What exactly are Parasancitta-jñāna and Āsravakṣaya-jñāna?
Cognitive neuroscience provides the answer.
Have you ever met someone like this?
Before you even open your mouth,
they seem to know exactly what you're thinking.
You smile and say you're fine,
but they see right through your brave face.
The layer of dignity you've carefully packaged
seems transparent in front of them.
You can't quite explain how they do it,
but you simply feel "seen."
Buddhism has a name for this ability:
"Parasancitta-jñāna," or the power of knowing others' minds.
When most people hear this term,
their first instinct is to think of divine powers,
superpowers,
or supernatural abilities.
The image that pops into their heads
is an old monk with his eyes closed,
directly reading the text and images in your mind,
like a Bluetooth pairing.
But think about it carefully.
If mind-reading were literally this kind of telepathy,
how would it be physically achieved?
What medium does thought use?
What signal is transmitted between brains?
What is the frequency?
What is the bandwidth?
You'll realize
it's exactly like when we dismantled the concept of "dedication."
As long as you follow this intuition,
every step leads to a dead end.
So,
either mind-reading is utter superstition,
or it's not what you think it is at all.
There's another more obscure but critical concept in Buddhism
called Āsravakṣaya-jñāna—the power of ending all outflows.
Buddhism says that among the six supernatural powers—
clairvoyance, clairaudience, mind-reading, past-life recall, and levitation—
the first five can be mastered by non-Buddhists too.
But the power of ending outflows belongs only to disciples of the Buddha.
Furthermore, Buddhism makes an incredibly profound statement:
This power is the root of all six powers.
Without it,
the other five are not ultimate.
Why?
Why is something that seems to have nothing to do with mind-reading
placed at the highest level of Buddhist practice?
In today's video,
I will use social cognitive neuroscience and our established framework
of predictive coding to answer these two questions.
When I derived the answer,
I discovered an incredibly elegant logic.
The relationship between these two powers
isn't just a metaphysical Buddhist narrative;
it corresponds to a clear chain of neural mechanisms.
And this chain reveals something so counterintuitive it'll give you goosebumps:
If you truly want to see others,
the only thing you need to do
is not to look outward more intensely,
but to clean yourself out.
Hello,
everyone.
I'm Wang Lijie.
To understand the power of knowing minds,
we first need to clarify a more fundamental fact:
Your brain is already reading minds,
and it's doing so every single moment.
You're chatting with a friend,
and they say, "Whatever,
you decide."
You immediately know they don't mean "whatever";
they're actually unhappy.
You're on the subway,
and a stranger across from you keeps checking their phone,
locking it,
then unlocking it again.
You know they're waiting for a message that hasn't arrived.
You watch a movie,
and a micro-expression from an actor...
you just know he's lying.
How do you know?
They didn't tell you,
and you didn't read the words in their minds,
but you just know.
This ability,
cognitive science calls it mentalization,
also known as Theory of Mind.
What it means is,
your brain is naturally equipped with a mechanism
specifically for inferring the mental states of others:
what they're thinking,
what they're feeling,
and what they intend to do.
This mechanism isn't a learned philosophical theory;
it's hardware that comes pre-installed in the brain.
Over the past twenty years,
social cognitive neuroscience has used brain imaging
to identify the core components of this hardware one by one.
The first core component:
Mirror Neurons.
In the 1990s,
Giacomo Rizzolatti's team at the University of Parma
discovered a type of miraculous neuron in macaque experiments.
When a monkey reaches for food itself,
these neurons fire.
When the monkey sees someone else reach for food,
these same neurons also fire.
In other words,
when your brain sees someone perform an action,
it automatically simulates that action internally.
When you see someone get pricked by a needle,
your hand might reflexively flinch.
When you see someone yawn,
you feel like yawning too.
It's not that you're overly sensitive;
it's your mirror system operating automatically.
The second core component is an old friend
we met in the previous episode on Echoing:
the Temporoparietal Junction (TPJ).
Extensive research by Rebecca Saxe at MIT has confirmed
that the TPJ is the core hub for inferring others' beliefs and intentions.
When you think, "He probably thinks I don't know,"
this is the area that's activated.
What it does
is help you build a model of what is going on in someone else's head.
The third core component is the Medial Prefrontal Cortex (mPFC).
As also mentioned in the Echoing episode,
it's responsible for self-reflection and social cognition,
especially when you're comparing and distinguishing yourself from others.
These three components, along with their connections,
form the social cognitive network in your brain.
This network runs in the background every minute you're awake.
You don't need to manually start it;
it automatically scans the facial expressions,
body language, tone of voice, and behavioral patterns of everyone around you,
and then generates a real-time judgment:
"What is this person's likely mental state right now?"
Now, here comes the key question.
If everyone's brain has this mind-reading hardware,
why are some people sensitive to others' emotions like radar,
while others are as oblivious as a block of wood?
This is where I add the second piece of the puzzle.
Remember the core logic of Predictive Coding?
Your brain is an active prediction generator.
Its perception of the external world
is essentially a top-down version constructed from prior beliefs,
which is then calibrated using sensory data.
The world you see
is primarily the version your brain has made up;
sensory data only serves to correct it.
This logic
applies equally to your perception of others.
When someone sits across from you,
your brain isn't passively receiving all the signals they emit
and then analyzing them objectively.
Not at all.
Your brain first uses your own prior beliefs to predict
their mental state,
and then uses the signals you receive to calibrate that prediction.
Your understanding of others
is essentially a controlled hallucination.
And the problem is,
those prior beliefs you use to predict others' mental states
largely come from yourself.
Psychology has a well-researched phenomenon
called projection bias.
When you're hungry, you overestimate how hungry others are.
When you're in a bad mood, you think others are unfriendly too.
When you're full of fear, you interpret neutral expressions
as hostile.
You aren't seeing others;
you are projecting your own state onto them,
mistakenly thinking you've seen them for who they are.
A 2008 study published in "Psychological Science" found
that when people are in a state of high emotional arousal—
such as anxiety, anger, or extreme excitement—
their accuracy in identifying facial expressions drops significantly.
It's not because their eyes are failing,
but because their internal noise is so loud
that it drowns out the signals coming from the other person.
If you put this finding into the framework of predictive coding,
the logic becomes crystal clear.
Your own emotional reactivity,
your fears, desires, biases, and traumatic memories—
how do these manifest in your brain?
They manifest as a set of prior beliefs with extremely high precision weight.
These beliefs constantly send down powerful prediction signals: "He doesn't like me,"
"She's judging me," "This person is untrustworthy," "Everyone leaves eventually."
What happens to these strong prediction signals?
They suppress the actual signals coming from the other person.
What your social cognition network receives
is no longer the person's true expression, tone, and body language,
but the version fabricated by your own prior beliefs.
In signal processing terms,
this is a signal-to-noise ratio problem.
The signal is the genuine social cues sent by the other person.
The noise is your own internal emotional reactions and cognitive biases.
When the noise is too loud,
the signal gets submerged.
You think you're looking at someone else,
but what you're actually seeing
is a reflection of your own inner self.
This is why an anxious person struggles to accurately judge
others' attitudes toward them.
It's also why a narcissistic person can almost never truly understand
how others feel.
It's not that their social cognition hardware is broken;
it's that the noise they generate
overwhelms the hardware's ability to receive.
Now,
remember this core finding: your accuracy in perceiving others' mental states
depends on your own internal signal-to-noise ratio.
The louder the noise,
the less you see others.
The quieter the noise,
the more transparent others become to you.
Now, let's shift the focus to Buddhism.
The "Six Supernormal Powers" (Abhijñā)
are six special abilities that can appear after reaching a certain stage of practice.
The Divine Eye (Divyacakṣu):
The ability to see things standard vision cannot.
The Divine Ear (Divyaśrotra):
The ability to hear sounds standard hearing cannot.
The Power of Transformation (Riddhividhi):
The freedom to travel anywhere at will.
The Knowledge of Past Lives (Pūrvenivāsānusmṛti):
Knowing experiences from prior existences.
The Knowledge of Others' Minds (Paracittajñāna):
Knowing what others are thinking.
The Extinction of Mental Outflows (Āśravakṣayajñāna):
The total cessation of all afflictions.
The first five powers,
Buddhism makes clear,
can be obtained by non-Buddhist practitioners as well.
Through deepening meditative concentration,
these five abilities may emerge.
But the sixth power,
the Extinction of Mental Outflows,
can only be realized within the Buddhist framework of practice.
Moreover, Buddhism repeatedly emphasizes one point: the first five powers are not final.
Only Lou jin tong (Asravaksaya) is true liberation.
But why?
To answer this question,
we must first clarify what the word "Lou" (leakage) actually means.
"Lou,"
or asrava in Sanskrit,
literally means outflow or leakage.
In Yogachara philosophy,
what does this leakage refer to?
It refers to a state where factors causing vexation and suffering
continuously flow out of your mental activities.
Specifically,
there are three fundamental leakages: the leakage of desire,
attachment to sensory pleasures;
the leakage of existence,
attachment to existence itself;
and the leakage of ignorance,
fundamental ignorance of ultimate reality.
Do you notice something?
This is exactly the Greed, Anger, and Ignorance we derived in the meditation episode.
Within our predictive coding framework,
Greed is the craving for states with low prediction error.
Anger is the resistance to states with high prediction error.
Ignorance is not knowing that this entire mechanism is at work.
And "leakage"
is the constant operation of these three improper reactions within your consciousness.
They don't just pop up occasionally;
they flow constantly, like a faucet that hasn't been turned off.
Translating this into the language of predictive coding:
Leakage represents parts of your prior belief system
where precision weights are severely miscalibrated.
Some weights that should be high are not high enough—
for instance, your awareness of impermanence.
It should be a high-precision prior,
but most people set it extremely low,
pretending everything is eternal.
Some weights that should be low are too high;
for example, beliefs like "Everyone must like me"
or "Loss means total destruction."
Their precision weights are set so high that no sensory data can penetrate them.
These miscalibrated weights are not static;
they operate continuously,
constantly distorting your perception
and constantly generating suffering.
This process of continuous outflow
is "leakage."
And Lou jin tong,
literally means stopping the leakage entirely.
All precision weights return to their proper levels.
It's not about eliminating beliefs;
it's about making every belief a revisable hypothesis
rather than an unshakeable truth.
The entire system no longer leaks noise out of control.
Now,
I'm going to do the core work of this video:
connecting Telepathy and the Extinction of Outflows with a single logical chain.
Back to the key conclusion we derived earlier:
the accuracy of your perception of others' mental states
depends on your own internal signal-to-noise ratio.
The more "leakage" you have,
the more internal noise there is.
The more greed you have,
the more likely you'll interpret others' actions through your own desires.
The more anger you have,
the more likely you'll read hostility into neutral signals.
The more ignorance you have,
the less you'll see your own projections.
You think you're seeing the truth,
but you're actually seeing your own shadows.
Conversely,
the less leakage you have,
the less internal noise you have.
When you are no longer constantly driven by your fears,
desires, and biases,
your social cognition network can finally quiet down
and receive the authentic signals from the other person.
You haven't gained a new superpower;
you've simply removed the noise source that's been interfering with you.
This is why Buddhism says Lou jin tong is the root of the Six Powers.
Let me clarify this relationship with an analogy.
Imagine you have a signal receiving antenna.
The hardware of this antenna itself is excellent.
It is extremely sensitive.
That is the social-cognitive network in your brain.
But the problem is,
several high-power signal transmitters are installed right next to it.
They are constantly blasting out noise.
These transmitters
are your greed, your anger, and your ignorance.
Your fears, your desires, your biases.
Under these circumstances,
can you receive a faint signal from a distance?
You can't.
It's not that the antenna is broken;
it's that the noise is drowning out the signal.
What is Telepathy (Ceto-pariya-ñāṇa)?
It's the antenna finally functioning normally.
What is the Extinction of Outflows (Asavakkhaya)?
It's when those noise transmitters are finally turned off.
You don't need to upgrade the antenna;
you need to shut down the noise.
The antenna was always there,
and it was always sensitive.
Does this logic find support
in empirical research within cognitive neuroscience?
Yes, it does.
Findings from multiple research teams point in the same direction.
Meditation training can significantly enhance one's accuracy
in perceiving others' emotional states.
In 2012,
Tania Singer's team at the Max Planck Institute in Germany
conducted a large-scale study on meditation training.
They divided participants into groups
to receive different types of meditation training.
One group focused specifically on compassion and social cognition.
The results showed that
those who received compassion meditation training
were significantly more accurate at identifying others' emotions than the control group.
And what was the neural mechanism behind this improvement?
Brain imaging showed that
synergistic activity in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and medial prefrontal cortex
was enhanced in these participants,
while activity in the Default Mode Network related to self-referential processing decreased.
Do you see it?
When self-related noise decreases,
the signal from the social-cognitive network becomes clearer.
Isn't this exactly the logic we just derived?
A follow-up study in 2014 further discovered that
the advantage meditators have in empathic accuracy tests
isn't because they "care" more about others,
but because they are less interfered with by their own emotional states.
In other words,
their advantage isn't about having something extra;
it's about having something less.
Less self-projection.
Less emotional noise.
Less distortion of signals by prior beliefs.
This finding perfectly aligns structurally with Buddhist descriptions.
Buddhism never claimed that telepathy works by using some special medium
to read information inside someone else's brain.
If you look closely at the descriptions in Yogacara,
the mechanism of telepathy is closer to this: when your mind is clear enough,
the mental activities of other beings will appear, like the moon reflecting in clean water,
naturally manifesting within your cognitive field.
Note the metaphor: the moon reflecting in clean water.
It's not that you reach into the sky to grab the moon;
the moon reflects on its own.
But the prerequisite is that the water must be clear.
If the water is murky,
the moon is still in the sky,
but you simply cannot see it.
When the water clears,
the moon naturally appears.
Murky water represents your 'outflows' (asavas).
Clear water is the 'extinction of outflows'.
The reflection of the moon is telepathy.
Alright.
Now let me push this logic to an even deeper level.
You might ask, "Okay..."
I understand.
Reducing internal noise can improve the accuracy of how we perceive others.
That makes sense.
But the kind of telepathy, or "knowledge of others' minds," described in Buddhism
seems to be more than just "reading expressions accurately."
Some accounts are quite hyperbolic,
claiming one can directly know the specific thoughts in another's mind.
How do we explain that?
I need to draw a line here.
What I have derived for you so far—
that reducing internal noise improves the signal-to-noise ratio of social cognition,
thereby enhancing the perception of others' mental states—
is supported by solid scientific evidence.
But the ability to directly read specific thought content,
as described in Buddhist literature,
has been neither proven nor disproven by current science.
It might be an exaggerated description of highly developed social cognitive abilities,
or it might involve mechanisms of conscious interaction we don't yet understand.
This is an honest "I don't know."
But even if we take the most conservative interpretation of telepathy,
as an exceptionally keen social perception,
the conclusion is profound enough.
Because it reveals a highly counter-intuitive truth: to see others clearly,
you don't need to learn mind-reading techniques.
What you need to do
is to clear yourself.
This logic reminds me of a widely recognized
consensus in the field of psychotherapy.
In all training for psychotherapists,
there is a core component called "personal analysis"
or "personal experience."
Essentially, the therapist must first undergo hundreds of hours of therapy themselves.
Why?
Because if you are filled with unprocessed trauma and complexes,
when you face a client,
you aren't seeing their pain;
you are seeing your own pain projected onto them.
You think you are helping them,
but you are actually fighting your own shadow.
Good therapists can keenly sense what victims
leave unsaid
not because they learned some magical mind-reading technique,
but because they are clean enough themselves.
Their social cognitive antennas don't have that much noise.
Isn't this a secular version of telepathy?
Now, let me raise the level of this framework further
and make the final bridge using the language of Yogacara.
Yogacara speaks of the seventh consciousness, Manas-vijnana—
the always-online "self-manufacturing machine" we are familiar with.
It's not just responsible for labeling every experience as "mine";
it is also a high-powered noise transmitter.
The four fundamental afflictions it produces—
self-view, self-love, self-pride, and self-ignorance—
are each high-precision, weighted prior beliefs.
Each one constantly distorts your perception of the world and others.
"Self-view"—
the belief in an independent, substantial "I"—
makes you encode all social interactions as "about me."
When someone says something,
your first reaction isn't to understand their meaning,
but to judge how that statement impacts you.
"Self-love"—
an attachment to this self—
makes you prioritize self-centered information in social cognition, like "do they like me?"
or "are they useful to me?"
It filters out the other person's genuine emotional expression.
"Self-pride"—
the impulse to compare self-worth—
means when you look at others, you aren't seeing them;
you are comparing yourself to them,
or judging them.
When you meet someone,
your first reaction isn't to feel their presence,
but to determine if they are superior or inferior to you.
"Self-ignorance"—
unawareness of this entire self-mechanism—
leaves you oblivious to the fact that these three noises are operating.
You think your judgment of others is objective,
or that you "just have a good eye for people."
You don't realize every judgment is deeply colored by the noise of Manas.
been deeply tainted.
These four fundamental afflictions
are the four high-power noise transmitters next to your antenna.
In Yogacara, within the process of transforming consciousness into wisdom,
what is the corresponding transformation for Manas-vijnana?
It transforms into the Wisdom of Equality.
What is the Wisdom of Equality?
It is the equal and non-discriminatory awareness of all sentient beings.
No longer encoding all social information with a self-centered bias,
but perceiving every existence as it is, without distortion.
Have you noticed?
The description of 'Wisdom of Equality,'
translated into the language of cognitive science,
is the pure output of the social cognitive network in a zero-noise state.
The four afflictions of Manas-vijnana are turned off;
the four noise transmitters are shut down,
and the antenna finally receives a clean signal.
You are no longer seeing others through the distorted mirror of the 'self.'
For the first time, you see them as they originally are, undistorted.
This is Telepathy (Paracitta-jnana).
It’s not adding something;
it’s dismantling something.
And this process of dismantling
is 'Asavakkhaya' (the exhaustion of outflows).
This logical structure reminds me of the insight Huxley shared
back in the 1950s.
The main function of the brain may not be to produce consciousness,
but to filter it.
Like the 'reducing valve' we discussed,
the brain is more of a reducer than a producer.
It narrows a vast flow of information into a manageable trickle
to allow you to function in daily life.
Applying this logic to social cognition,
your ability to perceive others' mental states
may not need to be increased,
but has likely been suppressed all along.
It is your own 'outflows,'
your greed, anger, and ignorance,
and the noise generated by your Manas-vijnana
that are suppressing it.
When these suppressions are removed,
the ability naturally emerges.
This is why Buddhism says sentient beings are 'inherently complete.'
It doesn't mean you are born knowing everything;
it means your underlying hardware
has always been complete.
It is software-level bugs that interfere with the hardware's operation.
Practicing 'Asavakkhayanhana' isn't a hardware upgrade;
it is software debugging.
Speaking of which,
let me add an AI perspective
to make this structure more complete.
In machine learning,
there is a concept called 'overfitting.'
If a model learns too much noise and specific patterns
from the training data,
it will actually lose its ability to judge new data.
An overfitted model seems to perform perfectly on the training set,
but fails completely when it encounters new situations.
The same goes for your judgment of others.
Your life experiences have left you with a massive 'training dataset,'
including trauma, prejudice, cultural assumptions, and defense mechanisms.
This data has trained your social cognitive model.
But if this model is overfitted,
learning too much from the specific patterns of your personal history,
it loses its ability to generalize to new, different people.
You use experiences with an ex to judge a new partner;
you use your parents' behavior to infer the intent of all authority figures.
You aren't seeing the unique individual;
you are seeing ghosts from your past training set.
'Asavakkhayanhana,'
in machine learning terms,
is when your social cognitive model reaches perfect generalization.
It is no longer held hostage by any specific training dataset.
Faced with every new individual,
it can model them as they are,
no more, no less.
This echoes the analogy from our episode on 'Dedication of Merit':
it's switching the spiritual loss function from local to global optimization.
Asavakkhayanhana is the ultimate form of this global optimization.
When your loss function is no longer just "minimize my prediction error,"
but becomes "perceive all things as they truly are,"
your model naturally gains the ability to generalize to all sentient beings.
This is the AI translation of Telepathy:
a perfectly generalized social cognition model.
Alright.
Let me pull all today's threads together.
What exactly is Telepathy?
It is not a superpower for reading words in another person's brain
through some unknown physical medium.
Within the framework of cognitive neuroscience,
it is the innate social cognition system of your brain.
It is a high signal-to-noise ratio state of perception
attained after internal noise has been largely removed.
Your mirror system, your TPJ, and your social cognition network
have always been working.
They have always been receiving signals from others.
But your own internal greed, anger, and ignorance,
your projection bias,
and the egocentric noise generated by your Manas-vijnana
have long been drowning out these signals.
When this noise is cleared,
the signal naturally becomes clear.
And what exactly is the Termination of Outflows (Asavakkhaya)?
In the framework of predictive coding,
the "outflow" (Asava) is all the severely miscalibrated precision weights
within your prior belief system.
They continuously distort your perception,
continuously create suffering,
and continuously leak noise.
The termination of outflows means all weights return to their proper places.
It's not about eradicating beliefs,
but ensuring the system no longer runs with out-of-control biases.
So, what is the relationship between Telepathy and the Termination of Outflows?
Termination is the cause;
Telepathy is the effect.
It's not that you've developed a new ability,
but that you've removed the obstacles blocking it.
When the water is clear,
the moon naturally reflects in it.
When the noise on the antenna is turned off,
the signal becomes naturally clear.
When Manas-vijnana transforms into the Wisdom of Equality,
your perception of all beings naturally becomes truthful.
Three languages,
one logical chain.
This conclusion gives me a very practical inspiration.
You don't need to wait until your "outflows" are gone to improve
your social cognition ability.
It is a continuous spectrum,
not a binary switch.
For every bit of internal noise you reduce,
your perception of others becomes one bit clearer.
You can start doing one simple thing today.
Next time you are talking to someone,
pay attention to the background program running in your brain.
Are you listening to what they are saying,
or are you thinking about what you are going to say next?
Are you feeling their emotions,
or are you judging them as a person?
Are you seeing them,
or are you seeing the shadow of yourself you've projected onto them?
When you begin to witness that background program,
you are already reducing the noise.
This is the direct application of meditation training in social cognition.
In meditation, you practice observing your thoughts without following them.
When transferred to social interaction,
this is observing your projections without following them.
Every time you pause your automatic judgment in a conversation
and listen quietly for one more second,
your social cognition antenna receives a bit more of the real signal.
Every time you realize, "I wasn't seeing him just now,
I was projecting myself,"
you turn off a small noise transmitter.
This isn't some mystical cultivation;
it is intentionality training that everyone can do every day.
But here, a bigger question emerges that I am still pondering.
The Telepathy we discussed today
uses the most conservative interpretation: highly developed social cognition.
But the Six Abhijna described in the Buddhist tradition
clearly go far beyond that.
Clairvoyance, clairaudience, teleportation, and retrocognition—
if these abilities truly exist,
what are their mechanisms?
Do they follow the same logic,
emerging naturally as underlying abilities once obstacles are removed?
Or,
do they involve levels of consciousness
that our modern science hasn't even touched yet?
Yogacara says the Alaya-vijnana is a storehouse of all seeds.
The information stored within it
goes far beyond your experiences in this single lifetime.
If this claim is correct,
then the range of information accessible after the 'exhaustion of leaks'
may far exceed the social cognition we discussed today.
But this enters a realm that science cannot currently verify.
I'll label it as a conjecture worth taking seriously
and leave it there.
Perhaps one day,
as the science of consciousness advances further,
we will find
that the Six Supernormal Powers are not six independent superpowers,
but natural expressions across different dimensions
of the same obscured underlying awareness system.
The 'exhaustion of leaks' opens more than just the window of social cognition;
it opens all windows currently sealed by noise.
But that is a story for later.
What are your thoughts
on this episode?
Have you ever had an experience where,
when you were particularly calm,
you suddenly became exceptionally sensitive to others' feelings?
Or conversely,
when you were anxious and irritable,
you were completely blind to others' emotions?
What topic do you want me to talk about next?
Feel free to leave a comment below.
I am Leo Wang.
See you next time.