Madhupindika Sutta: The Honey Cake (MN 18)
The Madhupindika Sutta, the eighteenth discourse of the Majjhima Nikaya, is cited here for its account of papanca, usually translated as conceptual proliferation. The passage traces a sequence: contact with something gives rise to feeling, feeling to perception, perception to thinking, and thinking to proliferation, after which the proliferated concepts return to occupy the person who produced them. The point this publication takes from it is the direction of that last step, in which the elaboration a mind generates is then experienced as though it came from outside. It is a scriptural text rather than a study, and it is used as the earliest available description of a pattern that modern work on rumination describes differently.
The Madhupindika Sutta, the eighteenth discourse of the Majjhima Nikaya, is cited here for its account of papanca, usually translated as conceptual proliferation. The passage traces a sequence: contact with something gives rise to feeling, feeling to perception, perception to thinking, and thinking to proliferation, after which the proliferated concepts return to occupy the person who produced them. The point this publication takes from it is the direction of that last step, in which the elaboration a mind generates is then experienced as though it came from outside. It is a scriptural text rather than a study, and it is used as the earliest available description of a pattern that modern work on rumination describes differently.
Written from the citation as recorded when this source was checked.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
Madhupiṇḍika Sutta (MN 18). The discourse on papañca, conceptual proliferation.
Where we use it
- 2,500 Years, One Good Study, Why We Exist / Endure
Reliability of this reference
The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.