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In Buddhist Psychology, conceptual proliferation or papañca (papañca, ) describes a mental process of ever-expanding inner language and concepts. The scope of meanings of the word Papañca is different and broader than any Western language equivalent (as it is often the case for Buddhist concepts in Pali, the original language of the Buddha - for instance “Dukkha”).

The term is used in various suttas of the Pali canon, such as the Madhupindika Sutta (MN 18). The mental concepts generated by this process of papañca are referred as papañca-saññā-sankhā. For instance, papañca-sankha is translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu as objectification-classifications: 'The mind's tendency to read distinctions and differentiation even into the simplest experience of the present, thus giving rise to views that can issue in conflict'.

The mental phenomena of Papañca has been described as "the way the mind proliferates into abstractions and how we get entangled in those, fixated on them, obsessed by them – which can make our problems worse than what they are."

Translations and definitions of Papañca
The translation of papañca as conceptual proliferation was first made by Katukurunde Nanananda Thera in his research monograph Concept and Reality.

In his notes on the Madhupindika Sutta, Thanissaro Bhikkhu writes: "As one writer has noted, the word papañca has had a wide variety of meanings in Indian thought, with only one constant: in Buddhist philosophical discourse it carries negative connotations, usually of falsification and distortion. The word itself is derived from a root that means diffuseness, spreading, proliferating.[...] For these reasons, I have chosen to render the word as "complication," although some of the following alternatives might be acceptable as well: self-reflexive thinking, reification, proliferation, exaggeration, elaboration, distortion"."

Modern Western Buddhist teachers express papañca with words like “daydreaming”, “mental fabrications”, “mental proliferation”, “trains of thoughts”, or “rumination”. Martine Batchelor writes: “…often when a thought appears in our mind we identify and grasp at it, run with it until it seems to run us. We become easily obsessed with certain trains of thoughts. In some cases, thoughts can even paralyze us physically.”

Consequences of Papañca
Beyond its use in Buddhism, papañca or conceptual proliferation captures a very common activity of our minds. It describes our tendency to generate uncontrolled trains of thoughts, that proliferate through spontaneous associations of ideas and emotions. Whether it is pure daydreaming or an attempt to interpret and elucidate events around us, it has the unexpected result of capturing our attention and blotting out or reducing direct nonverbal sensory perception. As such, it is a mechanism impacting our capacity of attention in the present moment. For instance, if a person looks at a tree while at the same time thinks and says: "This is a tree", the direct perception of the tree itself will not be as intense or complete.

Or, in the language of cognitive sciences: “When these maladaptive scripts and schemes are active repeatedly throughout one's daily life, it can lead to rumination or mental proliferation, in which a stream of mental events feed off each other with no connection to the original sense impression that initiated the stream of thought. Ruminative behavior is often characterized as reducing information processing capacity, producing general interference effects with ongoing task demands, and impacting ability to deploy top-down control”

Papañca, mindfulness and insight meditation
Conceptual proliferation is a key phenomena observed in the practices of mindfulness, focused attention, and insight meditation. Bhikkhu Bodhi, in an introduction to The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, writes: "Whereas in serenity meditation the meditator attempts to focus upon a single uniform object abstracted from actual experience, in insight meditation the endeavor is made to contemplate, from a position of detached observation, the ever-shifting flux of experience itself in order to penetrate through to the essential nature of bodily and mental phenomena. The Buddha teaches that the craving and clinging that hold us in bondage are sustained by a network of “conceivings” (maññita)—deluded views, conceits, and suppositions that the mind fabricates by an internal process of mental commentary or “proliferation” (papañca) and then projects out upon the world, taking them to possess objective validity. 'The task of insight meditation is to sever our attachments by enabling us to pierce through this net of conceptual projections' in order to see things as they really are."

The "goal" of mindfulness and insight meditation is not to eliminate papañca but to "sever our attachment to it" or "increase cognitive space around it". However, a reduction of mental proliferation is observed: ""Although the Buddhist Psychological Model does not focus on symptom reduction (in the clinical sense), since this is not the aim of Buddhist practice, reduction in symptoms resulting from practices such as mindfulness meditation is explainable as a reduction in these habitual reactions and resulting mental proliferation".

Papañca, self concept and Cogito Ergo Sum
In Western culture conscious thinking - under our control or not - is traditionally considered inevitable, and even seen as what defines "us" as conscious beings. This is clear in Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum ("I think therefore I am"). But Kierkegaard shows that Descartes implicitly assumes there is a conscious "I", arguing that "I think, therefore I am" is a tautology: "If the I in cogito is understood to be an individual human being, then the statement demonstrates nothing: I am thinking ergo I am, but if I am thinking, no wonder, then, that I am; after all, it has already been said..." .

Buddhist texts challenge this assumption of a well-defined "I", and in particular the identification of ourselves to our thoughts. In the Vajira Sutta a nun is distracted from her meditation by a thought (she hears "verses" in her mind). She attributes this thought to an external being: "Then the thought occurred to Vajira the nun: "Now who has recited this verse — a human being or a non-human one?" Then it occurred to her: "This is Mara the Evil One, who has recited this verse wanting to arouse fear, horripilation, & terror in me, wanting to make me fall away from concentration.". And she goes further in realizing that being a "living being" is also a fabrication: "What? Do you assume a 'living being,' Mara? Do you take a position? This is purely a pile of fabrications. Here no living being can be pinned down."

In his commentary of the Kalaha-vivada Sutta, Thanissaro Bhikkhu writes: "Objectification-classifications (papañca-sankha)[is] the mind's tendency to read distinctions and differentiation even into the simplest experience of the present, thus giving rise to views that can issue in conflict. As Sn 4.14 [Tuvataka Sutta] points out, the root of these classifications is the perception: "I am the thinker."

Nippapañca
Nippapañca is the opposite, the absence of papañca. Translated as "non-diffuseness", "non-differentiation", "undifferentiated", "free from defilements" or "the very reverse of separatedness, of Nibbana"