This is an abbreviated version of a recent post on Bernat's Substack newsletter, Berni's dharma. We thank Bernat for his kind permission to repost it on the SBN website.

*********

Emotions. Let’s be honest, they’re a bit of a drag—and if you want to be free of them, you actually can, because they’re optional! The Buddha didn’t have them, neither did any of the Buddha’s contemporaries, and not even did ‘we’ a few centuries ago.

What I’m really talking about is the concept of ‘emotion’. We swim in it so much today that we forget how young it is. Just about 200 years ago, people spoke of passions, sentiments, affections… but not of emotions. There is no term in any classical Buddhist language that corresponds to ‘emotion’. It’s a modern concept, and other epochs and cultures have organised inner life using different categories. (For the nerds among you, here’s a paper on all this.)

Consider this: are feeling sad and feeling angry similar enough to be considered the same kind of thing and thus approached in the same way? I think early Buddhists would answer ‘absolutely not’. What do you think?

I will speak of this in the second session of my online course Feeling Your Way to Liberation which I’ll be teaching in May & June, in English for Bodhi College and in Spanish for Espai Sati. I don’t want to spoil too much (bad marketing, right?), but let me anticipate two things:

• While I’ve heard from many teachers and scholars (whom I respect a lot) that ‘feeling tone’ (vedanā) does not refer to emotions, I’m afraid that during my PhD I came to disagree with them: I think those two concepts overlap.
• Some dharma teachers explain the third foundation of mindfulness (satipaṭṭhāna) as being aware of emotions: I disagree as well, at least in part. The contemplation of mind (cittānupassanā) is about ethics.

How we structure our inner life makes a difference. Sometimes I’ve found it useful to put aside the habit of lumping most of what I feel under the umbrella term ‘emotion’ and adopt early Buddhist categories. That alternative way of thinking (and experiencing!) can be quite valuable and freeing. It’s true we cannot forget our cultural conditioning just like that, but learning an additional and complementary perspective can give us more tools to disentangle the mess that often happens ‘in here’. We can practice it in our meditations and apply it to our daily life.

I must confess this is also an experiment for me… I’ve reflected about it and, as I said, I’ve tried it in practice, but in a sense I will be doing the course myself as I teach it, together with those who sign up. It’s the first online course I do for Bodhi College on my own, so I hope there’ll be a good enough number of participants—personally I tend to prefer medium-sized groups. We’ll see!

To register for my online Bodhi College course, Feeling Your Way to Liberation, click here.