Does Karuna have a feeling tone?

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Hi,

Are there suttas discussing whether karuna has a feeling tone, and what it feels like if it does?

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Do you mean ‘feeling tone’ as in vedana (pleasant, painful or neutral)?

I would say that it is sukha vedana (pleasant).

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Hi @Pasanna ,

I am trying to understand what it feels like more specifically than pleasant or unpleasant. For example, the Vissudhimagga says that metta meditation can manifest as a bright warm glow or a boundless expansive cool feeling, and a third form I don’t recall at the moment.

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Hi,

Why not practice it and experience and know for yourself?

If you’re not yet aware of the ways to cultivate this, there are a number of videos available on the BSWA website and elsewhere.

Not being snarky here – just offering the happy news that you can experience the answer to your own question. :folded_hands:

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Hi @Jasudho ,

I do practice them myself as part of daily living. The reason I ask is because I am emotionally stunted due to autism/aphantasia paired with a tragic life and so I am unable to understand what most apparently common and basic emotions feel like. I didn’t even know what love, metta, sympathetic joy, or pride felt like until not too long ago when Buddhism helped unlock those feelings. I understand and can act on and express all of them as concepts, inclinations, and desires but not as they actually feel to people with functioning emotional capacity.

It makes it complicated to communicate because when discussing dharma people have a lot of questions about how things feel that I can’t always answer with specificity. It also causes a challenge when trying to meditate since I don’t known what the difference (emotionally speaking from the perspective of feeling) is between metta and karuna and so can’t be sure if I am doing it right or not.

I once saw a list of 108 emotions with descriptions of them in a Tibetan wiki but wanted to know if the Buddha ever described them himself in the EBT. I also couldn’t find that wiki again.

It’s ok if there isn’t one, I could probably search online for other sources but I prefer the Buddha’s teachings.

Thanks for the link, I will check it out.

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Maybe the similes of the sun might help. I saw them in a book by Venerable Anālayo Bhikkhu ‘Compassion and Emptimess’. Actually, maybe the book will help your study.

In these similes he explains
Metta is like the sun at midday, bright and shining on everything
Karuṅa is like the sunset after a warm day
Mudita is like a sunrise
Upekkha is like the sun reflecting off the full moon in a clear night sky.

Compassion has a similar quality of well wishing to metta but it is more complex due to the suffering of the being you are feeling it towards.

ETA link to where I shared these similes before.
Why does almost everyone teach the brahmaviharas wrong? - #8 by Pasanna

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Thanks @Pasanna . I think those similes will help. They seem to be a poetic mapping of an emotional experience which would make sense if experienced directly and then compared to the simile, so I will read that book.

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From MN62 we have the sentence:

Cultivate compassion. (karuna)
For when you cultivate compassion any cruelty(vihesā) is given up.

Thus, as a negative definition, we can imply that cultivating compassion creates a lack of feelings and actions connected with vihesā.

Digital Pāḡi Dictionary
vihesā

  1. fem. irritation; annoyance; trouble [vi + √his + *ā]
  2. fem. harm; cruelty; viciousness; brutality [vi + √his + *ā]
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Hi again,

Thank you for sharing – it helped to clarify the context of your question. :folded_hands:

In addition to the similes suggested by @Pasanna , I wonder if real-life similes may be of help.

Can you imagine (or maybe something like this has actually happened to you), seeing a child lost in a large store, crying for help? Are there any feelings associated with that – and if not, what is your intention in that setting? Is it to offer comfort and help to the child? If so, any internal connection like that, even thoughts of helping without affect, is compassion. And that can be your beneficial “version” of it.

Other imaginary or real life scenarios (similes, so to speak) might be helpful to connect, or map as you wrote, emotional experiences onto your compassionate thoughts and intentions.

Another possibility: do you feel any emotional/affective responses to music? If so, you could try pairing peaceful and gentle music to the similes and scenarios offered above.

Hope this is helpful. :folded_hands:

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I have benefitted as well from Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown. (It’s one of her most recent books and reflects an evolving appreciation of Buddhist thought, without calling it out as such.)

I think she defines ~100 emotions. For example, she covers these chapters:

  1. Places We Go When We’re Hurting – Anguish, Hopelessness, Despair, Grief

  2. Places We Go With Others – Compassion, Pity, Empathy, Sympathy, Boundaries, Comparative Suffering

  3. Places We Go When the Heart Is Open – Love, Lovelessness, Heartbreak, Trust, Self-Trust, Betrayal, Defensiveness, Flooding, Hurt

  4. Places We Go When Life Is Good – Joy, Happiness, Calm, Contentment, Gratitude, Foreboding Joy, Relief, Tranquility

Each of the individual emotions gets about two to three pages of content.

Clearly the dwelling or obsessing on sorrowful or other unwholesome states of mind/heart keeps us mired in dukkha. Potentially it reinforces the “precious self” that keeps us locked into a sense of self that’s out of proportion with reality (aka the Buddha’s teaching on “self”).

Her book is not meant to encourage that; it’s to give people some vocabulary to identify when these states of mind arise and how they present themselves. It’s different than the use of similes.

I’ve often wondered whether modernity ushered in whole generations of people who stopped reflecting each other’s humanness to one another.

Kind of like when the Dalai Lama reportedly said to a Western student, “What do you mean self-hatred? I’ve never thought about such a concept.”

Now, bereft of such humane vocabulary, we need to learn it again.

In my practice of mindfulness of vedanā, I make an extra effort to notice when feeling tone is absent. I try to do the same thing with noticing the presence or absence of certain emotions in different situations – by name – and, ultimately, why that might be.

Having more vocabulary to do that is essential to my practice and how I engage with others – I guess that’s what I’m saying and thank you for your wonderful question!

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Thanks @Jasudho

Regarding music, I can’t even tell if I like a song or not on any level other than intellectual so I never listened to much music other than for noise cancelling when working.

In situations where someone needs help I don’t have a feeling in the emotional sense, but there is a strong instinctive need to help. It’s more like a drive to action, maybe in certain situations there was an urgency to it, but otherwise I would categorize it as basically neutral. I can’t recall anything beyond that though, it’s like a paternal instinct to help in that situation whether it’s a child, an adult, or even an animal. I don’t feel much or any emotions from doing it either unless I intentionally generate the feeling of joy, otherwise it’s mostly a feeling of ease and knowing nothing else needs to be done. I don’t mind being that way, I’m just not sure if I’m understanding the emotional feeling aspect of compassion or not since when other people describe their feelings in those situations it’s completely different than my experience.

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Hi @BethL ,

Thanks for the recommendation, that seems like it may be exactly what I need. :slight_smile: When you are doing mindfulness of vedanā is that during meditation or when you’re operating throughout the day? Have you found it effective as a method for deeper stillness or is this one not meant to be used that way? These may also be answered in the other books recommended in this thread which I will read as well.

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Thanks @am7 ,

That is helpful. Is that sutta suggesting that karuna’s role is explicitly for the prevention and uprooting of the irritation based feelings? If so, is it not meant to be used meditatively in the same way that metta would be used? What I mean is that the suttas and Ajahn’s I like to watch are always talking about how metta can be used as a way to enter jahnas but now that I’m trying to recall I can’t every recall them mentioning that sympathetic joy and compassion can be used the same way when meditating.

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Seems to me that’s your legitimate experience of compassion!

How others experience it is their “version.” Others might try to describe it, but in some ways it’s like trying to describe a color to someone.

If you, as you wrote, also wish to intentionally generate a feeling of joy, that’s sounds skillful. But your compassionate intention is the most important aspect, as it will generate wholesome responses of body, speech, and mind. Bright kamma. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thanks @Jasudho!

That makes sense. While on this subject, I haven’t read the books mentioned in this thread yet but I am wondering if the standard feeling of joy is what sympathetic joy means but on behalf of someone else’s experience of joy?

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In some contexts, muditā, points to sympathetic joy that is experienced when noticing the happy, uplifting, wholesome experiences of others. Practicing and investigating it opens our mind to the possible presence of hindrances like jealousy or ill-will. If present, they can be noticed and let go, replacing them with metta and compassion for example.

And again, these can be the “versions” as you experience them, while noticing, as you wrote, your intentions to help. Good news!

In other contexts, it can be joy experienced in and of itself and as an experience in jhana, (pÄŤti).

You said you can intentionally bring forth joy, and that sounds wonderful.

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It’s my experience that a regular sitting meditation practice is necessary for recalling vedanā, with some ease, throughout the day.

(During walking meditation I only notice neutral vedanā. So I don’t really practice that part of mindfulness during walking.)

The four modes of mindfulness (including mindfulness of vedanā) progress to more stillness. Mindfulness prepares us for deep stillness and keeps company with us then. Many lay practitioners benefit from mindfulness without moving into concentrated states. (Like, some people really don’t want to :slightly_smiling_face:.)

Dwelling in the divine states – mettā, karuṇā, mudhitā, uppekhā – can be a way to move into a concentrated mind. Like Jasudho says, this can also be a gentle way of developing a genuine desire for everyone to be well.

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Thank you @Jasudho and @BethL I really appreciate your time and input. :folded_hands:

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Compassion (or karuṇā) does not have an unpleasant tone. Pity, on the other hand, which is a distorted form of compassion, does.

About the feeling tone of karuṇā, I haven’t found an explicit answer in the suttas. The only clue I have found that it may have a pleasant feeling tone (sukha vedanā) is in the Visuddhimagga, a non-canonical text from the 5th century. Although its authority is disputable, the explanation in this specific passage seems reasonable.

In summary, the text suggests that the first three brahmavihāras (mettā, karuṇā, and muditā) are imbued with joy, so they have a pleasant feeling (sukha vedanā) and can be used as a basis for the first three jhānas. However, they must be set aside for the fourth jhāna, which is characterized by equanimity, while upekkhā, with its neutral feeling, is more suitable for attaining it.

Chapter IX – The Divine Abidings – Equanimity

  1. Though they have a single characteristic in having a measureless scope, yet the first three are only of triple jhāna (…). Why? Because they are not dissociated from joy. But why are their aims not dissociated from joy? Because they are the escape from ill will, etc., which are originated by grief. But the last one belongs only to the remaining single jhāna. Why? Because it is associated with equanimous feeling. For the divine abiding of equanimity that occurs in the aspect of neutrality towards beings does not exist apart from equanimous [that is to say, neither painful-nor-pleasant] feeling.
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I’ve gotten hung up on this as well. Am I practicing metta or karuna right now? How do I know which is which? Do I have to think certain words to practice metta and certain other words to practice karuna? Should their feelings be very distinguishable? At a certain point, I stopped focusing on this hang-up. Both are wholesome states. I know I’m doing something right when the mind gets calmer and cools down, the body feels better and the usual pains their disappear or are not a problem, everything is more peaceful, easeful, lighter, mindfulness sharpens. Does it really matter at this point which brahmavihara generates these wholesome states? I may not have the wisdom to distinguish things clearly now but if I continue to develop the Path, things will become more clear. It’s less about being right in terms of “the correct answer” and more about being right in terms of the positive effects on the body and mind as they’re experienced in reality.

Mind you, it took many, many “bad” meditation sessions and mistakes to learn how to generate even inconsistently good results. Every person varies: their kamma, their life situation, how diligently they try to understand and practice Dhamma, how strong their attachments are, etc. So timeframes vary. But it’s 1000% worth the effort. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who regrets developing the brahmaviharas.

IME, YMMV, etc.

PS
I’d recommend Ajahn Sona’s book Bloom and his talks on the brahmaviharas. He gives a lot of excellent advice on them.

May you grow in Dhamma!

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