  An often quoted passage from the Abhidharma literature reads:  “One sees the blue, but one does not see ‘it is   blue’.”[3]  This statement captures an essential aspect of Buddhist  phenomenalism: indirect perception, rather than providing a  definitive picture of the content of non-conceptual awareness,  instead distorts and misrepresents this content. The Buddhist  preoccupation with the pure datum of experience is in large measure  motivated by a deep suspicion of “any sort of theorizing about  the world that we experience” (Matilal 1986, 315). This is one  of the main reasons why philosophers of the logico-epistemological  tradition invite us to go beyond our ordinary language intuitions.