Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 44-minute session, Ven Jampa Ignyen teaches a foundational distinction in Buddhist psychology: anger, attachment, and pride are never feelings themselves, though feeling always accompanies them. He establishes this while working through Pabongkha’s Mind and Cognition text, starting with the division of cognition into minds and mental factors, and their five aspects of concordance. Using everyday examples—tasting food, hearing sounds, seeing objects—he grounds the framework of the five omnipresent mental factors (feeling, discrimination, intention, attention, contact) that must be present for awareness. He then classifies feelings as body or mental, contaminated or uncontaminated, and as ease, suffering, or equanimity. Pitched at practitioners with background in Buddhist psychology.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 16 M and C 2001 09 18.mp3
UUID: 882631c3-d882-4a3b-9727-449037d6175a
Teacher: Ven Jampa Ignyen
Collection: y Mind and Cognition 2001 Month 07-09 (Ven Jampa Ignyen)
Date: 2001-09-18
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.8 minutes
Words: ~4,234
So we’re continuing with Pabongkha’s text on Lorik. And so far, we’ve just examined, from last week, the division of cognition into minds and mental factors. And so there we’ve discussed the definition of main mind and mental factor. And then that mental factors possess five aspects of concordance with main minds. And these five aspects of concordance are support, focus, aspect, duration, and substance.
So any main mind, as the the central state of awareness, can have in its retinue various mental factors. And these retinue mental factors share five aspects in common, or five points of concordance or similarity with the central state of awareness. Still, the mental factors and the main mind that they’re concordant with share a similar substance, but they’re not the same substance. But to us, they appear completely mixed to the main mind and its retinue mental factors appear However, they still retain, even though they appear mixed, they still retain their individual identities. So of the mental factors there are fifty one altogether and the fifty one are divided up into six divisions.
That is the these occur on the bottom of page thirty six: the omnipresent, the five omnipresent, the five object determining, the eleven virtuous, six root afflictive mental factors, the twenty proximate afflictive. Proximate there just means near or secondary to the afflictive. Really mean near, they’re close to the affliction, so therefore they’re proximate affliction. And the four variables. The four variables means that they can either be virtuous, non virtuous or neutral.
In a way we can say that these six divisions are divided up really into three of either being positive, negative or neutral. The five omnipresent and the five object determining are generally neutral in themselves. The eleven virtuous are the eleven positive states. The eleven virtues. Six root afflictive and the twenty proximate afflictive are negative.
And the four variable can be either positive or negative. So we have two neutral, one positive, two negative, one variable. Yep. Oh no, the four variables there are four mental factors that can either be positive or negative or neutral. Yeah, they occur quite a way down, the four variables.
And also last week we did a little bit of investigation on feeling, discrimination intention, attention and contact. Now, these are the five omnipresent, and as it’s stated by Pabongkha, they’re explained to be omnipresent by being present for all minds. Because they’re present for all minds, they’re omnipresent. And the reason given there is that if any were incomplete, then we could not the mind itself would have not be able to engage its object. The mind engaging its object depends on the presence of these five.
So feeling, discrimination, intention, attention, and contact. And as says, if there’s no feeling, the experience of ease or suffering, a feeling, does not occur in relation to that object, which is obvious. If discrimination, there’s no imputation of convention. Imputation of convention there means there’s no holding to the sign of the object, to the convention in relation to the object. If there’s no intention, there’s no engagement of the object.
If there’s no attention, the mind is not directed to its focus. And if there is no contact, there’s no generation of the feeling of ease or suffering and so on. Right. So these five are ever present. Now, one of the things about this section in Pabongkha is that Pabongkha doesn’t go into a great amount of detail.
There is another text that’s also recommended in the curriculum of the basic program by Yeshe Gyatsen, and I’ve got some pages from that that may be useful, just to to look at in relation to the identity of the different mental factors. I’m just wondering whether we may photocopy okay. Now I’m just wondering whether it’s useful. The thing is if we start going into too much depth into the minds of mental factors, we won’t finish the text. It’s a question of whether what’s gonna be the most value at present.
We’ll just do a little bit more anyway. We’ll read what Pabongkha has to say about feeling. Right. So here we’re about, a third of the way down, page thirty seven. From among those, for the first, feeling there is definition and classification.
So cognition differentiating experience is the definition of feeling. So really experiences, or nyongwe in Tibetan, which means to experience, is the definition of feeling. The feeling, the mental factor of feeling, which experiences the object in a sense that it’s tasting the object. If you can imagine the object to be like a piece of food. What’s actually experiencing it is the feeling.
And feeling and feeling aggregate are equivalent. So here, the second of the five aggregates is feeling. And so feeling here just means the feeling aggregate. And then if classified, there’s a twofold classification, a threefold classification, a fivefold classification, and also a sixfold classification. In fact, there’s many, many.
No. I think emotion would be a broader term. Their emotion really means something which moves the mind. What it activates the mind or it sets the mind in motion. And other mental factors can do that.
Something like anger sets the mind in a in a particular direction, motivates the mind or sets the mind in motion. I it’s the thing about the emotions is that they’re quite broad in definition, aren’t they? They include quite a lot. I think the term itself doesn’t mean that it it moves the mind emotion, that which moves the mind. Positive emotion is talking talked about, negative emotion is talked about.
And I think things like love and compassion can be talked about as emotions, positive emotions, negative emotions like hatred and anger. And all of these are different from feelings. Feeling all feeling does is experience the object in one of three ways, either as positive, negative, or neutral. But we talk we talk about the feeling of anger and so on as if anger itself is a feeling. But technically, from the point of view of minds and mental factors, anger is not a feeling.
Feelings are neutral things. Anger is something non virtuous, one of the root afflictive states. No. No. Feeling is is viewing objects.
It’s not it’s not viewing other mental states. And anger itself is associated with feeling. Anger and feeling occur together, and they take a common object. They have they’re concordant in five aspects. They have the same focal object.
They have the same aspect of the focal object. They have the same duration, the same support, similar substance. Anger can be anger is always associated with feeling. But technically, in a way, there’s two sets of language that we have to apply here. There’s a technical language that’s dealing with Buddhist psychology.
And in that anger and feeling are always separate. Anger could never be feeling. Feeling could never be anger. They could never merge. But in everyday language, we say, I’m feeling angry, or I have the feeling of anger.
That we say. But technically, that feeling can’t be anger. Anger doesn’t have that function. It’s not anger’s function to experience the object, which is what feeling is doing. What anger does is seeks to harm an object, functions to agitate the mind.
Feeling doesn’t do that. Well, anger is one of the six root afflictions. It’s not a root affliction. Oh, it might be a condition. It might be a condition for them.
But here we have to separate, these mental factors out and see what their individual function is. Here, especially with the five omnipresent, then the five omnipresent and even the six root afflictive mental factors, just what their individual function is, what their identity is, their nature is. Because they’re never they’re they’re quite distinct in how they act how they act. And in doing this, then we’re able to more clearly see what is possible, whether anger can act as a condition for self grasping, self grasping for anger. And if there’s no self grasping, is anger possible?
And so on. But, again, these are distinct mental factors. We need to I think it could, yeah, in general, but emotion is a Western concept. It’s not found, like, in Buddhist texts as such. It’s such a broad, you know, like, category.
Emotions can people talk about positive emotions. So positive emotions, it could include all the virtuous mental factors. Then negative emotion, the root six roots and the twenty proximate mental factors could be included in negative emotion. Feeling could also be included. Even the neutral could be included.
Even the mind itself may be included. It’s quite broad. So yes, just the current feeling we have. Anger is not feeling. Feeling.
Attachment is not feeling. Pride is not feeling. Arrogance is not feeling. Deceit is not feeling. Pretension is not feeling.
But feeling is so central that we tend to mix feeling with everything. And go, anger is a feeling. You know, attachment is a feeling. There is feeling associated with attachment. There’s feeling associated with anger.
And they’re because they’re closely related, we often give the name of one to the other. Just like we, give the name of the sun, for instance, to where the sun is shining. We say the sun’s out as if it wasn’t out all the time. If you stand in the sun too long or whatever, we often give names to things by their association. So we call the rays of the sun the sun because they’re the result of the sun.
Here to the feeling of anger, because that feeling is prominent, when we get angry, the feeling also is quite strong. We often give the name of one to the other. Well, what the feeling is is this internal experience, like happiness. Happiness is a feeling. It’s a mental positive feeling.
And unhappiness is a feeling. Physical pain. We stick our hand in a fire. We have this negative feeling. So these things are feelings.
They’re the way we experience an object. Often they’re neutral and they’re not easy to discern. We we may think we don’t have any feelings, but our feelings are always there and then, for the most part, manifest. And they’re at times positive, at times negative. And they’re of central importance to us as an individual as our identity.
And this we can see moment by moment. It depends on what our feelings are like as to how we act and think about things. Right. So there’s a firstly, a twofold classification of feeling. So body feeling and mind feeling.
So body feeling, we should be able to differentiate. So body feeling is any feeling that arises with the body as a basis for the feeling. Or in other words, which arises through the senses, sensory feeling. If we taste an apple, it’s body feeling. We go to a restaurant, we have a nice meal.
We go there actually, probably a major part of going and eating for us is that it gives us pleasant body feeling, the taste of the food. That tongue awareness is always associated with feeling. And when the tongue and we go to the menu and we go to the menu so we get the things that we like the taste of because that taste gives us a positive feeling. We get a positive feeling we like the taste. So we choose that.
And when we eat it, a positive feeling arises. We’re not often aware of this, although it’s but if someone asks us, do you like the food? We say, yeah, the food’s good. I like it. It means we’re having a positive feeling.
Don’t like the food? Negative feeling. That negative, what, feeling which is tongue awareness or positive feeling which is tongue awareness. And we smell something. We like the smell because we have a positive nose awareness, which is feeling, a mental factor.
We have nose consciousness, and concordant with that nose consciousness, we have feeling, which arises in dependence on a nose sense base. And when we smell something, a positive it will a positive, neutral, or negative feeling can arise. Dependent on our past karma and other conditions. Then a positive feeling arises, that smells good. It smells good because we like the smell of it.
Positive. And that’s positive body feeling. On the other hand, we may have a neutral feeling which is nose awareness. And then we don’t even think about it. Our mind is often attracted to our feelings.
We pay attention when we like something or dislike something due to positive or negative feelings. Similarly with ear awareness, we like the sound of something because we have a positive feeling, which is ear awareness itself. Or we like the look of something. Our eye is attracted to something, captivated by something, something appealing, the color, the shape. Due to looking at that object, we have a positive I feeling which is I awareness.
So it’s good to be able to differentiate, oh, this feeling is eye awareness, this feeling is nose awareness, this feeling is tongue awareness. Feeling can be tongue awareness, can’t it? Is that possible? Is that true though? And if we know that there’s feeling there, what else has to be there?
The other four. Other other four. Yes. There has to be contact there for feeling to arrive. There has to be intention.
There has to be attention and discrimination. And all of these also are tongue awareness. Discriminating palate. People so ever discriminate it’s true that that’s it, isn’t it? A discriminating palate, a discriminating tongue ever to Put something into our mouth and yum.
Yeah. Vibrant. Could do with another year in a cask. No. They’re thinking it’s a nice sound is not feeling.
Here, just the pleasant what’s pleasant? The pleasant feeling that arises in relation to that object is the feeling. In relation to that, we like it. A liking, an attachment arises to the object. All the feeling is doing is is, what?
Acting as the experience. It is the experience itself of the object. It isn’t the object. It’s the experience of the awareness, of my awareness of the object. In a way.
Yeah. Yeah. All the other. Yeah. Yep.
Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. Yep. And, generally, there’s just positive or negative that will arise.
Or, of course, neutral also is there. But the more more important for us are the positive and the negative. But feeling can be tongue awareness. That aspect of tongue awareness which experiences experiences the object, or that aspect of tongue awareness which is cognition differentiating the experience of the object, is tongue feeling. The mental factor of feeling arising in dependence on a tongue sense base.
Right, and then beyond the five types of body feeling, have mind feeling. So mind feeling can be initiated by sensory feeling. We have initially, we taste something that’s nice, and then we start thinking about it. That’s a nice piece of of broccoli. That’s a nice brussels sprout.
So then we have conception focused on a brussels sprout, and that conception is initiated by sense perception. So it can be cognizing the brussels sprout, and in association with that, there’s a certain feeling, a pleasant feeling can arrive. And attachment to the brussels sprout. That’s an example of mind feeling. Mental awareness.
Here mind feeling or mental feeling is mental awareness, which is feeling, such as the conception of an object and the feeling that arises, which is conception. Yep. Yep. Because we know that here the distinction between body feeling and mind feeling is the support of the feeling. If the support is the mental sense base, then it’s gonna be mental feeling.
Right. So those two, the first feeling which is sense awareness and external feeling are equivalent. So we call that external feeling. Sensory feeling is external feeling. Really, it’s the feeling associated with external object.
Feeling, which is mental awareness, and internal feeling are equivalent. So with internal feeling, we’re also, in fact, we’re aware of both internal and external objects, so that’s called feeling, which is internal feeling. No. It’s okay. Now then there were two profane and sacred feeling.
zang shing and zang shing ma yin pa. So the first is equivalent to contaminated feeling. So all of our feelings are contaminated feeling. We haven’t in this life had one moment of uncontaminated feeling. It’s all contaminated, all profane.
Excuse me. And the second is sacred feeling. So the second is equivalent to uncontaminated feeling. So that is feeling associated with the mind perceptually comprehending emptiness. The feeling that arises in the continuum of an ārya being is perceptually comprehending emptiness is what we may call sacred feeling or it’s non profane feeling.
It’s uncontaminated feeling. So that’s then a further twofold classification of feeling. Then we have a threefold classification of ease or bliss, suffering, equanimity. So though either ease or suffering must be feeling, equanimity is not necessarily feeling because there are three types of equanimity. The feeling of equanimity, compositional equanimity as one of the eleven virtuous mental factors, and immeasurable equanimity.
So that equanimity there is the feeling of equanimity. It’s not compositional equanimity, which is the equanimity as one of the eleven virtuous mental factors. And it’s not immeasurable equanimity, which is the precondition for generating bodhicitta. Now we have a five fold classification: ease, suffering, mental ease, mental unease and equanimity. So as it said, though mental ease must be ease, it is not necessarily ease of the fivefold classification of feeling because if it is ease of the fivefold classification of feeling, it must be body the body feeling of ease.
In this classification where it says ease, it just in general, it means body the body feeling it is or body bliss, ease and bliss here. Yeah. It’s really everything from the slightly positive all the way up to bliss. Yeah. It depends on what intention is at that point.
If it’s neutral, then it just remains neutral. If we get bitten by a mosquito and it’s very painful, we may just remain with a neutral intention throughout the process. On the other hand, we might get, we may resent being bitten. And then if that’s the case, then we can develop a negative intention towards the mosquito and try and squash it. It Well, there’s feelings, even, you know, always there’s feelings there.
So at the same time of intention, at the same time the intention arises, is feeling there. But, of course, we are changing the objects of our both sensory and mental awareness all the time as well. What is changing the object is our intention. Now something might bite us, and we will, you know, then, you know, draw our attention to that object. But that’s, we do that through our intention to do so.
If it bias us, even our body awareness, you know, is, is unintentionally aware, you know, of that that mosquito, then our intention, you know, will focused there. But even so, intention is always present. It can quite often be neutral though. We have a neutral intention, whereas we’re not necessarily interested, you know, in the objects that are occurring or our mind is taking. But but we can there’s different levels there.
Even though we could be sitting there, we can be thinking about something intentionally. But our, you know, our sensory awareness may not be engaged by our intention. If actually the mosquito is biting us, we’re probably thinking about the pain. Yeah. We think about the object, and then then we can develop a negative intention towards that mosquito, which would be an intention that’s rounding up negative mental factors to focus on that object.
No. They’re neutral. They’re all they’re ever present and they’re neutral in themselves, but it depends on what else is being activated. What other mental factors are being activated? We’ll then determine whether they’re positive or negative.
At times only neutral mental factors will be activated and then they’ll be neutral. But if other positive mental factors are activated, then they will be colored by those other mental factors and become negative or positive in accordance with what is activated. Right, so we have this fivefold classification of feeling. Firstly, we have ease, so that refers to body ease fundamentally. And suffering, the body suffering.
The negative body feeling, negative or positive body feeling is ease and suffering. Then mental ease, mental unease. So this is what is said underneath. So mental ease must be ease. In general, mental ease must be ease.
It is necessarily not ease of the fivefold classification of feeling because if it is ease of the fivefold classification of feeling, it must be the body feeling of ease. Similarly, though mental unease must be suffering, it is not necessarily suffering of the fivefold classification of feeling. Because if suffering if it is suffering of the fivefold classification of feeling, it must be the body feeling of suffering. The latter such as compositional equanimity, etcetera, are to be understood from the higher and lower Abhidharma. Right.
Now here it hasn’t gone into the other mental factors. So also we have discrimination and so on. Now, in this regard, it’s probably worth actually handing these these out to be photocopied. Let’s see. What do you think is best?
Run off a few photocopies now. Just read through this and a bit more. Yeah. I think this might yeah. Put it on the world.
Yeah. We do that many anyway. It is very can be very useful to go through these in some depth to gain an understanding, a preliminary understanding of what the mental factors are, because much of our practice rests upon, separating out the different mental factors. In fact, that’s all in a way, that’s all our work is. It’s separating out the negative factors from the positive, being able to identify them and apply the antidotes to them.
This is what one is doing in mind training. So initially, we should be aware of the five omnipresent mental factors. It really depends. No. They can those can be like, the five omnipresent can can be associate or they’re associated with every type of mind.
They can be associated with wrong awareness. Because they’re associated with every mind, they’re gonna be associated with wrong awareness and doubt, inattentive awareness. They’re gonna be associated with correct belief, valid awareness. What about virtuous factors? Virtuous mental factors are going to be associated with types of awareness that determine their objects.
Not necessarily valid. Here we’re talking about the Sūtra School. It doesn’t have to be the first moment, it could be the second moment. They can either be correctly comprehending their object or, in a more general, in a looser sense, comprehending, in a weak sense of comprehending as in the case of correct belief. But often they are valid or correct because they’re, for a start, they’re authentic states of awareness.
They do have an actual object, unlike wrong awareness, which doesn’t have a reference object. But I don’t think it’s necessary that they actually comprehend need to comprehend their object. For instance, we may have faith in emptiness. Right? So faith is a positive mental factor, isn’t it?
And we may have faith in emptiness being something that is good to attain, good to attain an understanding of. Right? At present, we don’t comprehend emptiness. We also may have faith that impermanence is something, that would be a very positive thing to comprehend. But still, we may not have under understood it impermanence.
At present, we may aspire we take refuge in the three Three Jewels. We have faith in the Three Jewels. If we if it’s asked, do we comprehend the Three Jewels? Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Okay.
If we comprehend Buddha, then Buddha there is only four types of Buddha, the two form bodies, the two Dharma bodies. Do we comprehend like the Nirmānakāya Buddha, like Śākyamūni Buddha, or do we comprehend the Sambhogakāya Buddha? Well, for us, we can’t comprehend. We can’t perceive the Sambhogakāya. It’s too far too subtle.
Even an Nirmānakāya doesn’t exist at present on earth. Śākyamūni was an emanation body. Okay. The other two types of Buddha are the two Dharma bodies, which is nature Dharma body, which is emptiness, the emptiness of omniscience. We don’t comprehend the emptiness of omniscience.
And the other Dharma body is the primordial awareness Dharma body, the basis of that emptiness, which is omniscience itself, we don’t comprehend. Only another Buddha can comprehend the omniscient mind of another Buddha. So when we say I take refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, do we comprehend Buddha? It’s possible we don’t comprehend Buddha in the sense of having, a wisdom in our mental continuum that’s actually comprehending Buddha. Still, we may have a correct belief.
So we can have faith in our mental continuum at present focused on the Three Jewels, which is a correct belief? Faith? No. You I don’t think that would really be faith. Here, faith implies that there is an object, an existent object, that one that would be the object of that faith.