Center for South Asia Weekly Lecture Series: Jeremy Manheim (Doctoral Student, Asian Languages and Cultures, UW-Madison)

States of distraction offer the closest corollary in our immediate experience to the non-conceptuality of a Buddha. Such states of distraction provide a window into non-conceptual experience—the bedrock of any coherent account of a Buddha’s experience. In this talk, I delve into Sanskrit Buddhist textual accounts of distraction in order to explore how these liminal cases of intense distraction offer crucial glimpses into the possibility of meditatively cultivated non-conceptual experience.