Often Buddhists practicing meditation have questions about the interpretation of vitarka and vicāra, and how to interpret these two terms.
What some may not know is that these terms are also found in relation to meditation in the (Hindu) Yoga tradition. This may seem unrelated at first, but it is significant because that tradition based a lot of its methods, ideas, and terminology on those from early Buddhism (but we don’t know how or when this happened). And importantly, like Buddhists, meditation was a big part of their tradition.
The Yoga system most similar to that of Buddhism, and which owes the most to Buddhism, is that of Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra. There is a translation done by Edwin F. Bryant that goes into the text in much detail along with its classical commentaries.
There are some interesting parallels here with the Buddhist progression through the dhyānas as seen in classical formulations in the EBT’s. I thought I would post the most relevant passage from the Yoga Sūtra regarding vitarka and vicāra and their place in developing samādhi.
I.17 vitarka-vicārānandaāsmitā-rūpānugamāt samprajñātaḥ
Samprajñāta [samādhi] consists of [the consecutive] mental stages of absorption with physical awareness, absorption with subtle awareness, absorption with bliss, and absorption with the sense of I-ness.
As you can see, the text is incredibly compact, and would usually be interpreted with commentary explaining it. Here, vitarka is translated as “physical awareness” and vicāra is translated as “subtle awareness.” However, the translator—who has made a career of studying this text—quickly points out that vitarka and vicāra here cannot be translated adequately English, or understood in terms of their ordinary conventional meanings in Sanskrit.
In instances such as this, English translations such as “absorption with physical awareness” for vitarka and “absorption with subtle awareness” for vicāra do not convey the same meaning or difference between these two levels of samādhi. The technical way that these Sanskrit terms are being used here cannot be captured by a suitable English equivalent, so the reader is advised not to try to understand these terms through the clumsy English words a translator chose to convey them. In fact, even the Sanskrit terms are an artificiality, as Vijñānabhikṣu points out, and not to be correlated with how they are used in other contexts […] They are guides for the yogī, alerting him or her to some of the meditative experiences that will be encountered on the path.
Vijñānabhikṣu is the name of the author of one commentary on the text. The translator highlights the commentary of Vācaspati Miśra, who gives the clearest explanation of these stages:
[Vācaspati Miśra] considers the first state on Patañjali’s list, vitarka-samādhi, to be contemplation on a gross physical object, that is to say, meditating on an object that one experiences as a manifestation or construct of the gross physical or material elements. It is thus the first level of experiencing an object in samādhi. Keeping the metaphysics of Sāṅkhya in mind, we know that the five gross elements that constitute gross physical objects evolve from elements that are more subtle, that is, they are actually evolutes from the tanmātras, the five subtle elements. Vācaspati Miśra states that vicāra samādhi the second level of samādhi concentration mentioned by Patañjali in the sūtra, involves absorption on this more subtle aspect of the object of meditation, perceiving the object as actually consisting of these more subtle ingredients. In fact, I.44 informs us that the subtle substructure of external reality can refer to any of the evolutes from prakṛti, as even the tanmātras evolve from ahaṅkāra which, in turn, evolves from buddhi. Thus, the latter can also be considered sūkṣma, subtle. As a new archer first aims at large objects, Vācaspati Miśra says, and then progressively smaller ones, so the neophyte yogī first experiences the gross nature of the object in meditation and then its progressively more subtle nature. Instead of experiencing the object as composed of compact quantum masses, the bhūtādi gross elements, as in the first state of vitarka, in vicāra, the yogī experiences the object as composed of vibratory, radiant potential, subtle energy (a sublevel of reality normally imperceptible to the senses).
Hope nobody was too offended by this “heretical” content! And since I copied so much, I’ll give a full citation. If anyone is interested in this type of stuff, this translation is very good (done by a scholar who is passionate about the material and treats it seriously).
Bryant, Edwin F. 2009. The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary With Insights from the Traditional Commentators. New York, NY: North Point Press.
