called the Phenomenal Model of the Intentionality Relation (PMIR). In ordinary experience, the subject is phenomenally represented as being directed toward an object: there is something it is like to be a knowing self attending to something. Metzinger used a memorable analogy: have you ever slowly, very carefully opened a refrigerator to see if the light really goes out? That careful, self-aware act of looking is what śamatha creates: a system that is aware of itself as a knowing system directed at an object. Non-dual practice, by contrast, can opacify the PMIR, making visible the emptiness of the intentional relation itself, the fact that what appears as a subject grasping an object is not a real transitive action but an event in which subject-form and object-form arise simultaneously in awareness. Metzinger noted that contemporary research shows the PMIR collapses in neurotypical individuals many hundreds of times per day; it is a volatile, unstable structure in the human mind, much more so than the subjective phenomenology of continuous selfhood would suggest.
The third bridge was what Metzinger called the contraction principle. In ordinary experience, phenomenal consciousness contracts to a first-person, spatiotemporal vantage point, generating the egoic perspective: a located self with specific concerns, vulnerabilities, memories, and anticipated trajectories. The contraction is evolutionarily successful: it allows organisms to orient effectively within their environments and coordinate complex social lives. But it also, as Metzinger put it, creates an ocean of suffering.
Opposing the contracted, egoic perspective, Metzinger described a quality he called epistemic openness, which he and colleagues had identified psychometrically as factor eight in a large database of meditative experience reports. This factor, which the researchers dubbed “emptiness and non-egoic awareness,” is characterised by the absence of spatial and temporal self-location, no sense of ownership, no agency, and no conceptual self-representation, alongside a heightened awareness of the system’s own capacity to know. One experiential report from the database captures it: “I experienced awareness itself, not in the sense that I was experiencing awareness. There was no me. There was no observer. Awareness itself was always already aware.”
Metzinger hypothesised that epistemic openness corresponds to a state in which the system’s internal model of its own epistemic space, the high-dimensional screen on which everything else appears in normal waking life, has been made phenomenally opaque. One becomes aware, for the first time, of the model itself rather than merely of its contents. Cessation, on this account, would be the case in which this model has been deliberately shut off rather than made opaque. The Chag-Dzog critique, Metzinger suggested, can be read as pointing precisely to this distinction: making the epistemic space opaque is productive; shutting it down is not.
Metzinger closed by noting that after forty-eight years of formal practice, he found himself no longer particularly interested in the political rivalries between ancient schools. What interested him was whether the conceptual bridges he had proposed might help clarify what is actually happening in meditative experience, and what it would take for contemporary cognitive science to investigate these phenomena with the seriousness they deserve.
Discussion
The Q&A session ranged across several interconnected themes.
A question about the relationship between the Chag-Dzog critique and the early neuroscience of meditation prompted a candid self-assessment from Professor Dunne. He had been involved in some of the pioneering studies of long-term meditators, working with Francisco Varela, Antoine Lutz, and Matthew Ricard, in which the concepts of focused attention and open monitoring were developed. He acknowledged that the research team had assumed they were probing a minimal-consciousness approach without ever asking the adept meditators whether their meditation involved cessation of content or dynamic engagement with it. The phenomenological questionnaires asked about stability, luminosity, and clarity of awareness, but not about whether content was present. This oversight, he said, was consequential, and the Chag-Dzog critique implies that the question of content versus contentlessness is precisely the question that most needed to be asked.
A question about whether the Chag-Dzog critique is ultimately a sectarian claim rather than a universally applicable philosophical argument prompted a nuanced response. Professor Dunne acknowledged that the texts do appear to be directed at practitioners within the writer’s own tradition, not at hypothetical practitioners in other countries or lineages, and that institutional rivalries cannot be ruled out. But he argued that the critique carries philosophical weight independent of its local context: the two concerns he had identified, the difficulty of studying consciousness by examining its absence, and the possible ethical and behavioural consequences of cultivating thoughtlessness, are genuine and general concerns that any tradition would do well to consider.
Questions about the implications for clinical mindfulness practice generated a spirited exchange. Professor Finnigan reiterated her concern that the distinction between practices that target specific harmful thought patterns such as rumination and practices that aim at the elimination of all thought is rarely made explicit in clinical or corporate mindfulness applications. This distinction, the Chag-Dzog literature makes clear, is not merely a technical meditation question but a question with real consequences for practitioners. Professor Dunne agreed and noted that the growing popular interest in accessing cessative states, exemplified by the Journey startup mentioned at the outset, made this conversation more urgent rather than less.
A final question asked how the relationship between cessation and insight could be reconciled with the widespread positive reports of cessative experiences by practitioners who do not seem to have suffered the negative consequences the Chag-Dzog texts warn about. Professor Dunne replied that this is indeed an empirical question, and one that his ongoing research hopes to address more directly. The Chag-Dzog claim that compassion, faith, and moral sensitivity wither in practitioners who rely on cessative absorption is not impossible to test, at least in principle, and it would be valuable to know whether contemporary data support or complicate it.
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