Dear Marsha and all
I don't know much about Buddhist emotions, but I do think Dalai Lama
will scream if he sits on a hot stove too long.
As usual there are three aspects on the quality of emotions. Intensity
(Quantity), character (Pattern) and feeling (Value).
Think about the emotions corresponding to these situations of different
quality:
Experiencing a situation of unjustice is usually very intensive.
Everyone has his own key to our office but you.
Experiencing a malfunctioning system is usually easy to detect. The lock
doesn't work anyway.
Experiencing a solution of a problem is very positive. There is an open
door at the back of the house.
This shows that the quality of the signal from your emotional system is
useful to know.
Is the major signal a feeling of quantity, pattern or value? Is it a mix
of two or all three of them? Which is the dominating?
Just can't wait until monday.
Jan-Anders
This is from 'The Dalai Lama at MIT' by Anne Harrington and Arthur Zajonc.
Speaking is Georges Dreyfus:
"So what are some of the Buddhist ideas of emotions? Let me start with
a shocker; there are no Buddhist conceptions of emotions in the proper
sense of the term. By this statement I do not mean to deny that Buddhism
has a lot to say about the affective life, but I do mean to say that the
concept of emotion as we know it plays practically no role in the
tradidtional Indian and Tibetan Buddhist discussions of the mind. There is
no term in the traditional Buddhist vocabulary that resemebles our notion of
emotion, and our concept of emotion is not recognized indirectly either.
This may surprise, since the notion of emotion seems so self-evident and so
basic to our modern ways of understanding ourselves. We may imagine people
who do not have exactly the same emotional vocabulary as we do, but it seems
hard to conceive of people who do not understand a concept as fundamental as
that of emotion. And yet this seems to be the case for Buddhists, for in
traditional Indian and Tibetan Buddhist texts there does not seem to be any
word that even comes close to our concept of emotion.
This surprising and even shocking absence is certainly intriguing. It
shows that the idea of emotion, which seems self-evident, is not."
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