The Definition, Practice, and Psychology of Vedanā

Knowing How It Feels

John Peacock, Martine Batchelor, John Peacock, Martine Batchelor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000697926
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book examines the importance of the topic of ' feeling tone' ( vedan? ) as it appears in early Buddhist texts and practice, and also within contemporary, secular, mindfulness-based interventions.

The volume aims to highlight the crucial nature of the 'feeling tone' or 'taste of experience' in determining mental reactivity, behaviour, character, and ethics. In the history of Buddhism, and in its reception in contemporary discourse, vedan? has often been a much-neglected topic, with greater emphasis being accorded to other meditational focuses, such as body and mind. However, 'feeling tone' ( vedan? ) can be seen as a crucial pivotal point in understanding the cognitive process, both in contemporary mindfulness and meditation practice within more traditional forms of Buddhism. The taste of experience, it is claimed, comes as pleasant, unpleasant, and neither pleasant nor unpleasant – and these 'tones' or 'tastes' inevitably follow from humans being embodied sensory beings. That experience comes in this way is unavoidable, but what follows can be seen in terms of reactivity or responsiveness.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Buddhism.

1 Hedonic Hotspots, Hedonic Potholes

Vedanā Revisited

Akincano M. Weber

ABSTRACT
For the last 100 years vedanā – a key Buddhist term referring to a process instrumental in the arising of desire (tanhā), grasping and identification (upādāna) – has been mostly translated as ‘feeling’ or as ‘sensation’. But is it really either? Informed by a review of the concept’s use in the Pali Suttas, the paper attempts to re-trace the term’s meaning in early Buddhist Psychology. The established renditions of ‘sensation’ or ‘feeling’ for vedanā are deemed misleading; it is suggested that they be replaced by the unwieldy but more appropriate notion of ‘hedonic tone’. After a brief appraisal of occidental attempts to chart hedonic territory, beginning with the Greeks, the work of early psychologists up to recent neuropsychological research, the insights of an ancient contemplative tradition are found to look remarkably fresh and to be particularly pertinent for a deeper understanding of aspects as different as attentional governance, mindfulness training, addiction and ultimately a vision of happiness beyond gratification or avoidance.

Abbreviations for Pali Sources: Vin:Vinaya (Engl. transl. as Books of Discipline); D: Dīgha Nikāya (Engl. transl. as Long Discourses); M: Majjhima Nikāya (Engl. transl. as Middle Length Discourses); S: Saṁyutta Nikāya (Engl. transl. as Connected Discourses); A: Aṅguttara Nikāya (Engl. transl. as Numerical Discourses); Dhp: Dhammapada (Engl. transl. as Dhammapada); Sn: Suttanipāta (Engl. transl. as Suttanipata); Vbh: Vibhaṅga (Engl. transl. as Book of Analysis); Dhs: Dhammasaṅgaṇī (Engl. transl. as Buddhist Manual of Psychological Ethics); Ps: Papañcasūdanī (not translated); Vism: Visuddhimagga (Engl. transl. as Path of Purification); As: Atthasālinī (Engl. transl. as The Expositor)

Whatever is felt is included in suffering (S iv 216/SN 36.11)

Introduction

This paper attempts to re-trace the allegedly obvious meaning of the term vedanā in early Buddhist Psychology – a concept for which Western Buddhists and Indologists still struggle to find appropriate terminology. Given the centrality of the term in Buddhist Psychology, an appraisal of vedanā is desirable; in current Buddhist and secular mindfulness worlds alike the teaching on vedanā is not given the place it takes up in the old contemplative psychology of the suttas. As the discourse between Buddhist concepts and their Western interpreters goes into its next round – informed by the spread of meditation, better translations, a growing understanding of the Indian and Occidental history of ideas, the input of 150 years of psychology and the recent interest of cognitive and affective sciences’ in meditation – it seems worthwhile to take a fresh look at vedanā and what learning applicable to today can be gleaned from the insights of an ancient contemplative tradition.

A little history

Back in 1844, the eminent French Sanskritist Eugène Burnouf¹ – a man who’s massive ‘Introduction à l’histoire du Bouddhisme Indien’ was read by Schelling, by Schopenhauer, by Emerson, Thoreau and Nietzsche – kindly quotes his German Indologist colleague Goldstücker, as explaining the term vedanā ‘as kind of irritability … only in a larger sense’.

For almost 150 years, Western Pali dictionaries and lexicographers have laconically suggested that the meaning of vedanā is either ‘sensation’ or ‘feeling’ – terms that (a) are neither exactly synonymous and (b) of which the latter is as notoriously vague as it is popular.

Based on both textual inquiry and practical contemplative exercise, my understanding is that both ‘sensation’ and ‘feeling’ are problematic translations and that neither of them does justice to what is meant by vedanā in Early Buddhist teachings. While we can ascertain fairly exactly what the term means in its Indian Buddhist context, we seem to lack an equivalent for it in West European languages. It is therefore suggested that we naturalise the Indian concept into our thinking – rather than continuing to wrestle it into one of its current, yet unsatisfactory renderings.

Encountering the above-mentioned translations of vedanā in meditative teachings we are left with a number of questions: ‘If’ vedanā is ‘sensation’ or ‘feeling’ – which of the two is more accurate? And indeed: what precisely do we mean in our own language when using either of these two terms? Could vedanā mean something else altogether? Are there correlates for what Buddhist texts call vedanā in Western thinking, and in Western Psychology?

‘Feeling’, the English term most translators² have opted for when rendering vedanā, is a notorious semantic contortionist – morphing according to context into a bewildering display of denotations; these range from ‘mood’, ‘sentiency’, ‘subjective emotion’, ‘affect’, ‘perception’, ‘conscious state’, to ‘sense of touch’, ‘impression’ and occasionally even to ‘thought’; any of these meanings can be intended by the term ‘feeling’, as is borne out by examples easily found. Any translator, unless they explicitly narrow the term down to a singular meaning, must in view of the sheer range of its applications consider ‘feeling’ as one of the worst possible candidates for rendering the Buddhist technical vedanā since all the different English meanings will invariably be conflated with the Buddhist concept the term purports to translate.

In view of vedanā’s use in the Pali texts, the term ‘sensation’ is similarly problematic. If a sensation is ‘an impression produced by impulses conveyed by an afferent nerve to the sensorium’ – so a standard medical definition³ – then such an impulse is rather the precursor of vedanā, rather than vedanā proper, and would, in Buddhist terms, be part of the process called ‘contact’ (phassa) or, more precisely, ‘a tangible’ (phoṭṭhabba). While the contemplation of bodily tangibles and somatic experiences is central to the practice of establishing mindfulness, such practices have their own place in the Satipaṭṭhāna schema under the heading of contemplation of body (kāyanānupassanā), from which the contemplation of feeling-tones (vedanā) are explicitly differentiated.

Likewise misleading seems the equation of vedanā with feeling’s close relative ‘emotion’ – a term without exact equivalent in early Buddhist psychology. Emotions invariably involve affective and volitional aspects. The closest we come to this Western notion in Buddhist Teachings is the third dimension of Satipaṭṭhāna-exercises, the ‘contemplation of mind-states’ (cittānupassanā), which indeed covers conative and affective dimensions of experience. But then, these too, are explicitly distinguished from the practice of contemplating vedanā.

Given the old texts’ recurrent suggestion to understand vedanā as a single mental evaluative process forming three possible – and mutually exclusive – reactions to mental and physical stimuli as either pleasant, unpleasant or neither-unpleasant-nor-pleasant, I render vedanā as ‘feeling-tone’ or, preferably, as ‘hedonic tone’, from Greek hēdonē for ‘pleasure’. This latter term is a psychological concept, in English usage since the late 19th⁴ century and apparently introduced as a translation of Wilhelm Wundt’s notion of ‘Gefühlston’, a concept he later elaborated into his three-tiered affect theory that still underpins many of today’s affect theories. The Oxford English Dictionary, identifies hedonic tone as ‘the degree of pleasantness or unpleasantness associated with an experience or state … that can range from extreme pleasure to extreme pain.’⁵ In choosing this term I am following a number of scholars who have used the notion of ‘hedonic tone’ since the early ‘60s of the last century to render vedanā, e.g. K.N. Jayatilleke, Padma De Silva and Ross Reat; many others have followed them in more recent years. ⁶

Admittedly, the prevalent translations of ‘feeling’ or ‘sensation’ would be a lot less awkward than ‘hedonic tone’. However, they are not just misleading – one construing vedanā into the affective tone of an experience (e.g. ‘feeling’, ‘emotion’); the other by identifying it with a felt somatic quality (‘sensation’): both, therefore, notably miss vedanā’s crucial piece – the mind’s evaluative response to experience on an axis of pleasure, indifference and displeasure.

In the following I will try to illustrate the meaning and function of the term vedanā in early Buddhist teachings by sampling a few key Pali sutta passages, hoping to clarify and to contextualise vedanā in psychological terms. I will stick mostly to sutta material to avoid getting bogged down in later doctrinal developments.

Vedanā in the Pāli texts

The term vedanā is used widely in the Pali texts: in the Monastic Discipline, throughout the five Nikāyas and also in the books of the Abhidhamma. Emerging cont...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Vedanā: What Is in a ‘Feeling?’
• 1 Hedonic Hotspots, Hedonic Potholes: Vedanā Revisited
• 2 Defining Vedanā: Through the Looking Glass
• 3 Why Be Mindful of Feelings?
• 4 Vedanā or Feeling Tone: A Practical and Contemporary Meditative Exploration
• 5 The ‘Sensation of Doubt’ in East Asian Zen Buddhism and Some Parallels with Pāli Accounts of Meditation Practice
• 6 Feelings Bound and Freed: Wandering and Wonder on Buddhist Pathways
• 7 Vedanā and the Wisdom of Impermanence: We are Precipitants within the Experiments of the Universe
• 8 Feeling is Believing: The Convergence of Buddhist Theory and Modern Scientific Evidence Supporting How Self Is Formed and Perpetuated Through Feeling Tone (Vedanā)
• 9 Serious Illness, Overwhelmingly Unpleasant Feeling Tone of Life, and How Even Incipient Mindfulness Training May Sometimes Help
• 10 Vedana of Bias: Latent Likes and Dislikes Fuelling Barriers to Human Connection
• 11 Vedanā, Ethics and Character: A Prolegomena
• Index