My antenae went up when you said, " 'Numinous' is mainly used by theologians to suggest the felt presence of God. This word comes from the Latin numen 'divine will'."
For I thought -- "Hmmmm, a rather abstract notion for a word which I'd imagine had much more humble, concrete beginnings." So I wikied-around (for I have nothing else) iwith my naive skills and found this:
The Ancient Greek word noumenon was borrowed into Early Latin as the word noumen, whose spelling changed to numen in Late Latin.
Noumenon (νοούμενoν) is a Greek word. It is the medium-passive present participle of νοεῖν (noein), "I think, I mean". Thus a rough equivalent in English would be "something that is thought", or "the object of an act of thought". The plural is noumena (νοούμενα). Noein in turn originates from the word "nous" (roughly, "mind").
So is it that "numen" has its origin in "thought" or "mind" and was later taken in the hands of Roman religious folks to discuss spirits or fuzzy stuff of the mind which can't be seen by the senses?
@ Jayarava You said, "some Buddhists find it hard to let go of the notion that there is something beyond phenomena, a transcendental reality, which can be experienced "directly".
Am I correct in assuming you are saying both of these things: (1) Some Buddhists [though Jayarava disagrees] believe in a transcendental reality. (2) Some Buddhists believe they can directly experience this transcendental reality.
If so, could you point us to the major Buddhist sects which embrace this?
"If so, could you point us to the major Buddhist sects which embrace this?"
Try Googling "Buddhism reality", or reading David Kalupahana's A History of Buddhist Philosophy. Or reading anyone's defition of yathābhūta-ñānadassana (except mine of course).
To be up front, I admit to often being a poor reader and conflation is a common pitfal of mine.
It seems our sources disagree. I am sure mine are not as trustworthy as yours (being on wiki). Nonetheless, I doubt a word's origins is as abstract as "divine will" and would suspect a simpler origin.
This is starting to be frustrating (again). I use mainstream dictionaries, both lexical and etymological. You don't have a source, you have wiki, which is the distortion of someone else's source.
I do not say that numen originates as 'divine will' I say it originates as 'to nod', to give ascent. Hardly very abstract.
Please shut up and read the blog. Then read it again before making any more of these inane comments.
Dear Jayarava, just some thoughts to share: —I usually translate vedanā as "sensation" and never use "phenomenon" while translating from Sanskrit, although I often speak of a certain school as having a phenomenological approach (i.e., focusing on the phenomena as they appear rather than on looking for their ontological basis beyond appearances). The reason why I do not use "phenomenon" for vedanā is that I tend to think that (as you also say, if I am understanding you correctly) the latter includes one's reception of the external data, on top of their mere "shining forth". —All words come with their baggage and we have the additional problem of having to do with more than one, insofar as we have to take into account the Sanskrit (Pāli) history of a word, the Western one and in many cases also the Asian developments of the Sanskrit/Pāli history (its Tibetan or Chinese translations, for instance). But this is just UNAVOIDABLE. It is just the external output of what is happening within us while trying to understand Sanskrit (Pāli) philosophy. Making it apparent, external, explicit, can only help, I think.
I agree that there is no danger and a lot of advantage to be gained!
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Gambhiradaka said...
In the context of the 5 skandhas; if you translated vedana as phenomena, where would that leave rupa?
I understand rupa to be the mere appearance of the 'object' to the senses and vedana to be the feeling tone which accompanies this.
So we have a green leaf which is pleasant to see. Or we have a throbbing knee which is painful. The feeling tone is not an inherent property of the 'object' which is why we can enjoy the first piece of cake but less so the second (as you have written about elsewhere).
Another way to look at it would be that really it is a conceptual act to split the experience up into different aspect like this anyway. In experience you do not see a leaf and then feel the pleasure of that, the whole experience occurs simultaneously. Therefore breaking this up into different skandhas in the first place is falsifying the situation but it is done so because it has methodological value.
Following Sue Hamilton I take rupa to be the locus of experience rather than the object of it. I take the khandhas to be a minimal apparatus of or for experience, rather than the sum total of reality or the human being.
I wrote about this back in 2008 - The Apparatus of Experience - though I think my views have changed a bit since then - especially regards the sequence versus a collection.
One must be cautious of treating the khandhas as a sequence. They are always given in that order but as far as I know (and as far as Sue Hamilton knows) the order is never explained in the Pāli texts. The khandhas are discussed in order, but they are not presented as a sequence: merely as a collection of factors. In fact they don't form a natural sequence and if we take them as such then viññāna is out of place!
So you may be right to say they all happen at the same time.
We can justifiably ask why the khandhas are presented the way that they are, if this is not the canonical version of them. I don't know. Often we get the commentarial version and read that back into the suttas - as with the nidānas.
So we have another "everything you though you knew about Buddhism is probably wrong" moment. I'm starting to get used to it now.
rūpa is only the object of the eye, not of the other senses or the mind. I'm not aware of rūpa being used as a general term for sense objects elsewhere. In fact I would expect the term to be dhamma, or perhaps bāhira-āyatana (external-base).
Another great post concerning the Khandhas (missing a tag, if you'll allow me... ah hem... your writing here is too good to be lost).
Not being a language specialist, nor a scholar... but a painter/teacher who works a lot with vedana(including people's reluctance to leave the more mental & enter the more physical so as to verify the truth of their preceptions)... in my humble opinion, sensation is far better than feeling.
Though 'feeling-tone' applied to sensation is useful too.
I like the word phenomenon too, as it takes us to essential that The Vedana Sutta SN25.5 expounds .... "inconstant, changeable, alterable."
"There are, O monks, these three feelings, rooted in sense-impression, caused by sense-impression, conditioned by sense-impression: pleasant, painful and neutral feelings."
If Vedana can be broken down into these sub-parts, presumably there is a linguistic difference in the Pali texts too between 'sense-impression' & 'feeling'?
If you read closely you'll see that Nyanaponika is translating phassa as "sense-impression" and vedanā as "feeling". So vedanā is not being broken down. "Sense impression" strikes me as entirely wrong.
- Would love to read closely but can't read sanskrit/pali. I depend on translations
- 'feeling tone' is useful precisely because it is vague. By way of comparison, when mixing an indeterminate mid-tone grey sort of sludge colour, I find it useful to say 'well... is hot or is it cool?' Whilst hot & cool are not scientific terms, they are useful for colour mixing. When we start to pay attention to the inner body sensations in meditation, most of them are very strange & intermediate. Neutral or difficult to identify to begin with. To ask "what is the tone of this sensation?" is helpful to guide one's attention via labeling. The name of the label might not stand up to critical scrutiny but is a helpful tool in the meditator's toolbox.
- I recently listened to Bhikku Bodhi talking about his chronic pain. As there is hope that mindfulness might help with chronic pain management, I would think that sensation is a more useful word than feeling in this type of context. I paste here (hope you don't mind) , as I find it to be a very strong teaching on Vedana. I like how he breaks Vedana down into 'little dots'... almost like binary & buses & chunking in computing. Maybe there is the occassional odd binary that throws up a flag & provokes a +ve/-ve response?
" What we call pain is a kind of label that is applied to a particular experience … and is a distinction between the label & the actual experience… which doesn't mean that the experience is pleasant.. . in a way it is painful & that it does cause some sort of sensations that the body naturally recoils from & the mind doesn't like…but what one does is simply observe these sensations, painful sensations, and just …as one continues to observe them, what one is labeling as 'pain', 'pain' … turns into a almost like a constellation of little pointillist dots like in the pointillist painting of Seurat… where from a distance you see the image of the woman carry the parasol & the gentleman by her side walking along by her side in this park… but when you come close, and get within maybe within a foot of the picture, you don't the see image of the woman, the man, the parasol, the park anymore, but just little points of paint…. so what I found is… that as when one observing the sensation of what we call 'pain', it sort of dissolves into little points sensations that we're labeling as 'painful'… but it became extremely interesting to simply observe them… and as one goes on observing them what one finds is that not only that mass of painful sensation dissolve into points of sensations …pointillist.. but that those points of sensation are always changing… they are arising, passing, arising, passing, arising, passing …. and then the endless sensations through the whole body, as one extends the awareness from this area around the head to the whole body, one sees that those sensations too are arising and passing… so what we call 'my body' turns experientially into a mass of sensations that are always arising & passing."
podcast : working with pain, audio dharma, 31/10/10
Oh ... and the advantage of the word 'sensation' over the word 'feeling' is that it conjugates better with 'sensory faculties' (eye balls, taste buds etc) & 'sense impressions' (the incoming data via the sense faculties).
I particularly like yr comment "I don't there's any danger of my suggestions being taken on. :-)"
The fact is that we're often very confused about what vedanā is because we don't see it used in context in the original. We just see it used in translation and we fit it into our pre-existing language and system of categories.
At the very heart of the meaning of the word is the verbal root √vid 'to know'. The related word veda means 'knowledge'. The morphology is bit beyond me, but it looks to be a primary derivation vid (with guṇa) + ana making an action noun vedana 'announcing, proclaiming'. But Buddhists use it in the feminine form vedanā which in ordinary Sanskrit means, according to Monier-Williams, 'pain, torture, agony'. My guess is that Buddhists intended it to be understood in the sense of announcing. And what is it "announcing"? It is announcing phassa (contact).
This should alert us to the problem of defining vedanā in terms of sukha and dukkha. I would say that vedanā cannot be defined by sukha/dukkha, but that these are the elements of vedanā which the Buddha thought were salient. I think we get all kinds of information from contact, but our response in terms of attraction and repulsion is what lies at the heart of suffering.
The problem is that our translations do not convey this story, or the subtlety; and they are drawing from an intellectual tradition which makes different assumptions.
What I would emphasise from Bhikkhu Bodhi's words is that it is vedanā which is arising and passing away. This is the intellectual component of the Buddha's insight - just as the visual Mandelbrot set is the 'real' component of a complex number graph with an 'imaginary' axis. [real and imaginary used in the sense of number theory]
And this crucial observation that what we call "the body" or "my body" is in fact a mass of sensations. Which is not to say that the body is an illusion, but that the sense of having a body is dependently arisen.
I think most of our attractions and repulsions are there because we evolved them and in our pre-civilisation lives they had survival value.
How about this? Three words SENSATION, FEELING , EMOTION
(i am aware traditional Buddhist terminology shys away from the word emotion but for me, a westerner, 'feeling' is almost synonymous with 'emotion', certainly more so than with the word 'sensation')
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
1.SENSATIONS arrive via the sense organ & are then filtered through the sense consciousness (which may or may not be conscious in the mind, the forebrain)... at which stage they are attributed/judged/ evaluated/associated with a
2. FEELING of either pleasure, pain or neutral. (BTW, I can't find any proof of this in current neuroscience & antomny, so it must be a function of the mind rather than the body i.e. this take of feeling is not a message that ascends to the brain from the body.. or it is dogma that is not based on medical science).
These feelings are then worked upon, elaborated by exaggeration into
3. EMOTIONS based on perceptions, memories, predjuices & value judgements (this is better than that) & neurotic content. Unconscious associations may be triggered off from the mental formations in the unconscious. these emotions are exaggerated by been given an opinion. These opinions serve to create a sense of self. Meaning, if you like. If you recognise something, then the raw sensation has already been filtered via feeling tone etc.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
The reason why I bang on so much about this so much is that Vedana Upekkha is a positive act of awareness. By not exaggerating, by holding back from attributing a feeling tone to a sensation, we are more open to just looking, just sensing, just smelling, etc for the six sense bases. Equanimity actually enlarges our awareness to a state of as if we knew nothing and were just looking as if for the first time, with curiousity & an open mind. Just observing. Moving from recognition & fantasy into seeing & sensing. My first teacher Krishnamurti talked a lot about this. Non attachment to views is a great mental freedom.
This is of course the well-spring of science as much as it of the arts. This is an actuality I encounter very regularly when teaching students to look, to see. Just observe. Suspend the opinion. Suspend the expectation. Look, as what you think you are seeing is rarely exactly what is there. It is only ever your experience, a phemonena of both object & subject arising at the same moment...
Suspend the attribution of a feeling tone. Or at least be aware of the act of attribution of a feeling tone. This detachment diminishes the exaggeration inherent in transforming a sensation into mental consciousness, which in turn exaggerates a sense of self with all its opinions.
Sitting meditation for me involves a lot of just listening to the body & its sensations. A lot of the body's signals are not listened to in everyday awareness.
I'm not sure what the project is. You seem to be trying to do several things at once. So I'm not sure if what you propose is a success or not. What are the criteria? Are you making a distinction between feeling and feeling tone? If so what is it?
Vedanā is when you know you are having an experience. That experience is either pleasant or not, which makes you want to repeat it/make it last, or stop it and never experience it again. As such we can conceive of experience having a positive or negative effect on us.
The affective response is either taṇha or dosa: if we set aside the poetry for a moment it boils down to attraction or repulsion. Attracted to an experience we mentally and physically draw towards it. This we share with animals. This is, I think, a bodily response in Buddhist terms. I need to do more work on it. Once we desire it, we crave it as a feeling. This feeling of craving fuels our continued becoming (whatever that might mean!). I understand equanimity as being able to unhook from the push and pull associate with experience.
Mentally we process the experience in a different way: we identify the experience and its characteristics and we name it. Typically we reify experience in the sense that we are naive realists and consider experience to be WYSIWYG.
If the experience is attractive we may dwell on it, anticipating having it again, and planning for it. We may just experience it again in imagination (which may be what papañca refers to).
There are in fact two different processes resulting in different types of knowledge. Which is the theme of Friday's blog. I think you will enjoy it.
So we're trying to mash together as least two models which are looking at two different aspects of experience: physical and mental. These two aspects have different characteristics, and cause different kinds of problems, and require different kinds of responses.
The fact that Pāli texts include several different models of perceptual awareness is hidden by our view that they must describe a single process. I think we have to conclude that: a. the multiple models are sometimes incompatible; b. that the multiple models describe different processes or at least different aspects of a complex process; and/or c. all of the above. And above all we have to remember that the Buddha was a pragmatic spiritual teacher, not a scientist. He taught the practices that he thought would help people. We tend to get them generalised and decontextualised.
Saturday, March 03, 2012
[Image] music of the spheresFIRST USED IN ENGLISH in 1570s the word phenomenon is traced back to the Greek phainesthai 'to appear, to seem' from phainō 'to show, to bring light'. For instance in The Odyssey, when marking the start of a new day, Homer often used the lovely phrase: phanē rhododaktulos Ēōs "Dawn's rosy fingers appeared". Phainō can also mean 'to make known' via the metaphor 'to see is to know'.
From the Greek come such words as fantasy, fancy, phantom, emphasis, and diaphanous. The PIE root is *bhā 'to shine'. Via Germanic cognates we get words such as banner, beacon, berry. In Latin a phantasma is the name for an apparition or spectre. Also via Latin we get epiphany, sycophant, hierophant. The root goes into Sanskrit as bhāsati 'to shine' and prabhā 'shining' and vibhāta 'shining forth'.
In English the meaning of phenomenon varies according to the context but basically it refers to the something known through the senses rather than by the intellect or reason. It can also mean any kind of observable event. Of course a Buddhist definition of phenomena, would include objects of the mind and observable mental events (not all such events are observable from within).
Phenomena are sometimes contrasted with noumena (from Greek noeō 'to perceive, to observe, to notice'; probably from a non-IE source since there are no other attested forms, and no PIE root). Before Kant philosophers took noumena to be synonymous with Plato's ideal forms. Plato likened human perception to seeing shadows cast on the wall of a cave, suggesting that we don't ever see the things that cast the shadows, i.e. the ideal forms (this gives us the label 'Idealist'), or presumably the light which illuminates them. In Kant's philosophy the appearance of thing (phenomenon) is contrasted with the 'thing in itself' (German Ding an sich) or noumenon, and, according to Kant, noumena are not directly perceptible, we can only intuit their existence from appearances - hence his philosophy is called Transcendental Idealism. Other philosophers hold that noumena can be perceived by the intellect, or pure reason, which might appear to make them akin to the Buddhist notion of the mental sense objects (dharma), however the differences are great enough to warn us off suggesting noumena as a translation. Although most Buddhist traditions would deny the possibility of noumena outright, some Buddhists find it hard to let go of the notion that there is something beyond phenomena, a transcendental reality, which can be experienced "directly".
The adjective noumenal (related to noumena) is sometimes conflated with the adjective numinous, though the latter is from a different root. 'Numinous' is mainly used by theologians to suggest the felt presence of God. This word comes from the Latin numen 'divine will'. Ultimately we can trace it to the PIE root *√neu "to nod"; and it suggests ascent by a nod of the head. A related English word is innuendo.
Because dharma/dhamma is often used in the sense of an object of the senses, particularly the mind-sense (manas), and because it can mean 'a thing', or 'an item' we often translate it as 'phenomenon'. The fit is not exact however. Dharma comes from the root √dhṛ 'to hold, to support'. There is a word which would be well translated by phenomenon and that is vedanā. The root of this word is √vid 'to know, to find' and is regularly used in words to do with knowledge such as veda 'sacred knowledge' and vidyā 'secret knowledge'. We often translate these Indic words with English from the same root, i.e. wisdom 'experience and knowledge combined with the ability to judiciously apply them'. Vedanā then is 'the thing known', in effect it is 'what appears', i.e. the phenomenon. Though again Western thinkers don't typically include mental objects under the rubric of phenomena.
Vedanā is often translated as 'feeling' because in Buddhist doctrine it is associated with pleasure and displeasure (sāta/asāta or sukha/dukkha), leading to attraction and repulsion. I tend to translate 'sensation' because 'feeling' allows for vedanā to be confused with emotions which are colloquially also called 'feelings'. We could say that emotions have a felt component, and a cognitive component. A feeling without a corresponding thought process is possible, but it is usually hard to know what to make of it. In modern terms the feelings of pleasure and pain associated with sensations are part of our internal sense network which includes proprioception, the inner-ear balance organs, the viscera and digestive tract, and other sources of information from within the body itself. We sometimes talk about 'raw sensations' in Buddhism, but this is a bit of a misnomer because even in Buddhist psychology a lot of complex processes have to be active in order for us to become aware of a sensation. What in effect we mean by raw sensation is the vedanā before it gives rise to craving or aversion. To experience this we have to be relatively detached from pleasure and pain.
[Image]From the Buddhist point of view one of the important things about vedanā is that it arises in dependence on conditions. It is said to arise when there is contact, and contact occurs when sense faculty meets sense object giving rise to sense consciousness - and the three together constitute the condition for the arising of vedanā. We see a crucial difference in the Buddhist and Western approaches here. The Western intellectual tradition sees our internal world as subjective, as synonymous with the subject. Buddhists see this as a mistake. The subject is involved in creating experience, but only in active interaction with the object. Experience itself then is neither subjective nor objective; it is not a function of either alone, but of the interactions of the two together. I have observed before that this technically means that early Buddhist thought is dualistic - it acknowledges that subject and object are two different things. This is a metaphysical position, and it has wide ranging implications should we choose to follow them up, but the authors of the suttas never did.
Buddhism in the West is still in the process of settling on terminology. Perhaps for the first time in history a culture is having to deal with multiple competing forms of Buddhism which are using radically different oriental vocabulary e.g. Indian, Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, Thai and Korean. Of these languages only Japanese and Korean are even remotely related (and the relationship is remote in this case). Phenomenon and it's counterpart noumenon are widely used, but the discussion about suitability has yet to really take place. I'm reasonably well versed in Indian Buddhist terminology, but I find I cannot read books on Tibetan Buddhism because they use another set of terms with may neologisms that I don't understand. Similarly I often flounder when reading about Japanese Buddhism. Buddhist jargon is often impenetrable, even to Buddhists.
I'm all in favour of just ditching traditional jargon and Buddhist Hybrid English (English vocabulary with Sanskrit syntax) that doesn't make sense. Perhaps it is time to drop all the words and have a new attempt at describing the procedures of Buddhism, and the experiences that result? A word like phenomenon shows that it won't be easy, because words come with baggage. On the other hand we are constantly redefining words: think of terrific (i.e. terrifying OEtD), or silly (originally 'happy, blessed' OEtD). It suggests that there will be a role for philologists—those people who tell us what words mean, and why they mean that—in Buddhism for a long time to come.
21 Comments
Close this window Jump to comment formConcerning Numen:
My antenae went up when you said, " 'Numinous' is mainly used by theologians to suggest the felt presence of God. This word comes from the Latin numen 'divine will'."
For I thought -- "Hmmmm, a rather abstract notion for a word which I'd imagine had much more humble, concrete beginnings." So I wikied-around (for I have nothing else) iwith my naive skills and found this:
The Ancient Greek word noumenon was borrowed into Early Latin as the word noumen, whose spelling changed to numen in Late Latin.
Noumenon (νοούμενoν) is a Greek word. It is the medium-passive present participle of νοεῖν (noein), "I think, I mean". Thus a rough equivalent in English would be "something that is thought", or "the object of an act of thought". The plural is noumena (νοούμενα). Noein in turn originates from the word "nous" (roughly, "mind").
So is it that "numen" has its origin in "thought" or "mind" and was later taken in the hands of Roman religious folks to discuss spirits or fuzzy stuff of the mind which can't be seen by the senses?
Am I even close on that one?
Friday, September 16, 2011
@ Jayarava
You said, "some Buddhists find it hard to let go of the notion that there is something beyond phenomena, a transcendental reality, which can be experienced "directly".
Am I correct in assuming you are saying both of these things:
(1) Some Buddhists [though Jayarava disagrees] believe in a transcendental reality.
(2) Some Buddhists believe they can directly experience this transcendental reality.
If so, could you point us to the major Buddhist sects which embrace this?
Friday, September 16, 2011
numen and noumena comes from different roots according to my etymological sources... as I said above! Did you read it?
Friday, September 16, 2011
"If so, could you point us to the major Buddhist sects which embrace this?"
Try Googling "Buddhism reality", or reading David Kalupahana's A History of Buddhist Philosophy. Or reading anyone's defition of yathābhūta-ñānadassana (except mine of course).
Friday, September 16, 2011
To be up front, I admit to often being a poor reader and conflation is a common pitfal of mine.
It seems our sources disagree. I am sure mine are not as trustworthy as yours (being on wiki). Nonetheless, I doubt a word's origins is as abstract as "divine will" and would suspect a simpler origin.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Sabio
This is starting to be frustrating (again). I use mainstream dictionaries, both lexical and etymological. You don't have a source, you have wiki, which is the distortion of someone else's source.
I do not say that numen originates as 'divine will' I say it originates as 'to nod', to give ascent. Hardly very abstract.
Please shut up and read the blog. Then read it again before making any more of these inane comments.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Dear Jayarava,
just some thoughts to share:
—I usually translate vedanā as "sensation" and never use "phenomenon" while translating from Sanskrit, although I often speak of a certain school as having a phenomenological approach (i.e., focusing on the phenomena as they appear rather than on looking for their ontological basis beyond appearances). The reason why I do not use "phenomenon" for vedanā is that I tend to think that (as you also say, if I am understanding you correctly) the latter includes one's reception of the external data, on top of their mere "shining forth".
—All words come with their baggage and we have the additional problem of having to do with more than one, insofar as we have to take into account the Sanskrit (Pāli) history of a word, the Western one and in many cases also the Asian developments of the Sanskrit/Pāli history (its Tibetan or Chinese translations, for instance). But this is just UNAVOIDABLE. It is just the external output of what is happening within us while trying to understand Sanskrit (Pāli) philosophy. Making it apparent, external, explicit, can only help, I think.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Hi Elisa
Yes. I'm trying to highlight the issues for people who probably haven't ever thought about them.
I don't there's any danger of my suggestions being taken on. :-)
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
I agree that there is no danger and a lot of advantage to be gained!
Thursday, September 22, 2011
In the context of the 5 skandhas; if you translated vedana as phenomena, where would that leave rupa?
I understand rupa to be the mere appearance of the 'object' to the senses and vedana to be the feeling tone which accompanies this.
So we have a green leaf which is pleasant to see. Or we have a throbbing knee which is painful. The feeling tone is not an inherent property of the 'object' which is why we can enjoy the first piece of cake but less so the second (as you have written about elsewhere).
Another way to look at it would be that really it is a conceptual act to split the experience up into different aspect like this anyway. In experience you do not see a leaf and then feel the pleasure of that, the whole experience occurs simultaneously. Therefore breaking this up into different skandhas in the first place is falsifying the situation but it is done so because it has methodological value.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Hi Gambhiraḍāka
Following Sue Hamilton I take rupa to be the locus of experience rather than the object of it. I take the khandhas to be a minimal apparatus of or for experience, rather than the sum total of reality or the human being.
I wrote about this back in 2008 - The Apparatus of Experience - though I think my views have changed a bit since then - especially regards the sequence versus a collection.
One must be cautious of treating the khandhas as a sequence. They are always given in that order but as far as I know (and as far as Sue Hamilton knows) the order is never explained in the Pāli texts. The khandhas are discussed in order, but they are not presented as a sequence: merely as a collection of factors. In fact they don't form a natural sequence and if we take them as such then viññāna is out of place!
So you may be right to say they all happen at the same time.
We can justifiably ask why the khandhas are presented the way that they are, if this is not the canonical version of them. I don't know. Often we get the commentarial version and read that back into the suttas - as with the nidānas.
So we have another "everything you though you knew about Buddhism is probably wrong" moment. I'm starting to get used to it now.
Cheers
Jayarava
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Another thought on this...
rūpa is only the object of the eye, not of the other senses or the mind. I'm not aware of rūpa being used as a general term for sense objects elsewhere. In fact I would expect the term to be dhamma, or perhaps bāhira-āyatana (external-base).
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Another great post concerning the Khandhas (missing a tag, if you'll allow me... ah hem... your writing here is too good to be lost).
Not being a language specialist, nor a scholar... but a painter/teacher who works a lot with vedana(including people's reluctance to leave the more mental & enter the more physical so as to verify the truth of their preceptions)... in my humble opinion, sensation is far better than feeling.
Though 'feeling-tone' applied to sensation is useful too.
I like the word phenomenon too, as it takes us to essential that The Vedana Sutta SN25.5 expounds .... "inconstant, changeable, alterable."
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Hi Adam
This is not a post about the khandhas.
"Feeling tone" is a very vague phrase and I'm not sure either what it means, or how I would relate it back to Buddhist terminology.
Jayarava
Sunday, January 15, 2012
I like how Nyanaponika in his The Discourse-Grouping on the Feelings distinguishes between sense-impression & feeling.
"There are, O monks, these three feelings, rooted in sense-impression, caused by sense-impression, conditioned by sense-impression: pleasant, painful and neutral feelings."
If Vedana can be broken down into these sub-parts, presumably there is a linguistic difference in the Pali texts too between 'sense-impression' & 'feeling'?
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Hi Adam
If you read closely you'll see that Nyanaponika is translating phassa as "sense-impression" and vedanā as "feeling". So vedanā is not being broken down. "Sense impression" strikes me as entirely wrong.
Jayarava
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Hi Jayarava
- Would love to read closely but can't read sanskrit/pali. I depend on translations
- 'feeling tone' is useful precisely because it is vague. By way of comparison, when mixing an indeterminate mid-tone grey sort of sludge colour, I find it useful to say 'well... is hot or is it cool?' Whilst hot & cool are not scientific terms, they are useful for colour mixing. When we start to pay attention to the inner body sensations in meditation, most of them are very strange & intermediate. Neutral or difficult to identify to begin with. To ask "what is the tone of this sensation?" is helpful to guide one's attention via labeling. The name of the label might not stand up to critical scrutiny but is a helpful tool in the meditator's toolbox.
- I recently listened to Bhikku Bodhi talking about his chronic pain. As there is hope that mindfulness might help with chronic pain management, I would think that sensation is a more useful word than feeling in this type of context. I paste here (hope you don't mind) , as I find it to be a very strong teaching on Vedana. I like how he breaks Vedana down into 'little dots'... almost like binary & buses & chunking in computing. Maybe there is the occassional odd binary that throws up a flag & provokes a +ve/-ve response?
" What we call pain is a kind of label that is applied to a particular experience … and is a distinction between the label & the actual experience… which doesn't mean that the experience is pleasant.. . in a way it is painful & that it does cause some sort of sensations that the body naturally recoils from & the mind doesn't like…but what one does is simply observe these sensations, painful sensations, and just …as one continues to observe them, what one is labeling as 'pain', 'pain' … turns into a almost like a constellation of little pointillist dots like in the pointillist painting of Seurat… where from a distance you see the image of the woman carry the parasol & the gentleman by her side walking along by her side in this park… but when you come close, and get within maybe within a foot of the picture, you don't the see image of the woman, the man, the parasol, the park anymore, but just little points of paint…. so what I found is… that as when one observing the sensation of what we call 'pain', it sort of dissolves into little points sensations that we're labeling as 'painful'… but it became extremely interesting to simply observe them… and as one goes on observing them what one finds is that not only that mass of painful sensation dissolve into points of sensations …pointillist.. but that those points of sensation are always changing… they are arising, passing, arising, passing, arising, passing …. and then the endless sensations through the whole body, as one extends the awareness from this area around the head to the whole body, one sees that those sensations too are arising and passing… so what we call 'my body' turns experientially into a mass of sensations that are always arising & passing."
podcast : working with pain, audio dharma, 31/10/10
Sunday, February 05, 2012
Oh ... and the advantage of the word 'sensation' over the word 'feeling' is that it conjugates better with 'sensory faculties' (eye balls, taste buds etc) & 'sense impressions' (the incoming data via the sense faculties).
I particularly like yr comment "I don't there's any danger of my suggestions being taken on. :-)"
Sunday, February 05, 2012
Hi Adam,
The fact is that we're often very confused about what vedanā is because we don't see it used in context in the original. We just see it used in translation and we fit it into our pre-existing language and system of categories.
At the very heart of the meaning of the word is the verbal root √vid 'to know'. The related word veda means 'knowledge'. The morphology is bit beyond me, but it looks to be a primary derivation vid (with guṇa) + ana making an action noun vedana 'announcing, proclaiming'. But Buddhists use it in the feminine form vedanā which in ordinary Sanskrit means, according to Monier-Williams, 'pain, torture, agony'. My guess is that Buddhists intended it to be understood in the sense of announcing. And what is it "announcing"? It is announcing phassa (contact).
This should alert us to the problem of defining vedanā in terms of sukha and dukkha. I would say that vedanā cannot be defined by sukha/dukkha, but that these are the elements of vedanā which the Buddha thought were salient. I think we get all kinds of information from contact, but our response in terms of attraction and repulsion is what lies at the heart of suffering.
The problem is that our translations do not convey this story, or the subtlety; and they are drawing from an intellectual tradition which makes different assumptions.
What I would emphasise from Bhikkhu Bodhi's words is that it is vedanā which is arising and passing away. This is the intellectual component of the Buddha's insight - just as the visual Mandelbrot set is the 'real' component of a complex number graph with an 'imaginary' axis. [real and imaginary used in the sense of number theory]
And this crucial observation that what we call "the body" or "my body" is in fact a mass of sensations. Which is not to say that the body is an illusion, but that the sense of having a body is dependently arisen.
I think most of our attractions and repulsions are there because we evolved them and in our pre-civilisation lives they had survival value.
The Dalai Lama I ain't.
Monday, February 06, 2012
Many thanks for your generous feedback.
How about this? Three words SENSATION, FEELING , EMOTION
(i am aware traditional Buddhist terminology shys away from the word emotion but for me, a westerner, 'feeling' is almost synonymous with 'emotion', certainly more so than with the word 'sensation')
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
1.SENSATIONS
arrive via the sense organ & are then filtered through the sense consciousness (which may or may not be conscious in the mind, the forebrain)... at which stage they are attributed/judged/ evaluated/associated with a
2. FEELING
of either pleasure, pain or neutral.
(BTW, I can't find any proof of this in current neuroscience & antomny, so it must be a function of the mind rather than the body i.e. this take of feeling is not a message that ascends to the brain from the body.. or it is dogma that is not based on medical science).
These feelings are then worked upon, elaborated by exaggeration into
3. EMOTIONS
based on perceptions, memories, predjuices & value judgements (this is better than that) & neurotic content. Unconscious associations may be triggered off from the mental formations in the unconscious. these emotions are exaggerated by been given an opinion. These opinions serve to create a sense of self. Meaning, if you like. If you recognise something, then the raw sensation has already been filtered via feeling tone etc.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
The reason why I bang on so much about this so much is that Vedana Upekkha is a positive act of awareness. By not exaggerating, by holding back from attributing a feeling tone to a sensation, we are more open to just looking, just sensing, just smelling, etc for the six sense bases. Equanimity actually enlarges our awareness to a state of as if we knew nothing and were just looking as if for the first time, with curiousity & an open mind. Just observing. Moving from recognition & fantasy into seeing & sensing. My first teacher Krishnamurti talked a lot about this. Non attachment to views is a great mental freedom.
This is of course the well-spring of science as much as it of the arts. This is an actuality I encounter very regularly when teaching students to look, to see. Just observe. Suspend the opinion. Suspend the expectation. Look, as what you think you are seeing is rarely exactly what is there. It is only ever your experience, a phemonena of both object & subject arising at the same moment...
Suspend the attribution of a feeling tone. Or at least be aware of the act of attribution of a feeling tone. This detachment diminishes the exaggeration inherent in transforming a sensation into mental consciousness, which in turn exaggerates a sense of self with all its opinions.
Sitting meditation for me involves a lot of just listening to the body & its sensations. A lot of the body's signals are not listened to in everyday awareness.
Friday, March 02, 2012
Hi Adam
I'm not sure what the project is. You seem to be trying to do several things at once. So I'm not sure if what you propose is a success or not. What are the criteria? Are you making a distinction between feeling and feeling tone? If so what is it?
Vedanā is when you know you are having an experience. That experience is either pleasant or not, which makes you want to repeat it/make it last, or stop it and never experience it again. As such we can conceive of experience having a positive or negative effect on us.
The affective response is either taṇha or dosa: if we set aside the poetry for a moment it boils down to attraction or repulsion. Attracted to an experience we mentally and physically draw towards it. This we share with animals. This is, I think, a bodily response in Buddhist terms. I need to do more work on it. Once we desire it, we crave it as a feeling. This feeling of craving fuels our continued becoming (whatever that might mean!). I understand equanimity as being able to unhook from the push and pull associate with experience.
Mentally we process the experience in a different way: we identify the experience and its characteristics and we name it. Typically we reify experience in the sense that we are naive realists and consider experience to be WYSIWYG.
If the experience is attractive we may dwell on it, anticipating having it again, and planning for it. We may just experience it again in imagination (which may be what papañca refers to).
There are in fact two different processes resulting in different types of knowledge. Which is the theme of Friday's blog. I think you will enjoy it.
So we're trying to mash together as least two models which are looking at two different aspects of experience: physical and mental. These two aspects have different characteristics, and cause different kinds of problems, and require different kinds of responses.
The fact that Pāli texts include several different models of perceptual awareness is hidden by our view that they must describe a single process. I think we have to conclude that: a. the multiple models are sometimes incompatible; b. that the multiple models describe different processes or at least different aspects of a complex process; and/or c. all of the above. And above all we have to remember that the Buddha was a pragmatic spiritual teacher, not a scientist. He taught the practices that he thought would help people. We tend to get them generalised and decontextualised.
Saturday, March 03, 2012