John Peacock

This paper will attempt to establish a framework for the term vedanā. Then it will present the range of the different feeling tones: pleasant, unpleasant and neutral. It will point out that ‘neutral’ feeling tone can be defined in different ways as either non-existing, indeterminate, indifference or the beginning of equanimity. Following this, vedanā will be discussed in the context of the five nāma factors: contact, feeling-tone, perception, intention and attention. This paper will suggest that mindfulness can be of benefit because it possibly gives rise to what is referred to in the early Pāli texts as ‘unwordly pleasant’ feeling tones. The paper concludes by making a connection between the practice of mindfulness of feeling-tones and the cultivation of the ethical precepts as an antidote to unskilful reactive patterns that arise in relation to vedana.

I this paper I am concerned with how our ethical worlds are built on circular reactive patterns fuelled by vedanā. These are ‘circular,’ it will be claimed, in the sense of being what could be referred to as both ‘feedback loops’ and ‘self reinforcing,’ - with all the ambiguity implied by the latter phrase. These are behavioral patterns that are observable in physical action, speech and intentional attitudes. It is how these give rise to and form intentional and dispositional attitudes, what we refer to as ‘character’ and how that character is formed through unexamined reactivity, that is of interest to us in relation to vedanā as the fundamental motivating dynamic behind this process. Nevertheless, the idea that the freedom that the Buddha directs us to is a freedom from enthrallment to reactive patterns based on vedanā and the development of a ‘skills’ base that allows for the development of character in a more positive and potentially more ethical direction. It is to the significance of ethics as the foremost and central task that the Buddha’s analysis and understanding of vedanā, it will be claimed, is directed.