8. The Brahmavihāra of Loving Kindness

The path to the Discriminating Wisdom is via the Other Power practice of Loving Kindness

Photo by Yang on Unsplash

In my twenties, and again in recent years, I have been studying and practicing Buddhism in the context of the Triratna Buddhist Community, and I have gratefully made reference in these articles, to practice models that have been proposed by Urgyen Sanghakshita and his students. I need to emphasise therefore, that I am not in this series, pretending to be any sort of authority in regard to these models. On the contrary, the analysis offered, is merely a sharing of what I have learned from many years of contemplation of this valuable source material. I am only one of many who are engaged in the ongoing work of refining Buddhism’s English-language interpretations and conceptualisations – I feel drawn to contribute what I can to that collaboration.

Indeed this writing aspires to be an example of what Gendlin came to call ‘Thinking at the Edge’ – a complex idea in Gendlin’s thought, which essentially invites us to check the ‘rightness’ of our thinking in the felt-experience of the body. I regard this discipline of always ‘checking that our words fit our experience’ as foundational for Buddhist study. This is especially true of our situation as Western Buddhist practitioners, where most of the key terminology with which we are communicating is in a language that not our own. This particular article is highly relevant to this theme. In my last article, I spoke of the ‘describing’, or ‘objectifying’ function of mind. In this one I shall be addressing the opposite or complementary function of mind, which the Buddhist tradition calls samjñā – the subjective, evaluative, function of mind that we need to integrate with our thinking mind if we are to achieve true wisdom.

This is the eighth article in this series, and the second of five in which I am addressing each of the five Wisdoms that play such an important part in the Enlightenment teachings and the ‘mythic context’ of Vajrayāna Buddhism. You may wish to read from the first article in the ‘Buddha meets Gendlin’ series: Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Clear Space’. You may also wish to read the previous article: The Brahmavihāra of Equanimity.

The Evaluative Samjñā Skandha

On the opposite, western side of the mandala of the skandhas, from the rūpa skandha in the east, we have the evaluative and emotional samjñā skandha, by which we discern and make decisions via that subjective mode of discrimination that in English we sometimes call 'feeling'. I hesitate to use that word, because unfortunately we use that same word 'feeling' in English, both for the act of subjective discernment and evaluative discrimination, and for the act of 'sensing', as in 'attending to sensations'. The correct equivalent for the perceptual activity of sensing (or attending to the data of sensation) in the skandhas model, is vedanā. It is important to recognise that the 19th Century translators of the Pali Canon, while they were enthusiasts, were not meditators, and did not necessarily have a deep contemplative grasp on the skandhas model. Their translations are however, embraced all over the English speaking world with an attitude of profound faith – an understandable attitude, given that the skandhas are regarded as a high-level teaching that is not easily accessible to the un-Enlightened mind. I however, like many in English speaking world, believe that a more discerning and critical approach is more appropriate.

Unfortunately the Victorian translators rendering vedanā as 'feeling'. While ‘feeling’ is understandable translation, given that the sensations in the ‘internal’ sensory field of the body provide the perceptual sensory data on the basis of which we engage in the evaluative and discriminative cognitive process that we call discernment through ‘feeling’. Many students of Buddhism are now keenly aware that ‘sensation’ would have been a much better translation. The double meaning of the word 'feeling' in the English language has caused enormous confusion among the globally influential English-speaking Buddhist scholars – a confusion that appears to have spread beyond the English-speaking world. This confusion is a huge obstacle to rational discourse on the Buddha's skandhas model among English-speaking Buddhists. The translation has proved especially disastrous, because it has taken two completely distinct components of the cognitive-perceptual process – the sensing (vedanā) and evaluative (samjñā) components – and merged them; and in doing so they have profoundly undermined the intent of the Buddha’s model. I shall be talking further about this issue in my next article, where I shall address the ‘sensing’, or sensory, activity vedanā skandha in more detail.

Perhaps the greatest gift of Gendlin’s Focusing approach to the body-mind, in the context of Buddhist practice, is that it allows us to approach the phenomenology of the describing, sensing, evaluative, and intuitive-volitional functions of the mind with a profound freshness. By initially leaving the skandhas model behind entirely, when we first practice Focusing, we are able to subsequently return to the model with a much more critical discernment – and with an understanding of where English-speaking Buddhists have fallen into errors of translation and interpretation.

The differentiation of the evaluative function of mind that the Buddhist tradition calls samjñā goes hand-in-hand with our recognition of the evaluative brahmavihāra, which is mettā/maitri, or Loving Kindness. Evaluative discrimination and Loving Kindness, are intimately connected. When we learn to both release our egoic identification with the evaluative and discriminative mode of cognition that the Buddhist tradition calls samjñā, while also making it more conscious and causing it to become more differentiated (Gendlin's Focusing teaches us to do both of these things), we can start to use feeling as a mode of evaluative discrimination in a whole new way. This transformation can be extremely profound. Discovering within ourselves (beyond the egoic mind) a source of unconditional love (mettā/maitri, or Loving Kindness), we begin to glimpse what the Buddhist tradition means by the Discriminating Wisdom. By turning towards and familiarising ourselves with this source of contentment and benevolence, we begin to release the kleshas in the category of rāga – our compulsive cravings, our greed, our avoidance of emotional pain, and our obsessive, addictive seeking after things that cause only fleeting feelings of satisfaction, and cannot truly nourish us or serve life.

The polarity of the Mirror-Like Wisdom and the Discriminating Wisdom, and the corresponding polarity of rūpa and samjñā, can helpfully be thought of as akin to the polarity of 'reason' and 'emotion'. Buddhist psychology engages with this polarity in a very subtle way, as does the psychology of Gendlin's Focusing model. These two areas of cognitive function are in fact bound together in the mind – a fact borne out by the way the Buddhist tradition represents them as an East-West polarity in the mandala. Rūpa claims to be objective, but in reality is profoundly subjective, playing the role, as often as not, of rationalising our subjective evaluations (samjñā) – giving plausible mental 'form' to perceptions that are primarily shaped by our emotional reactions, and by the perspectives generated by our, always very individual and particular, accumulation of life experience. In the egoic mind, the rūpa skandha, as I explained in my previous article, rather than being a source of objectivity, has an objectifying function – giving an appearance of objectivity to the mind's subjective perceptions. So, samjñā, when we see it clearly, is recognised to be subjective, and for this reason is very often translated simply as 'perception'. It is that subjective, emotional, evaluative function of mind that continuously colours our perceptions – in effect shaping our perception by unconsciously drawing on emotional memories.

So the samjñā skandha refers to cognitive processes that draw on emotional memory and therefore profoundly shape perception. The mind is inherently subjective and emotional because of the activity of the samjñā skandha. While in the West we often tend to think of the mind in terms of its predominantly mental reactivity, the early Buddhist tradition more often acknowledged the emotional reactivity of the mind to be predominant. Hence, one of the main words for mind in the Buddhist tradition is citta (pronounced 'chitta') – a word which carries connotations of feeling and emotion, such as we find in the English words 'heart' or even 'soul'. We need to remember that the klesha category associated with the samjñā skandha is rāga – a word which is usually translated simply as 'craving', but which connotes strong emotion, and can even mean 'passion'. A further reinforcement of our awareness of the way that the mind is viewed in early Buddhism as predominantly emotional, comes when we remember that the Foundation of Mindfulness that is associated with the samjñā skandha is citta.

The confusion regarding the meaning of the rūpa skandha that I have outlined above, has understandably led to confusion in regard to the samjñā skandha also. If rūpa is rendered literalistically and incorrectly as the objective 'form' of things, rather that as the mentally 'objectifying' and 'form-creating' function of the mind, then it seems logical for some Buddhist thinkers and translators to make up for the lack that this creates in the resulting skandhas model – the lack of a mental, or conceptualising, or describing function of mind – by making a further error, by rendering the samjñā skandha as 'thought'. A common example of this that many will be familiar with, is in Phillip Kaplau's wonderfully chantable and poetic translation of the Heart Sutra (from the original Chinese) – a translation that I love despite its errors.

Those that are familiar with Phillip Kaplau's pared-down translation of the Heart Sutra will remember the dramatic description of Bodhisattva Āvālokiteshvāra's recognition of "the emptiness of all five skandhas":

Form is only emptiness,
Emptiness only form.
Feeling, Thought and Choice,
Consciousness itself,
Are the same as this.

While these lines have a very appealing poetic 'flow' and even a 'ring of truth', and they serve to evoke this profound mythic moment for us, they are technically inaccurate as a translation of the five skandhas – they are not intended to provide an accurate and comprehensive synopsis of the Buddha's subtle 'process description' of reality. While it works – I might even say really works – as poetry, it is just not a great translation. Indeed it is not even intended to be a great translation, and probably cannot be improved. It seems likely, that even the greatest Buddhist poet writing in English, could not render the depth and complexity of the Buddha's five skandhas teaching in a short stanza of poetry like this. 'Form' however, as I have explained in my previous article, is a confusing and inaccurate translation of the mental and 'form-creating' rūpa skandha function of mind; 'feeling' is not a good translation of the sensing and sensory vedanā skandha; 'thought' is a terrible translation of the emotional and subjectively evaluative samjñā skandha; and 'choice', while it has an appropriate simplicity and directness, cannot begin to express the Buddhist tradition's subtle notion of the 'empty' samskāras skandha – the intuitively recognised volitional energies of the mind.

Loving Kindness (mettā/maitri)

Experienced meditators are very familiar with the way our cultivation of, and embodiment of mettā/maitri, changes our perceptions. Metta/maitri allows us to more accurately recognise our world and the people in it. It allows us to see people without the distortions caused by the emotional nature of conscious and unconscious memory. As our emotional patterning is made conscious and released, and we more and more fully embody Loving Kindness (mettā/maitri), we increasingly recognise people as having an inherent beauty and an inherent value. Similarly, the discipline of Focusing teaches us to experientially track and deeply explore the currents of feeling (samjñā) that are shaping our perception. By acknowledging the way our emotional history shapes the currents of feeling in our mind, and by recognising both the complex sensory felt-experience (vedanā) of how we carry these evaluations in our body, and the volitional components (not-wanting and wanting), or samskaras, associated with them, we are able to cleanse ourselves of the emotional kleshas that are clouding our perception. As samjñā is seen through, and begins to evolve towards Loving Kindness and the Discriminating Wisdom, it becomes a mode of increasingly fine subjective judgement – a mode of cognition that is akin to what we can call aesthetic judgement.

The Buddhist tradition tells us that the kleshas of the 'craving' category (rāga) lead to rebirth in the Preta Realm, the Realm of the pitiful and insatiable Hungry Ghosts. Whereas the samjñā skandha, as it manifests in the egoic mind, is subjective and reactive, and often deeply conditioned and emotional in its subjective perceptions and cravings; the Discriminating Wisdom is unconditional. In essence, the Discriminating Wisdom is a mode of perception and judgement that is informed by unconditional love (mettā/maitri) – the capacity to be warmly and unconditionally present, to give unconditional value to everything in our experience within, and every person that we encounter without. Its perception and its capacity for attention and for loving relationship is no longer subject to emotional memory, and therefore uncontaminated by craving and attachment. This is what the Buddhist tradition means by mettā/maitri, or Loving Kindness – personified in the mandala by Amitābha and Pandaravārsini. Eugene Gendlin has much to teach us about the transformative power of this unconditionally valuing and warmly relational attention toward everything arising in our experience – it was, I think we can say, the most foundational characteristic of the Mindfulness practice that he called Focusing.

The Preta Realm - artist unknown

The curious archetypal imagery of the pretas, of addictive beings who are drawn to externals in their world that have no value, while being alienated from their internal emotional connection to their own unconditional value, deserves more attention than I can give it here. I would like however, to acknowledge that the archetypal Preta Realm is telling us that our alienation from mettā/maitri is a collective process. We grow up in, and are immersed all our lives in, a world-view that tells us that our value and our well-being are dependent on externals – we are taught to ignore the nourishing and guiding power of the unconditional love that is perhaps the most fundamental feature of the dharmic reality.

Without that internal connection to mettā/maitri, it is difficult for us to grow toward true individuality, since we are left always looking for value outside of ourselves, through a sense of ‘belonging’ in our relationships with 'the group'; or looking to be 'given value' by significant others; or attempting to 'gain value' by associating with idealised others in our spiritual community; or desperately trying to change ourselves in order to become more valuable and loveable in our own eyes, and in the view of others. Obviously, these are not entirely negative processes, but we need to bring a deep Mindfulness to them, such as may be cultivated, I believe, through Gendlin’s Focusing dyad practice – a practice that brings dis-identification from, and therefore deep critical awareness of, our emotional inner world, and of our habitual styles of relating. In my experience, this evaluative, emotional and relational aspect of Mindfulness, needs to go hand in hand with the practice of mettā/maitri on the path of the Discriminating Wisdom.

Our embodiment of the Discriminating Wisdom requires the healing of the 'internal' and 'external' aspects of the emotional and subjective dimension of mind that we call samjñā – an enormous and difficult task. Only by releasing the corresponding klesha category of craving (rāga) can we achieve a clarity of perception. Without going into too much detail here, I would like to distinguish the 'internal' and 'external' aspects of samjñā from each other. The 'internal' aspect of the evaluative samjñā skandha is related to the inner, or 'self-regarding', aspect of mettā/maitri (Loving Kindness). Just as the 'internal' aspect of mettā/maitri involves a relationship of receptivity to the mahabrahmavihāra of mettā/maitri, so too does the 'internal' aspect of samjñā involve a receptive relationship with our accumulation of evaluative and emotional experience.

It is my conviction, and the Tibetan Buddhist tradition believes this too, that this accumulation of evaluative and emotional experience is not just an accumulation of memories within the nervous system, but is an energetic phenomena that science has yet to explain. The Tibetan tradition speaks of an Emotional Body – a layer within our somatic experience, in which an energetic residue, or energetic record, of our experiences is held, so that they continue to shape our perceptions. While Gendlin never speculated as to the origin, or storage location, of these traces of emotional memory, the experience of practicing Focusing certainly affirms the existence of a reservoir of these evaluative and emotional impressions such as the Tibetan tradition describes.

Focusing, can be enormously valuable in a Buddhist context because it in some ways serves us better than solitary meditation practice as a way of relating, in a very affirmative way, to this difficult subjective domain of emotional memory. Focusing dyads can provide a structured practice by which we can be supported to free our perception of these mostly unconscious processes, especially if we have an accumulation of emotional deprivation and trauma that is making solitary meditation difficult. Ultimately, the healing of the 'internal' aspect of samjñā arises, in my view, from establishing ourselves in self-mettā. The depth of self-mettā that we ultimately need however, only comes when we enter into an Other Power, or receptive, or 'self-surrender' relationship, with the mahabrahmavihāra of mettā/maitri. The recognition that Loving Kindness is a given – an inherent reality in the depths of the mind – changes everything. Once we glimpse this primordial reality, and gain a confidence in it, we enter a new mental and emotional stability, and gain easy access to Presence – and enter a much more natural and easeful process of emotional healing.

The 'external' aspect of the evaluative samjñā skandha can be illuminated by comparing it with the 'external' aspect of mettā/maitri. A meditation practitioner who is resting 'as' the 'other-regarding' mettā/maitri, will experience a deep sense of valuing others, of valuing their wellbeing, and of wishing them happiness. In a similar way, the 'external' aspect of the evaluative samjñā skandha allows us to attune to the feeling life of others – to instinctively attend to their emotional states and attitudes. If we are habitually identified with the 'external' aspect of samjñā however, and therefore not using that function of mind in a conscious and balanced way, we will find it very difficult to access any degree of Presence in our meditation, or contentment in our lives, because we will be making our happiness dependent on external things, and on the wellbeing of those around us.

Photo by Maciej Pienczewski on Unsplash

To transform the functioning of the evaluative samjñā skandha, we need to be much more deeply open to feeling and emotion than we are generally used to in the West, and we need to feel in a much more detailed and conscious way. Becoming Mindful of samjñā is paradoxical, because it involves both stepping back out of identification with some aspects of feeling (where that identification is preventing feeling processes from unfolding); while also welcoming currents of feeling that we have not previously been willing to experience fully (where, in effect, we have become dissociated from some aspect of our feeling life). The essence of the Mindfulness of samjñā (or Mindfulness of citta) practice, from a Focusing point of view, is that we seek to come into a relationship with the emotional and evaluative (samjñā skandha) currents in the body-mind. By doing this we learn to also discern the way these are carried in the body as sensation (vedanā), and the way each current of feeling carries a volitional dimension or energetic direction (samskāras) – a fear or a desire, or an energy of not-wanting, or wanting. It is these energetic or volitional components of the mind that the Buddhist tradition calls the samskāras, which I shall be briefly outlining in a later article after talking a little more about the vedanā skandha in my next article.

© William Roy Parker

Consider reading the next article in the Buddha Meets Gendlin series: