A little history
Back in 1844, the eminent French Sanskritist Eugène Burnouf1 – a man who’s massive ‘Introduction à l’histoire du Bouddhisme Indien’ was read by Schelling, by Schopenhauer, by Emerson, Thoreau and Nietzsche – kindly quotes his German Indologist colleague Goldstücker, as explaining the term vedanā ‘as kind of irritability … only in a larger sense’.
For almost 150 years, Western Pali dictionaries and lexicographers have laconically suggested that the meaning of vedanā is either ‘sensation’ or ‘feeling’ – terms that (a) are neither exactly synonymous and (b) of which the latter is as notoriously vague as it is popular.
Based on both textual inquiry and practical contemplative exercise, my understanding is that both ‘sensation’ and ‘feeling’ are problematic translations and that neither of them does justice to what is meant by vedanā in Early Buddhist teachings. While we can ascertain fairly exactly what the term means in its Indian Buddhist context, we seem to lack an equivalent for it in West European languages. It is therefore suggested that we naturalise the Indian concept into our thinking – rather than continuing to wrestle it into one of its current, yet unsatisfactory renderings.
Encountering the above-mentioned translations of vedanā in meditative teachings we are left with a number of questions: ‘If’ vedanā is ‘sensation’ or ‘feeling’ – which of the two is more accurate? And indeed: what precisely do we mean in our own language when using either of these two terms? Could vedanā mean something else altogether? Are there correlates for what Buddhist texts call vedanā in Western thinking, and in Western Psychology?
‘Feeling’, the English term most translators2 have opted for when rendering vedanā, is a notorious semantic contortionist – morphing according to context into a bewildering display of denotations; these range from ‘mood’, ‘sentiency’, ‘subjective emotion’, ‘affect’, ‘perception’, ‘conscious state’, to ‘sense of touch’, ‘impression’ and occasionally even to ‘thought’; any of these meanings can be intended by the term ‘feeling’, as is borne out by examples easily found. Any translator, unless they explicitly narrow the term down to a singular meaning, must in view of the sheer range of its applications consider ‘feeling’ as one of the worst possible candidates for rendering the Buddhist technical vedanā since all the different English meanings will invariably be conflated with the Buddhist concept the term purports to translate.
In view of vedanā’s use in the Pali texts, the term ‘sensation’ is similarly problematic. If a sensation is ‘an impression produced by impulses conveyed by an afferent nerve to the sensorium’ – so a standard medical definition3 – then such an impulse is rather the precursor of vedanā, rather than vedanā proper, and would, in Buddhist terms, be part of the process called ‘contact’ (phassa) or, more precisely, ‘a tangible’ (phoṭṭhabba). While the contemplation of bodily tangibles and somatic experiences is central to the practice of establishing mindfulness, such practices have their own place in the Satipaṭṭhāna schema under the heading of contemplation of body (kāyanānupassanā), from which the contemplation of feeling-tones (vedanā) are explicitly differentiated.
Likewise misleading seems the equation of vedanā with feeling’s close relative ‘emotion’ – a term without exact equivalent in early Buddhist psychology. Emotions invariably involve affective and volitional aspects. The closest we come to this Western notion in Buddhist Teachings is the third dimension of Satipaṭṭhāna-exercises, the ‘contemplation of mind-states’ (cittānupassanā), which indeed covers conative and affective dimensions of experience. But then, these too, are explicitly distinguished from the practice of contemplating vedanā.
Given the old texts’ recurrent suggestion to understand vedanā as a single mental evaluative process forming three possible – and mutually exclusive – reactions to mental and physical stimuli as either pleasant, unpleasant or neither-unpleasant-nor-pleasant, I render vedanā as ‘feeling-tone’ or, preferably, as ‘hedonic tone’, from Greek hēdonē for ‘pleasure’. This latter term is a psychological concept, in English usage since the late 19th4 century and apparently introduced as a translation of Wilhelm Wundt’s notion of ‘Gefühlston’, a concept he later elaborated into his three-tiered affect theory that still underpins many of today’s affect theories. The Oxford English Dictionary, identifies hedonic tone as ‘the degree of pleasantness or unpleasantness associated with an experience or state … that can range from extreme pleasure to extreme pain.’5 In choosing this term I am following a number of scholars who have used the notion of ‘hedonic tone’ since the early ‘60s of the last century to render vedanā, e.g. K.N. Jayatilleke, Padma De Silva and Ross Reat; many others have followed them in more recent years. 6
Admittedly, the prevalent translations of ‘feeling’ or ‘sensation’ would be a lot less awkward than ‘hedonic tone’. However, they are not just misleading – one construing vedanā into the affective tone of an experience (e.g. ‘feeling’, ‘emotion’); the other by identifying it with a felt somatic quality (‘sensation’): both, therefore, notably miss vedanā’s crucial piece – the mind’s evaluative response to experience on an axis of pleasure, indifference and displeasure.
In the following I will try to illustrate the meaning and function of the term vedanā in early Buddhist teachings by sampling a few key Pali sutta passages, hoping to clarify and to contextualise vedanā in psychological terms. I will stick mostly to sutta material to avoid getting bogged down in later doctrinal developments.
