..续本文上一页ure of the feelings will impress itself very deeply on the meditator”s mind. This experience, gained also from other mental and bodily processes, will gradually mature into the Insight Knowledge of Dissolution (bhangañana). On reaching that stage, the meditator will find himself well on the road to further progress.

　　It is within the practice of Insight meditation that the Contemplation of Feelings can unfold its full strength as an efficient tool for breaking the chain of suffering at its weakest link. But from this Contemplation, considerable benefits can be derived also by those who, in their daily life, devote only some quiet reflection to their feelings and emotions, even if done retrospectively. They will soon find that feelings and emotions are "separable." Even this reflective and retrospective contemplation can help them to a fuller awareness of feelings and emotions when they actually occur. This again can save them from being carried away by the emotional cross-currents of elation and dejection. The mind will then gradually reach a higher level of firmness and equipoise, just by that simple procedure of looking, or looking back at, one”s feelings and emotions.

　　This, however, should not, and need not, be made a constant practice, but should be taken up on suitable occasions and for a limited period of time until one has become familiar with the mechanism of feelings followed by emotions. Such an understanding of the process will result in an increasing control over one”s emotional reactions, and this will happen in a natural, spontaneous way. One need not have fears that one”s focusing the mind on the feelings and emotions, in the manner described, will lead to cold aloofness or an emotional withdrawal. On the contrary, mind and heart will become more open to all those finer emotions spoken of before. It will not exclude warm human relationships, nor the enjoyment of beauty in art and nature. But it will remove from them the fever of clinging, so that these experiences will give a deeper satisfaction, as far as this world of Dukkha admits.

　　A life lived in this way may well mature in the wish to use the Contemplation of Feelings for its highest purpose: mind”s final liberation from suffering.

　　Nyanaponika

　　Kandy, Sri Lanka

　　January, 1983

　　The Place of "Feeling" in Buddhist Psychology

　　It should be first made clear that, in Buddhist psychology, "feeling" (Pali: vedana) is the bare sensation noted as pleasant, unpleasant (painful) and neutral (indifferent). Hence, it should not be confused with emotion which, though arising from the basic feeling, adds to it likes or dislikes of varying intensity, as well as other thought processes.

　　Feeling, in that sense, is one of the five Aggregates or Groups of Existence (khandha), constituting what is conventionally called "a person." The specific factors operative in emotion belong to the Aggregate of Mental Formations (sankhara-kkhandha). Feeling is one of the four mental Aggregates which arise, inseparably, in all states of consciousness; the other three are perception, mental formations, and consciousness.

　　Feeling arises whenever there is the meeting of three factors, i.e., sense-organ, object and consciousness. It is called the meeting of these three that, in Buddhist psychology, is called sense-impression (contact, impact; phassa), which is a mental, and not a physical process. It is sixfold, as being conditioned either by of the five physical senses or by mind. it is this sixfold sense-impression by which the corresponding six feelings are conditioned. In the formula of the Dependent Origination (paticca-samuppada), this is expressed by the link: "Sense-impression conditions Feeling" (phassa-paccaya vedana). When emotions follow, they do so in accordance with the next …

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