UC Santa Barbara

Like the terms “karma,” “dharma,” and “yoga,” “yogic perception (yogipratyakṣa, rnal ’byor mngon sum)” is highly polysemic and widely used across Indo-Tibetan religious traditions. Unlike these terms, however, “yogic perception” does not defy loose definition, such that no description semantically encompasses its myriad instantiations. Generally, it denotes the culmination of yogic, meditative practice, where the yogi is granted some perceptual ability thanks to their austerities. However, various Hindu and Buddhist traditions interpret the content of this perception differently. (1) Some argue that it affords an ability to see far-off or distant objects, a type of remote seeing. (2) Others argue that it affords literal knowledge of all objects, tantamount to omniscience. (3) Lastly, some couch it as a type of spiritual insight, the ability to perceive the truth of reality and its phenomena.

This dissertation uses a polythetic model to represent yogic perception’s various meanings, general enough to account for maximum variance but polythetic in being able to capture particularities without the demand they extend to every instance. The three aforementioned themes—yogic perception as remote seeing, omniscience, and spiritual insight—are indicative of this polythetic model: while some descriptions of yogic perception span more than one theme, many instantiate only one. In addition to this thematic analysis of yogic perception, this dissertation also seeks to account for diachronic factors in yogic perception’s intellectual development, showing how these characterizations changed over time.

The dissertation is thus both thematically organized along these three themes as well as chronologically organized. The first three chapters are devoted to each of these three themes in the Indian sources, showing those themes’ historical developments during yogic perception’s intellectual history. Tibetans received a large portion of this millennium-long Indian discussion on yogic perception en masse and were highly synthetic in their approach. Therefore, chapters four and five treat Tibetan interpretations of these Indian materials. Lastly, I offer some speculative explanations as to why these three connotations of yogic perception have been so salient in the primary sources, offering some hypotheses in chapter six as to their particular temporal endurance. Drawing on methodologies culled from the field of cognitive science of religion, I argue that longstanding preoccupation with these themes in the those texts suggest that they are especially intuitive.