What the Buddha Felt

In a recent podcast episode of Tricycle Talks, I spoke with the scholar Maria Heim about her latest book, How to Feel: An Ancient Guide to Minding Our Emotions. It’s a collection of her translations of and commentary on the Pali teachings on vedana, or “feeling tone”—pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral sensation. Vedana, however, more broadly speaking, includes in its scope the full range of human emotion, and Heim highlights the liberative potential that Buddhist teachings on the psychology of emotion can offer. She pointed out that the term “emotion” is a relative latecomer in English, and that Western ideas of universal emotions contrast with Buddhism’s more fluid perspective. I had to wonder, then, whether what we feel might be quite different from what people felt, say, in the time of the Buddha, framed as our emotional lives are in a specific social and cultural context. As the anthropologist Franz Boas pointed out, even our understanding of our experience—emotional or otherwise—is filtered through the lens of our culture. The notion of any kind of “universal experience” is thrown into question, and the oft-heard phrase among Buddhists, “things as they are,” can become problematic if misunderstood. Short of enlightenment, the best we can say is that things are conditioned and impermanent.

Some may feel that this diminishes our experience or has, at least, set us adrift on an ocean of relativism. Indeed, the deconstructive zeal of past decades has led us to question all our conceits, institutional and otherwise, leaving us to wander amid the rubble of broken certainties. Yet for William Waldron, who teaches South Asian religious traditions at Middlebury College, the constructed nature of experience presents as much an opportunity as a challenge. In “The Case for the Conventional,” Waldron argues that recognizing the constructed nature of reality need not leave us in nihilistic despair. Rather than lamenting that the truth is not the truth, we can embrace what he calls “conventional truth”—the recognition that while nothing possesses unchanging essence, we still need functional tools to navigate our world.

The key insight is that not all constructs are created equal. As Waldron notes, “We need to be very intentional in the conventional categories we collectively construct.” Some constructs—like essentialist notions of race—create suffering and division. Others, developed through rigorous methods in various disciplines, help us understand ourselves and alleviate affliction. The challenge isn’t to escape construction but to construct wisely.

This applies equally to our emotional lives. Rather than seeing the culturally mediated nature of emotion as a limitation, we can view it as an invitation to cultivate more skillful ways of feeling and relating. The Buddha’s teachings on vedana weren’t describing fixed categories but offering practical methods for working with the conditioned nature of experience itself. The fact that our emotional vocabulary differs from that of the Buddha’s contemporaries—that we now speak of and even experience “emotions” in ways they didn’t—doesn’t invalidate these teachings but demonstrates their ongoing relevance. We can acknowledge that our emotional categories are constructed while still finding them meaningful. The goal isn’t to transcend all cultural conditioning but to become more conscious participants in the continual construction of our collective emotional reality.

However historically conditioned our understanding, the task remains the same: to work skillfully with the conditioned nature of experience itself, recognizing that how we construct our understanding, say, of emotion, shapes the very emotions we share.

–James Shaheen
Editor-in-Chief