Baishui Zen

So you’ve read this far into the series, and you’ve understood the broad strokes of Buddhism’s project for each individual. We understand afflictions, a little bit of the metaphysics and philosophy of mind. We’re aimed at the Buddha nature. This is a great vision for personal cultivation as it stands, but to make progress towards these goals, we have a lot to do. The next part of the Approaching the Path series will be dealing with and responding to Chapter 3 of his Holiness, Approaching the Buddhist Path, which is all about our emotions. This is a natural to discuss next because while the chain of events leading to cyclic existence (samsara) does begin with ignorance, it is impossible to meaningfully contemplate metaphysics, let alone apply it to life, when bombarded by chaotic emotions. This presents a bit of a catch-22. The ignorance causes the afflictions and samsara, but these in turn prevent us from doing the legwork it takes to address them. How do we resolve this impasse?

Well, the most obvious answer is that it’s not black and white. While we may have afflictive thoughts or feelings in our lives, even regularly, they don’t possess us literally all the time. We can find or create moments of peace in our lives to engage in meditative practices and introspection. These will give us opportunities to push back on the afflictions and make progress. Moreover, Buddhist thought has concrete views and advice for how to deal with emotions that can arise in a variety of situations. Therefore, the discussion which follows, and will occupy us for the next leg of the journey, can be thought of as a sort of “step 0.” Now that we know what we’re after, we want to break ground on cultivating this wisdom, but there’s preparations that need to be in place.

There is a natural objection at this stage in time which his Holiness points out: Why do I, as a western person, need to do this particular kind of preparation? Surely if I’m having a hard time dealing with emotions, or in a bad place with regards to my mental health, I can just see a therapist, right? Of course. But usually such services are reserved for those who need them most, and even us relatively normal people still benefit from mindfulness training. On the other hand, some psychologists these days are realizing that the same sorts of mindfulness training from the Buddhist tradition are completely viable for their patients as well. The essence of cognitive behavioral therapy is to recognize that many of our problems come from unhelpful ways of thinking or dysregulated emotional habits, and that with mindfulness training, we can interrupt these and make progress on the problem. The form of the training may vary, but the core idea is the same. All of this is to say, mindfulness training is just a kind of self-therapy we can do.

I don’t want to mislead you too much though with this simplification. It’s not the case that the Buddhist concept of emotion is the same as the western one, and the difference is not just one of abstract philosophical concern. The very meaning of “emotion” in English is somewhat difficult to find in Buddhist texts directly, because the languages these texts are written in are very different from English, and so lack direct counterparts for some concepts. In Tibetan, his Holiness (and the editors who help) point out that there are some similar words, like myong ’tshor which may serve as a translation, although this word is not widely used. Etymologically, myong means “experience” and ’tshor means “feeling.” Both of these qualities pertain to other mental states that are not emotions. Others propose the word gyer bag, which is used in other Tibetan commentary. However, it is an archaic word and does not include what in English we consider positive emotions. It would be weird to fixate on just the negative emotions, although when talking about afflictive feelings, these are generally negative, so we can understand why this situation occurs.

The situation is not much better in Chinese, where a single character, 心, is used for both the intellectual aspects of mind and the emotional ones, pronounced “tsin,” with a high tone. The radical system and ideographs help the situation somewhat, as more complex hanzi that refer to specific kinds of thoughts and feelings often use this marker to express the specific kind of feeling. There is a term for emotions in general, 感, which upon careful inspection consists of three parts. We have 戈, 口, and 心. The first one is supposed to be a spear, and used for words involving weapons, violence, chaotic things, and so on. The second is a mouth or entranceway or gate. This character doesn’t appear tremendously often in a Buddhist context, and when it does, it often means “to move.” Sometimes in a sentimental sense, but also sometimes in the sense of “response to something else,” like an effect of something. There are specific hanzi for specific emotions, but like Tibetan, many of them that use 心 don’t line up with the positive emotions. For example, 驩 means joy in the sense of delight, 娛 means pleasure or happiness, and 寧 means “to be calm” or “at peace.”

Finally, there is at least one concept from Sanskrit worth pointing out, which is that of kleśa, and is common throughout Buddhist writing. On the other hand, it also does not match up with our concept of “emotion.” Loosely, it refers to mental factors that do not allow it to abide peacefully. These disturbing emotions and views enslave the mind, confining it to a narrow perspective and motivate actions that hinder the happiness of both ourselves and others. It’s the word that we are often translating as “affliction” in English, or sometimes in a broader sense, we may say things like “disturbing emotions,” or “wrong views.” The latter is important because by “mental factor” we don’t just mean a feeling. We mean anything that is in the mind with those effects. This therefore also includes things like unquestioned assumptions about the world that lead people to bad states of mind.

There is another key point of contrast in Buddhism, which we have flirted with in this discussion, but should outright address. The concept of “positive” and “negative” emotion is itself somewhat different. Our baseline understanding of these concepts in the anglosphere is that an emotion is positive if we like experiencing it and it makes us happy, more or less. We like feeling things like calm, content, joyful, excitement, love and to be loved. We don’t like things like anxiety, discontentment, despair, scorn, and so on. All these words are perfectly possible to translate to and from these languages, but whether or not a given emotion is positive or negative doesn’t always line up as we might expect.

For a Buddhist, the defining factor for a positive emotion is one which reduces the suffering of ourselves or others in the long term. Slightly more generally, a feeling is positive when its long term effects are positive, even if the situation we experience that feeling in might be literally unpleasant at the time. In light of the first chapter, it should be somewhat clear why. The project we’re setting out for, that of personal buddhahood, takes anywhere from a lifetime to many lifetimes, depending on your sect and beliefs about reincarnation. We can never attain this if the emotional lens through which the present moment is filtered is focused on the here and now. We need this lens to be aimed at the future in just about every situation. Thus, even if a feeling is unpleasant, it may be regarded as positive. In the Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, we are presented with the following 4 situations:

Here, when someone feels a certain kind of pleasant feeling, non-virtuous states increase in him and virtuous states diminish; but when someone feels another kind of pleasant feeling, non-virtuous states diminish in him and virtuous states increase. Here, when someone feels a certain kind of painful feeling, non-virtuous states increase in him and virtuous states diminish; but
when someone feels another kind of painful feeling, non-virtuous states diminish in him and virtuous states increase.

We need to keep these intuitions in mind as we are learning about Buddhism, because the primary sources we draw on will not always map directly on to our own concepts. So to summarize a few key points.

• Throughout the world languages where Buddhism is influential, words for “emotions” often refer specifically to negative emotions, with positive ones being separate.
• There is little distinction between thoughts and feelings.
• As a consequence, in English, we tend to separate mental activities by how they are carried out, e.g. logically or emotionally. In Buddhist writings, we separate mental activities by whether or not their consequences are good or bad.
• Drawing different “mental boundaries” for these concepts leads to a little bit of confusion about what the text is says.

I like to keep these posts relatively short, and we want to discuss a myriad of negative emotions, and the most basic meditations and training for dealing with these emotions. We’ll collect all these ideas into the next post.