The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha - Bhikkhu Nanamoli [553]
5 Paṭhaviṁ paṭhavito sañjānāti. Although perceiving “earth as earth” seems to suggest seeing the object as it really is, the aim of Buddhist insight meditation, the context makes it clear that the ordinary person’s perception of “earth as earth” already introduces a slight distortion of the object, a distortion that will be blown up into full-fledged misinterpretation when the cognitive process enters the phase of “conceiving.” MA explains that the ordinary person seizes upon the conventional expression “it is earth,” and applying this to the object, perceives it through a “perversion of perception” (saññ̄vipall̄sa). The latter is a technical expression explained as perceiving the impermanent as permanent, the painful as pleasurable, what is not self as self, and what is foul as beautiful (AN 4:49/ii.52). Ñm reads the ablative suffix -to of the Pali as signifying derivation and translates the phrase: “From earth he has a percept of earth.”
6 The Pali verb “conceives” (maññati), from the root man, “to think,” is often used in the Pali suttas to mean distortional thinking—thought that ascribes to its object characteristics and a significance derived not from the object itself, but from one’s own subjective imaginings. The cognitive distortion introduced by conceiving consists, in brief, in the intrusion of the egocentric perspective into the experience already slightly distorted by spontaneous perception. According to the commentaries, the activity of conceiving is governed by three defilements, which account for the different ways it comes to manifestation—craving (taṇh̄ ) , conceit (m̄na ), and views (dị̣hi).
MA paraphrases this text thus: “Having perceived earth with a perverted perception, the ordinary person afterwards conceives it—construes or discriminates it—through the gross proliferating tendencies (papañca) of craving, conceit, and views, which are here called ‘conceivings. ’…He apprehends it in diverse ways contrary [to reality].”
The four ways of conceiving (maññan̄): The Buddha shows that the conceiving of any object may occur in any of four ways, expressed by the text as a fourfold linguistic pattern: accusative, locative, ablative, and appropriative. The primary significance of this modal pattern—enigmatic in the Pali as well—seems to be ontological. I take the pattern to represent the diverse ways in which the ordinary person attempts to give positive being to his imagined sense of egohood by positing,below the threshold of reflection, a relationship between himself as the subject of cognition and the perceived phenomenon as its object. According to the fourfold pattern given, this relationship may be one either of direct identification (“he conceives X”), or of inherence (“he conceives in X”), or of contrast or derivation (“he conceives from X”), or of simple appropriation (“he conceives X to be ‘mine’”).
But care is needed in interpreting these phrases. The Pali does not supply any direct object for the second and third modes, and this suggests that the process at work in conceiving proceeds from a deeper and more general level than that involved in the forming of an explicit view of self, as described for example at MN 2.8 or MN 44.7. The activity of conceiving thus seems to comprise the entire range of subjectively tinged cognition, from the impulses and thoughts in which the sense of personal identity is still inchoate to elaborate intellectual structures in which it has been fully explicated.
Ñm, however, understands the implicit object of conceiving to be the percept itself, and accordingly translates: “having had from earth a percept of earth, he conceives [that to be] earth, he conceives [that to be] in earth, he conceives [that to be apart] from earth,” etc.
The fifth phrase, “he delights