The Power of Feeling Tone
Part 1 of a 2-part series on Vedana
The definition of “feeling tone” in Buddhism is deceptively simple: It is the quality of a given experience of being pleasant, unpleasant, or neither-unpleasant-nor-pleasant. When we first hear it, we may almost shrug. So what?
The Buddha placed tremendous importance on this apparently simple quality. It is one of the four foundations of mindfulness – broad areas of experience through which the mind can establish awareness of the present moment and gain liberating insight. It is one of the five aggregates – aspects of experience with which we tend to identify (and hence create a self). It is the condition in the sequence of dependent arising that leads to craving, the key support for dukkha.
OK, but again, so what? Let’s unpack this unassuming factor that offers so much potential for our practice.
Feeling tone is a common translation of the Pāli word vedanā. Some translators use “feeling,” but to Western minds this can sound like emotion, which is a more complex phenomenon. Feeling tone is simple, immediate, and direct. Every experience, through any of the six senses, has a feeling tone. It is not that there are three distinct types, but more of a spectrum with pleasant and unpleasant on either end, and a range in the middle that is not quite either.
Another translation is “sensation,” which begins to point toward our experience of vedanā: It is intimate, and it takes place in the mind right where the mind receives sensory input. The related verb vedeti is often used when a person “directly experiences” some phenomenon.
Vedanā is so close, we often don’t distinguish it. And yet it drives so much of our behavior. Without the light of awareness, we blindly seek the pleasant and move away from or avoid the unpleasant, much like an amoeba swims toward food and shrinks from acid or high heat. Or to use a different animal simile, we are like oxen led by the nose ring of feeling tone.
What starts as simple attraction or repulsion based on pleasant or unpleasant can rapidly blossom into complex patterns of suffering in the human mind. We feel a pain in our abdomen and begin to ruminate about our friend who had liver cancer, and then we imagine our own death and the suffering that will come to our family and children as a result. Or we are sitting peacefully on retreat, but find our mind launching into the detailed creation of a screenplay, complete with deep character development and profound pathos. All of this is possible because we didn’t simply notice “unpleasant” or “pleasant” at a key moment.
The Buddha said that feeling tone is the basis for views (DN 1, MN 18). All of our complex philosophizing and politicizing might actually come to down to wanting a certain feeling tone. This may not be easy to believe just from reading it; please have a look in your own mind. It is humbling to discover that in the end, what we crave is to feel a certain way.
Once we begin to see these connections, even intellectually, we might wonder how we missed something so crucial as vedanā, and also how to practice with it. There are a number of avenues, and the fruit it promises is vast.
The first step, of course, is to be able to see feeling tone. This is why it is a suitable area for the establishment of mindfulness (it is the second satipatthana). Feeling tone feels like the initial “gut” response to any experience: The “ahhh” of pleasant, the “ugh” of unpleasant, and the “ehhh” of neutral.
As we get more skilled at seeing it, we realize it is actually hard to track moment-to-moment. Vedanā can be subtle, and it changes rapidly. One approach is to use mindfulness of feeling tone in extreme cases of very pleasant or unpleasant experiences. This can be a good way to prevent the mind from getting thrown off-kilter. When the shower suddenly went cold one morning during a long retreat, my mind instinctively noted “unpleasant!” And then I could calmly respond.
A portion of the “chain” of dependent arising is: Contact, feeling tone, craving, clinging – which takes the mind on to suffering. Noticing feeling tone with clarity “cuts the chain” before craving ignites in the mind, leading to dukkha. Huge amounts of suffering can be avoided this way, for both ourselves and others.
This gives just a taste of the power of working with feeling tone in our practice. The next essay will delve into more of the subtlety of this important quality. Singling out vedanā as a distinct area of human experience and realm for insight practice was one of the Buddha’s brilliant methods.
For now, you might be inspired to incorporate awareness of feeling tone into your sitting and daily life practice, simply taking note of whether experience is pleasant, unpleasant, or neither-pleasant-nor-unpleasant. You might also consider where the feeling tone resides – the object? The mind? Check it out.
Part 1 of a 2-part series on Vedana
The definition of “feeling tone” in Buddhism is deceptively simple: It is the quality of a given experience of being pleasant, unpleasant, or neither-unpleasant-nor-pleasant. When we first hear it, we may almost shrug. So what?
The Buddha placed tremendous importance on this apparently simple quality. It is one of the four foundations of mindfulness – broad areas of experience through which the mind can establish awareness of the present moment and gain liberating insight. It is one of the five aggregates – aspects of experience with which we tend to identify (and hence create a self). It is the condition in the sequence of dependent arising that leads to craving, the key support for dukkha.
OK, but again, so what? Let’s unpack this unassuming factor that offers so much potential for our practice.
Feeling tone is a common translation of the Pāli word vedanā. Some translators use “feeling,” but to Western minds this can sound like emotion, which is a more complex phenomenon. Feeling tone is simple, immediate, and direct. Every experience, through any of the six senses, has a feeling tone. It is not that there are three distinct types, but more of a spectrum with pleasant and unpleasant on either end, and a range in the middle that is not quite either.
Another translation is “sensation,” which begins to point toward our experience of vedanā: It is intimate, and it takes place in the mind right where the mind receives sensory input. The related verb vedeti is often used when a person “directly experiences” some phenomenon.
Vedanā is so close, we often don’t distinguish it. And yet it drives so much of our behavior. Without the light of awareness, we blindly seek the pleasant and move away from or avoid the unpleasant, much like an amoeba swims toward food and shrinks from acid or high heat. Or to use a different animal simile, we are like oxen led by the nose ring of feeling tone.
What starts as simple attraction or repulsion based on pleasant or unpleasant can rapidly blossom into complex patterns of suffering in the human mind. We feel a pain in our abdomen and begin to ruminate about our friend who had liver cancer, and then we imagine our own death and the suffering that will come to our family and children as a result. Or we are sitting peacefully on retreat, but find our mind launching into the detailed creation of a screenplay, complete with deep character development and profound pathos. All of this is possible because we didn’t simply notice “unpleasant” or “pleasant” at a key moment.
The Buddha said that feeling tone is the basis for views (DN 1, MN 18). All of our complex philosophizing and politicizing might actually come to down to wanting a certain feeling tone. This may not be easy to believe just from reading it; please have a look in your own mind. It is humbling to discover that in the end, what we crave is to feel a certain way.
Once we begin to see these connections, even intellectually, we might wonder how we missed something so crucial as vedanā, and also how to practice with it. There are a number of avenues, and the fruit it promises is vast.
The first step, of course, is to be able to see feeling tone. This is why it is a suitable area for the establishment of mindfulness (it is the second satipatthana). Feeling tone feels like the initial “gut” response to any experience: The “ahhh” of pleasant, the “ugh” of unpleasant, and the “ehhh” of neutral.
As we get more skilled at seeing it, we realize it is actually hard to track moment-to-moment. Vedanā can be subtle, and it changes rapidly. One approach is to use mindfulness of feeling tone in extreme cases of very pleasant or unpleasant experiences. This can be a good way to prevent the mind from getting thrown off-kilter. When the shower suddenly went cold one morning during a long retreat, my mind instinctively noted “unpleasant!” And then I could calmly respond.
A portion of the “chain” of dependent arising is: Contact, feeling tone, craving, clinging – which takes the mind on to suffering. Noticing feeling tone with clarity “cuts the chain” before craving ignites in the mind, leading to dukkha. Huge amounts of suffering can be avoided this way, for both ourselves and others.
This gives just a taste of the power of working with feeling tone in our practice. The next essay will delve into more of the subtlety of this important quality. Singling out vedanā as a distinct area of human experience and realm for insight practice was one of the Buddha’s brilliant methods.
For now, you might be inspired to incorporate awareness of feeling tone into your sitting and daily life practice, simply taking note of whether experience is pleasant, unpleasant, or neither-pleasant-nor-unpleasant. You might also consider where the feeling tone resides – the object? The mind? Check it out.