What is Svabhāva-vikalpa and with Which Consciousness(es) is it Associated? Ching Keng 1 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019 Introduction Buddhists have a strong tendency to think that a cognition into the Reality cannot involve any conceptualization. Moreover, they have a tendency to champion sensory consciousness over mental consciousness, for the obvious reason that it is the latter that conceptualizes. But does this mean that for the Buddhist tradition, sensory consciousnesses never conceptualize? When I see something as large or small, as blue against a yellow background, does this involve no conceptualization at all? For example, E.J. Lowe (2000) in his Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind remarks, “it seems that one must attribute to the child at least some concepts if one is to attribute to it a perceptual experience of seeing a table to be rectangular, because an ability to enjoy such an experience seems to require an ability to recognize tables as objects of some kind (even if not as tables) and likewise an ability to distinguish between rectangularity and other shapes that objects can possess.” (Lowe: 133) This line of thinking seems to me to be the mainstream in the European philosophical tradition that can be traced at least to Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) if not all the way to Plato. In sharp contrast, the Buddhist Yoga ¯ca ¯ra tradition holds that pure perception without concepts is possible. 1 In fact, Yoga ¯ca ¯ra thinks the whole weight of practice & Ching Keng ckeng@nccu.edu.tw 1 National Chengchi University, No. 64, Sec. 2, ZhiNan Rd., Wenshan District, Taipei City 11605, Taiwan 1 This is most clear in Digna ¯ga’s Pramāṇasamuccaya verse I. 3c where Digna ¯ga claims that “Perception is free from conceptual construction (Hattori 1968, p. 25)” [pratyakṣaṃ kalpanāpoḍham (Steinkellner 2005, p. 2)]. 123 J Indian Philos https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-018-09377-8