This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Vedana and Entanglement - Mei Elliott. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Mei Elliott at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Good morning. My name is Mei. The talk today is going to be on vedanā1, or feeling tone. For those who aren’t familiar with it, I’ll spend some time in the meditation inviting you to explore vedanā in your own experience. That will aid in your understanding of the dharma talk as a whole, to have a felt sense of it.
If you’re not familiar with what vedanā is, just a very brief introduction: vedanā is typically translated as feeling tone, and it refers to this spectrum of pleasant, unpleasant, or neither. All of our experiences have a feeling tone. In life, there’s extremely pleasant; we might think of vedanā on a spectrum. Very pleasant on one end of the spectrum, very unpleasant on the other end of the spectrum, and in between, we might say it’s neutral—neither pleasant nor unpleasant.
In this sit today, we’ll explore vedanā as it relates to body sensations, to sounds, and maybe even visual sights. That’s what you can expect. We’ll start by settling in, just sensing the body, being with the breath, and sitting in silence for a while before we get into feeling tone. So why don’t you go ahead and find a posture that feels supportive for you to sit in, a posture that is upright and relaxed.
Just take some time to settle in with the body. You might connect with your home base for the meditation. For a lot of people, that’s the breathing. For some, it might be the soundscape or a global sense of the body. Sitting, taking some time to settle with your home base, with your anchor, landing in the present moment.
Having taken some time to settle in, we’ll now shift our attention to vedanā, to feeling tone. We’ll start by exploring it in the body, and we’ll do this with a couple of body scans. We’ll start at the top of the head and do a slow scan down to the feet. For our first scan, we’ll be noticing any sensations that register as unpleasant. It might be very slightly unpleasant, moderately unpleasant, or it could be very unpleasant. When we meet these sensations, see if we can do so with a sense of ease and relaxation.
Scanning down the forehead, feeling the jaw. Maybe there’s some tightness in the jaw that feels unpleasant. Sensing the neck, the shoulders, the torso, sensing anything that might register as unpleasant. It could be tension or tightness or pressure. Sensing the arms, the wrists, and hands, and the hips and legs. Sensing anything unpleasant. When you finish, just coming back to the breath.
We’ll start another scan now at the top of the head, going at about the same pace, noticing anything that’s pleasant. It might be ever so slightly pleasant. I’ll allow you to go at your own pace. Sensing, maybe it’s an area that feels relaxed or spacious. Maybe an area of the body that feels like a nice temperature, just a little pleasant. Maybe a softening, a slightly pleasant tingling, maybe in the hands. Making your way through the body, sensing for anything pleasant. That’s fine if you don’t find anything; it may be that there aren’t any pleasant sensations. Sometimes we’ll catch just a little pleasantness in the body. When you finish your scan, coming back to the breath.
And beginning another scan of the body from head to toe, this time noticing vedanā, feeling tone that’s neither pleasant nor unpleasant. This is vedanā that we might call neutral. Often, much of our experience is neutral sensation that doesn’t feel pleasant or unpleasant. So going down the forehead, the face, in your own time, your own pace, sensing neutral sensations. Neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Often, neutral sensations are less interesting for the mind, so we tend not to pay attention to them. It can take some extra energy to stay with them. When you finish your scan, landing with the breath again.
Now, letting go of the breath, we’ll shift our attention now to explore vedanā in the soundscape. Resting in this vast field of hearing. We can hear sounds within our own bodies, sounds within the room, and sometimes sounds outside the room, maybe traffic or a bird call. We’ll see if we can stay with this field of hearing, and as we listen, we’ll be attuning to feeling tone. We’ll be attuning to this sense of pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. As you hear a sound, see if you can have a soft mental note in the background that acknowledges the feeling tone of that sound. So even as you hear my voice, you might notice if the sound of the voice registers as pleasant, unpleasant, or neither—neutral. You may find that it changes when you hear different sounds. Vedanā isn’t fixed; it comes and goes. Maybe just a soft background note: neutral, unpleasant, neutral, neutral.
Our task with vedanā is just to be with the feeling tone as it is. If it’s pleasant, we don’t grasp hold of it and try to get more. If it’s unpleasant, can we be with it without aversion, without rejecting it? And if it’s neutral, can we stay with it without zoning out, without getting lost in thought?
We can release our focus on the soundscape and we’ll shift now to do a little experimentation with the vedanā of thinking. So thoughts and emotions also have vedanā. To experiment with this, you might bring to mind someone that you love or that you care about. That might be a mental picture of them or just a felt sense of them. And now notice the vedanā associated with that thought or that sense of the person. Often we find that it might be pleasant, maybe a little pleasant or very pleasant, to think about someone that we care about.
To notice an unpleasant thought, you might think about something on your to-do list that you’re not so excited about. Not getting lost in thought about it, just bringing up maybe the headline or a mental image of doing the task. It may be that just the idea “to-do list” registered as unpleasant. So noticing the vedanā, whatever you’re seeing in your mind, whatever that task is, that thought, it’s an idea. It might be you see words in the mind, it might be a picture. So noticing the feeling tone of the words or picture in the mind related to this task. This is just the vedanā of the thought, the idea. That doesn’t mean that the task itself will actually be that way, but it may be that the thought has unpleasant vedanā.
So letting go of these images now, coming back to the breath, the body, reconnecting with a sensation that’s neutral or pleasant.
After the meditation, there were announcements. A teacher named Camille, who is expecting her first child, was thanked for her years of service. An upcoming Mindful Parenting group was announced. It was also mentioned that IMC operates on donations. —
I’d like to start the talk this morning with a very short poem. It’s a very short poem at the very beginning of a very long book. The book is the Visuddhimagga2, fifth-century commentarial teachings by Buddhaghosa3. And in it, it references Gotama4, so that’s the Buddha. It goes like this:
A tangle within, a tangle without. The whole world is tangled in a tangle. Gotama, I ask you this: Who can untangle this tangle?
When I was a kid, maybe seven years old or so, my parents took me to the Grand Canyon. For those who might not be from the US or familiar with this area… this fly really likes the Grand Canyon. Hi, little friend. For those who aren’t from the US, the Grand Canyon is probably one of the geologic wonders of the world. It’s really extraordinary. But interestingly enough, one of my key memories from that trip was not of the Grand Canyon, but of the gift shop. There was a little toy in the gift shop that consisted of two pieces of metal, and each piece was kind of like a little loop, and the loops were hooked together, something like this. They looked inextricably linked, like they couldn’t be decoupled, like they couldn’t be taken apart. But if you kept moving them for a very long time, eventually they would decouple.
I was just obsessed with this toy, totally fixated on it. It was like the highlight of the Grand Canyon trip. I was remembering that toy and that experience, and I was thinking about how many times in my life I’ve been totally fixated on some inner puzzle, some story or complex life situation, and I’m really just obsessed with trying to figure it out, trying to find the solution, to figure out the right thing to say or do. And in being so captivated by this inner puzzle, I’m missing the majesty which is my life.
I think that this is something that a lot of us do. We get so caught, so entangled in our inner challenges, our inner puzzles, that we don’t even notice that the Grand Canyon is right there waiting for us, that the full beauty and awe of our life is somehow missing. We’re not quite seeing it because we’re so fixated on these puzzles.
Of course, that toy is long gone, but I’m still really interested in how we get caught in these puzzles, how we get entangled, and then how do we become unentangled? The Buddha talked about entanglement and this very process of learning to be free of entanglement, to be free of suffering, to be free of stress in our life.
Today, the focus of the talk is on one of these gateways to unentanglement. And more specifically, the talk is on vedanā, or feeling tone. For those of you who weren’t here at the beginning of the meditation, I’ll provide a little recap. Vedanā is typically translated as feeling tone; sometimes it’s translated as hedonic tone or affective tone. When I say feeling, this is not talking about an emotion or a body sensation. It’s referring to the pleasantness, unpleasantness, or neutrality of experience.
I had mentioned the spectrum. We can think of vedanā as being on a spectrum with one end being the most pleasant thing a human can experience—very pleasant, quite pleasant, a little less pleasant, slightly pleasant, neutral, a little unpleasant, etc., all the way to the most unpleasant thing a human can experience. It could be the emotions associated with the loss of a loved one or severe physical pain. So this is that spectrum of vedanā.
One of the most famous suttas, the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta5, which forms the basis for most of our meditation instruction in the West, goes over four foundations of mindfulness. I’ll just mention a couple: one is the body, one is the mind, and one is vedanā. It’s really interesting to me that the Buddha only gave one foundation to the body, only one foundation to the mind, and vedanā gets an entire foundation to itself. So what’s up with that? That caught my attention. This must be important if the Buddha said there are four things to pay attention to, and one of them is vedanā.
One of the main reasons vedanā gets so much airtime from the Buddha is because it plays a critical role in why we suffer. It plays a critical role in how we get entangled. One of the teachings that the Buddha offered that best explains how we get entangled is Dependent Origination. It’s also known as Dependent Arising, also known as the 12-fold chain. The Pali6 is Paṭiccasamuppāda7. This teaching, at first glance, and even after first glance, can seem very complicated, very hard to understand, confusing. But very simply, the 12-fold chain is just a description of how we get caught in the cycle of suffering. It’s often depicted as a wheel, the 12 links kind of going around in a chain. We just go round and round the circle of suffering.
I appreciate that it’s called the 12-fold chain because awakening is sometimes referred to as freedom from bondage. When we become awakened, it’s kind of like we become unchained, unhooked. But what’s amazing is it’s actually possible to break the chain, to break this cycle of suffering before full liberation. That’s what I’m interested in today in this talk: that we can actually break the chain. We can stop entanglement from happening here and now, and we don’t need to wait for some future enlightenment.
In the talk today, I’ll be talking about just four of the links, and of those four, really zooming in on two of them. What’s nice about the four I’m going to mention is that you don’t need to know anything else about the rest of the chain for them to be useful and applicable. And what’s also nice about them is you can experience them in your life; they’re not theoretical.
Let’s go through them. I’ll just say all of them to begin with: the six senses, contact, vedanā, craving. That’s the order.
To highlight the relevance of craving for you, I want to remind you of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths. I’m just going to mention the first two. First Noble Truth: there is suffering. Second Noble Truth: the source of suffering is craving. This is really radical, right? The source of suffering. He’s not saying the source of suffering is unpleasant vedanā. We usually think that unpleasant things are the source of suffering, but that’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying that it’s actually the wanting and not wanting that’s the suffering, the rejection of experience or the grabbing hold of experience. That’s our suffering.
Craving, and of course the other side of the coin of craving is aversion—so wanting and not wanting. Why are those suffering? The secret message behind craving and aversion is that this moment is not enough. If craving for something else is present, or aversion is present, it’s saying that this moment needs to be better or different, more or less, in order to be content, in order to be happy. Inherently within the wanting and not wanting, there’s a sense that this moment isn’t okay, that I need something different in order to be happy. It can be hard to see that because we’re so fixated on the object of desire, what it is we want to get. But really, embedded in that whole process of mind, the whole wanting and not wanting system, is dissatisfaction. That’s why craving is dukkha8, that’s why craving is suffering.
Returning to dependent arising, these links here. I had said the knee-jerk reaction to vedanā is craving. What happens is we experience pleasant vedanā, and we immediately want more. That’s that movement from vedanā to craving. We experience unpleasant vedanā, and we immediately want to get rid of it, or we want less of it. That’s the aversion, right? We want to fix it or change it or destroy it or get rid of it. If we experience neutral vedanā, we’re usually bored. It’s not interesting to us, and so we go into delusion. Delusion is like getting lost in the thinking mind, in the narrative of “I, me, and mine.” We check out, we go into selfing. This is that movement through the chain: six senses, contact, vedanā, craving.
We can see this in our experience. It happens really fast, but I’ll share a short example. Some years ago, I was having a snack at home, some nut butter. I’m sitting in the kitchen eating my nut butter straight out of the jar—delicious, my favorite. I should mention nut butter is like a high-ticket item in my family; it is a coveted item. So I’m really enjoying my snack. I finish, I put it back in the fridge, and I’m about to close the door when I realize there was something just a little strange about the way that I put the jar in the fridge. I realized I didn’t just set the jar in the fridge; I kind of moved some things out of the way, put the jar in, and then moved those items back. You know how a dog will take a bone in the backyard and dig a hole and put the bone in and then cover it with dirt? That’s what was happening.
I could have been hard on myself about this, like, “Oh, come on, you’ve done renunciate monastic training focusing on generosity and giving things up.” But fortunately, I was just amused when I saw this. It was just interesting to see this is just what the mind does. This was just the chain of dependent origination in action. Six senses—in this case, there was a mouth. There’s a moment of contact; the mouth made contact with some almond butter. I was conscious, so there’s a moment of contact. That contact was very pleasant, and that pleasantness led to craving and clinging, and I did not want to share. So that’s that chain. That’s how that occurs, and this is happening all day long for us.
There’s this classic sutta called “The Dart” or “The Arrow” (Samyutta Nikaya 36.6). Some of you may know it as the teaching on the second arrow. It’s a very commonly taught sutta; however, a lot of people don’t know that it’s actually about vedanā. I’m going to read you a little section from it:
“When an untaught worldling”—I love this phrase, an untaught worldling refers just to an untrained person, a person who hasn’t practiced the teachings of a Buddha, who hasn’t done the introspective training—”is touched by a painful vedanā, they worry and grieve. They lament, beat their breast, weep, and are distraught. They thus experience two kinds of vedanā: a bodily and a mental vedanā. It is as if a person were pierced by an arrow, and following the first piercing, they are hit by a second arrow.”
So the first arrow, let’s say we have knee pain. There’s some unpleasant vedanā of the knee pain. That unpleasant vedanā, that’s the first arrow. But then when we grieve and worry and lament, when we go, “Oh my gosh, my knee hurts! How am I going to afford seeing a doctor? What if I need surgery? What if I have a limp? Who will love me if I have a limp?”—that’s the second arrow.
That description of the first arrow and the second arrow are those two links of dependent arising that we’ve been talking about. That’s vedanā and craving. Unpleasant knee pain, that’s the vedanā. The aversion, the fear, the worry, that’s the craving, specifically aversion. That’s that movement, and within that movement is the movement from freedom to suffering. Because remember, vedanā—pleasant, unpleasant, neutral—is not the source of suffering. The Buddha said craving is the source of suffering. So that’s that shift from ease to dukkha, right there.
One aspect of training as a Zen monk is being trained as a ceremonial instrumentalist. You become kind of like a Zen musician. In residential Zen training, there are a lot of ceremonies, and there are all different instruments. There are drums, there are bells of all different sizes. I remember at Tassajara9, there was one that was almost big enough to take a bath in. There are a variety of instruments… there’s one called the mokugyo10 that’s like a red lacquered fish that you hit with a mallet. There was a large wooden hanging fish, and you hit it right in the eye with a mallet. All these different instruments, and sometimes the instrumental parts are quite complex, which is kind of a vulnerable thing for a Zen monk who didn’t choose to move to a monastery to be a musician. A lot of Zen monks don’t really have a lot of musical tendencies, including myself.
So sometimes this was challenging, and of course, if you make a mistake, the whole assembly hears. During one ceremony at City Center, San Francisco Zen Center, the former Abbess, Blanche Hartman, was officiating. The doan11, the instrumentalist who’s playing the bells, needs to be hitting each bell at a very specific time, choreographed and aligned with what the abbess is doing. The whole assembly knows exactly when the bells are supposed to happen; they’ve heard it a million times. On this particular day, the doan was a woman who was moving right along until she hit a bell at the wrong time. She hit the bell and immediately she winced, that facial expression that’s like the universal expression of “damn it.” She hits the bell, winces. The abbess looks over because she hears that the bell is wrong, and then of course the ceremony continues.
At the end of the service, the woman who was playing the bells went up to Blanche and she apologized for hitting the bell at the wrong time. And Blanche, she responds, she says, “Mistakes on the bells are inevitable. But the face… the face was extra.”
The unpleasant sound of the incorrect bell—inevitable. That’s the first arrow. The wince—that’s extra. That’s the second arrow. The wince is the second arrow, that wince of aversion, that movement from vedanā to craving.
So what is our alternative? How do we break the chain? How do we keep suffering from arising? The key is learning to rest in vedanā, learning to experience vedanā without reacting to it. Can you be with the pleasantness of experience without chasing it, grasping for more? And can you be with unpleasant experience without aversion, without rejecting it, without trying to get rid of it or get away from it? This is our task.
What’s worth noting is when we think about the chain, we still have six senses, they still make contact with objects, and vedanā still arises. Vedanā is a benign force. Even after the Buddha’s enlightenment, the Buddha still experienced vedanā. He still experienced pleasant and unpleasant; he still had really bad back pain. But what he didn’t have was craving and aversion. That’s what’s different about the liberated mind. It doesn’t have craving and aversion. So you don’t need to get rid of what’s unpleasant in your life. You don’t have to chase what’s pleasant in order to be free. You can just be with what is, without anything extra. And that’s what’s freeing. That’s how we become unentangled. “Gotama, how to untangle this tangle?”
For many people, it’s difficult to decouple vedanā and craving. I might say that it’s a victory just to start noticing vedanā at all. And so that’s where I’d like to suggest you start. In terms of the practice of decoupling vedanā and craving, we start by just being mindful of vedanā in our life, starting to identify it. That second foundation of mindfulness: vedanā.
You might start by noticing it in your meditation practice. You might spend a period of meditation just noticing vedanā, kind of how we did today, where you see if you can notice pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant sensations in the body. See if you can notice pleasant, unpleasant, neutral sounds. Try opening your eyes and seeing if you can identify pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral visual objects, sights. It gets really interesting to do this with emotions and moods, and particularly so with thoughts, if you can catch them. It’s really easy to get lost in thoughts and not be able to see them clearly, but if you can see them clearly, you can begin to see how much the vedanā of thoughts controls our life, has so much power over us.
Getting interested in vedanā, starting to notice it, becomes a gateway to wisdom. We get wise about vedanā when we become mindful of it. I want to say a few things about the way that we get wise about vedanā so you can see how this can affect us.
One way is that we start to see that vedanā is impermanent, that it’s really transitory, that it’s always changing. We think that vedanā is fixed. We chase some object, you know, “ice cream is always pleasant,” or maybe more dangerously, “exercise is always terrible,” or even worse, “X-type of people… I always hate X-type of people.” We have this sense that maybe there’s some unpleasant vedanā associated with certain people that we don’t like, and that’s how they are, it’s always unpleasant. That’s assuming that vedanā doesn’t change. But as we begin to examine it and experience it in our life, we see that vedanā operates almost like raindrops on a pond, just coming and going. Even within a single mouthful of food, the vedanā will change. There’ll be a peak of pleasantness in the chewing, and then it becomes a little more neutral, and then we swallow and the vedanā is gone. So check it out for yourself.
When we begin to see that vedanā is impermanent, we start to see how futile it is to grasp it. Why grab hold of something, why chase something, why spend so much time trying to fix or reject or get rid of something when that vedanā is impermanent, when it doesn’t last? That starts to undermine our tendency to move from vedanā to craving. Seeing clearly that things are impermanent, that vedanā is impermanent, it starts to allow us to break the chain. It starts to allow us to just rest in vedanā. Why get so entangled in the vedanā with craving, with wanting and not wanting, when we know it’s going to change anyway? I can just rest here.
Some of you may have had the experience of getting a new toy, maybe a new article of clothing, or maybe a new gadget, a cell phone, maybe something bigger, a new car, and being really excited about it for like two weeks. There’s like a fever-pitch pleasantness associated with that experience, and then something happens. We often don’t even notice it, but that new item just kind of fades into the background of our life. It just becomes normal, and we don’t really notice it anymore. And then we need a new toy in order to experience that fever-pitch pleasure. All that’s happening with that first item is that the vedanā went from very, very pleasant to neutral.
That example is to express that one, vedanā changes, but also another way that we get wise about vedanā is that we begin to see that vedanā is not inherent to the object. Pleasant vedanā is not embedded in the new car. Shockingly, pleasant vedanā is not embedded in ice cream. It’s possible to have ice cream that’s neutral. It’s possible to have ice cream that’s unpleasant. It changes, and it’s not fixed. It’s not embedded in the object. It’s not inherent to the object. All of this undermines the tendency to cling.
One area where you might see this for yourself, where you might be able to see that capacity to rest in vedanā without clinging, is to start noticing things that are just slightly pleasant or slightly unpleasant, because we have a greater capacity to be with them without reactivity. In your life, notice if there’s a food that’s just slightly pleasant, and you might notice there’s no craving with it. “Oh, interesting, I’m not craving for a second helping. Okay, I’m actually seeing how I can experience something pleasant without craving.” So then you just get a little taste of what that’s like to see the two decoupled, to see vedanā and craving decoupled. For a lot of people, they’re so used to those two forces happening at the same time that it’s hard to see that they could be separate.
Another practice you might play with is noting practice. We did a little of that in the meditation. This can be helpful for both recognizing vedanā and also not getting hooked by it, not getting entangled with it. You might just notice when you’re attending to vedanā, you just might use a soft mental note: “pleasant, pleasant, pleasant,” or “unpleasant, unpleasant.” Maybe a phone rings during your meditation, and normally you’d go, “Why does the phone always ring during meditation? It’s so distracting. I wish it wouldn’t do that.” But instead, you might just note, “unpleasant, unpleasant, unpleasant.” This is one way that you can incorporate another tool to noticing vedanā and not getting hooked by it.
I want to say a little more about how wholesome it is to rest in vedanā. When we do this, it’s a little like a foretaste of enlightenment. One definition of enlightenment is the complete uprooting of craving, aversion, and delusion. So when we can rest in vedanā, when we can just be with pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral without craving, without aversion, and without delusion, that’s a mind a lot like the liberated mind. So don’t miss it. Enjoy it and know that it’s possible. It’s possible to break the chain here and now, to rest in something very close to freedom. It’s not full enlightenment, but it’s like a taste of the peace that’s possible. This is how we become unentangled.
I’m going to end with a piece of a poem. It’s called “In This Passing Moment” by Hogen Bays.12 I share it because part of our task with vedanā is to choose the vedanā we have right then, rather than trying to get better vedanā. Choose the vedanā we have, rather than trying to get rid of the unpleasant and get the pleasant.
In this passing moment, karma ripens and all things come to be. I vow to choose what is. If there is cost, I choose to pay. If there is need, I choose to give. If there is pain, I choose to feel. If there is sorrow, I choose to grieve. When burning, I choose heat. When calm, I choose peace. When starving, I choose hunger. When happy, I choose joy. Whom I encounter, I choose to meet. What I shoulder, I choose to bear. When it is my death, I choose to die. Where this takes me, I choose to go. Being with what is, I respond to what is. This life is as real as a dream. The one who knows it cannot be found, and truth is not a thing. Therefore I vow to choose this dharma entrance gate. May all Buddhas and wise ones help me live this vow.
Let’s sit together.
Kurt: Thank you very much. Two quick questions. How do you spell vedanā? And how can we find what you just read, that “I choose to, I choose to”?
Mei: Great. So vedanā, it’s spelled V-E-D-A-N-A. In Pali, V’s are typically pronounced as W’s, so I could argue that it should be pronounced “wedanā,” but in the West, we usually say “vedanā,” so for consistency, we’ll stick with that. The poem, if you want to note the title, it’s called “In This Passing Moment” by Hogen Bays. This is recorded, so if you just go to the IMC website, you can hear that title and look it up, and then you can see the full poem too.
Mizu: Good morning, my name is Mizu. I have two questions also. The first one is, what is the feeling tone, or vedanā, of accepting what is?
Mei: So what is the feeling tone or vedanā of accepting what is? Typically, acceptance registers as pleasant, sometimes neutral. And I should say that remember that vedanā isn’t fixed, and it’s not consistent. So there isn’t one consistent, reliable feeling tone associated with acceptance. However, there are trends. So typically, it’s pleasant or neutral. You might imagine a time for yourself where there was some sort of clinging or holding on or struggle, and then that shift to acceptance. Often, acceptance is a state of non-clinging, right? So non-suffering, and that’s pleasant. Non-suffering is very pleasant.
Mizu: I thought so, thank you. I just wanted to clarify that for myself. And then the second question is about vedanā as it relates to dukkha and going back to the story of the arrows. There’s a first arrow and then there’s a second arrow. So the vedanā isn’t an arrow at all?
Mei: The Buddha actually, to clarify, he was saying the vedanā is like a first arrow. Like, there are painful things in our life. We can experience extreme physical pain, and that’s like a first arrow. But then the reactivity, the wanting and not wanting, that’s the second arrow. So it kind of goes along with the phrase that you may have heard: “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.”
Mizu: Okay, so then the last question, just to get into the full clarification of dukkha then, is dukkha only then the second arrow and not the first arrow, which is vedanā?
Mei: Typically, when we’re talking about dukkha, we’re talking about the suffering that’s optional. One could consider physical pain as dukkha also. Sometimes the Buddha would refer to dukkha as sickness, old age, death—these things that are very, you know, first arrow, very primary. But typically, when we’re talking about dukkha, we’re referring to that optional type, the second arrow, because that’s the dukkha we have some say over. That’s the type that’s optional.
Vedanā: A Pali word that translates to “feeling” or “feeling tone.” It refers to the pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral quality of any experience, distinct from emotions. ↩
Visuddhimagga: “The Path of Purification,” a comprehensive manual of Buddhist doctrine and meditation written in the 5th century by the scholar Buddhaghosa. ↩
Buddhaghosa: A 5th-century Indian Theravāda Buddhist commentator, translator, and philosopher. He is the author of the Visuddhimagga. ↩
Gotama: The clan name of the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gotama. ↩
Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta: “The Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness,” a key Buddhist text that provides detailed instructions on the practice of mindfulness meditation. ↩
Pali: An ancient Indo-Aryan liturgical language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is the classical language of the Theravāda Buddhist canon. ↩
Paṭiccasamuppāda: The doctrine of “Dependent Origination” or “Dependent Arising,” which describes the chain of causes and conditions that lead to suffering (dukkha) and the cycle of rebirth. ↩
Dukkha: A core concept in Buddhism, often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” “anxiety,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the fundamental discontent inherent in worldly life. ↩
Tassajara: Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, a Sōtō Zen monastery located in a remote area of the Ventana Wilderness in California. It is part of the San Francisco Zen Center. ↩
Mokugyo: A traditional Japanese woodblock instrument, often shaped like a fish, used in Buddhist ceremonies to keep rhythm during chanting. ↩
Doan: In Zen Buddhism, the doan is the person who plays the bells and other instruments to signal the time and lead the assembly during meditation and ceremonies. ↩
Hogen Bays: Roshi Hogen Bays is a Zen master and the co-abbot of the Zen Community of Oregon. The poem is a version of the “Bodhisattva’s Vow for the Precepts.” ↩