I think “feeling tone” captures it well. I have played around with phrases like “instinctive reaction”.
“Hedonic tone.”
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It’s worth noting that vedana applies to anything arising at the six sense bases, in other words all aspects of our experience. So you could say that vedana pervades experience.
"At Savatthi. “Monks, feeling born of eye-contact is inconstant, changeable, alterable. Feeling born of ear-contact… Feeling born of nose-contact… Feeling born of tongue-contact… Feeling born of body-contact… Feeling born of intellect-contact is inconstant, changeable, alterable.”
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn25/sn25.005.than.html
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And vinnana-vedana-sanna are always conjoined (MN 43), such that defining each one in a strictly separate way isn’t possible.
So, with any sense sphere (so, with any experience at all) there are always these three aggregates. This is why vedana as ‘experience’ is fully insufficient - it requires mentioning the other two, in order to actually get to the root of the term ‘experience’.
vinnana - vedana - sanna
awareness - hedonic tone - perception
EDIT: I mean, ‘feeling’ works, but its overlap with ‘emotion’ really militates against using it.
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I’m just writing something about this. A few points.
Vedanā as experience. Sorry, but this doesn’t work. Experience is what the khandhas produce collectively and vedanā is only a fragment of this. We need the word “experience” for the larger concept, as a translation, for example of paṭisamvedeti “he experiences”.
Vedanā as “hedonic tone”. Hedonic is from the Greek hēdonē “pleasure”. The term “hedonic tone” is used by psychologists to refer to our capacity to experience pleasure. Alongside hendonia or hedonoception we have “nociception” the perception of pain (from the Latin nocēre). Hedonic tone is not appropriate. Related terms “affective tone” and “feeling tone” are anachronistic (their use peaks in the 1920s and 1930s on Google’s ngram viewer) and nowadays they both explicitly refer to affect or emotions. And this is precisely what we wish to avoid.
“Feeling” is a verb that is used very vaguely in English. However if I say, to a modern person, that subjective experience consists of thoughts, emotions, and feelings, they know what I mean. We are unlikely to confuse emotions/feelings in this context. Feelings in this context applies precisely to things like pain and pleasure - sensations that are not from the five senses, are not emotions, and not thoughts. So in context, “feeling” is the best way of referring to pleasure and pain. In addition there is no other Pāli word that we might be tempted to translate as “feeling”.
We have to be clear that Pāli makes no such categorical distinction. Thoughts, emotions, and feelings are all one category: citta. We also need to be clear that the word vedanā does not denote dukkha, sukha, and adukkhamasukha. It denotes “something made known” (it derives from a past participle of vedeti, the causative voice of the verbal root √vid). So if you went to North Indian in 500 BC and started talking to non-Buddhists about vedanā in the sense that we use it, none of them would understand you. A native Prakrit speaker of that time would take vedanā to refer to some kind of revealed knowledge. And this is why the Pāli suttas have to explain what vedanā means. It is a word being used in a way that requires explanations, even in 500 BC.
Scholars are at a stalemate over this word, but only because we are focussed on semantics rather than pragmatics, and we are over-specifying the requirements for the translation. Semantically vedanā doesn’t mean vedanā either; it only means vedanā pragmatically or in usage. As Wittgenstein said, “Meaning is use.” Pragmatically, “feeling” is by the best translation of vedanā, even though it requires contextualisation.
Best Wishes
Jayaravaḥ
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What a curious thread!! :0)
I agree with friends @Nimal & @Martin that “experience” is too general for “vedana”, and that it can possibly and rightly be applicable to “anything” or to “the all”! Friends @samseva, @Pasanna, & @sabbamitta: I follow A. K. Warder in understanding vedana precisely as “emotion” rather than just “sensation”; since sensation is the brute result of “rupa” and “phassa” or contact. Vedana clearly refers to the emotional dimension of sensation but not the mere registering of sensorial data; and, it is only such emotional dimension that can be “accompanied by attachment or upadana”; we often forget that the five khandha are always described as “upadana khanda”!
Friend @Martin, “instinctive reaction” is precisely “kamma” !!
And just to confuse everyone even more … “experience” is one of my favourite translations rather of “bhava”!! 
Thank you
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But arahants still feel dukkha-vedana yet are free from negative emotions as I understand it. Cutting your foot on a rock is painful but it doesn’t have to be an emotional experience. How do you understand the relationship between, vedana, emotions, and the experience of arahants?
Hi @Polarbear. You have just showed how we easily forget that the teaching on the five khandha is a teaching predominantly on upadana or attachment, and not meant to represent some philosophy of mind. The arahant has definitely removed all five upadana khandha, Vedanupadanakhanda does no longer apply to him. And in various suttas the Buddha speaks about (“vedananirodha”), meaning the destruction of “emotional attachment” rather than sensation, since the latter is not possible even for an arahant as you mentioned. So the example you gave very much proves that vedana is emotion rather than the mere sensation. :0)
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My understanding is that the Buddha still experiences vedana, although without upadana:
The subduing of desire & passion, the abandoning of desire & passion for form: that is the escape from form.
"Whatever pleasure & joy arises dependent on feeling: that is the allure of feeling… MN 109
So the subduing of desire and passion is the escape from vedana, but not necessarily the ending of vedana itself.
I have heard that on one occasion the Blessed One was staying near Rajagaha at the Maddakucchi Deer Reserve. Now at that time his foot had been pierced by a stone sliver. Excruciating were the bodily feelings that developed within him — painful, fierce, sharp, wracking, repellent, disagreeable — but he endured them mindful, alert, & unperturbed. Having had his outer robe folded in four and laid out, he lay down on his right side in the lion’s posture, with one foot placed on top of the other, mindful & alert. - SN 1.38
Is your suggestion that arahants do not experience vedana at all?
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Also:
“If he feels a pleasant feeling, he understands: ‘It is impermanent’; he understands: ‘It is not held to’; he understands: ‘It is not delighted in.’ If he feels a painful feeling, he understands: ‘It is impermanent’; he understands: ‘It is not held to’; he understands: ‘It is not delighted in.’ If he feels a neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling, he understands: ‘It is impermanent’; he understands: ‘It is not held to’; he understands: ‘It is not delighted in.’
“If he feels a pleasant feeling, he feels it detached; if he feels a painful feeling, he feels it detached; if he feels a neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling, he feels it detached.
“When he feels a feeling terminating with the body, he understands: ‘I feel a feeling terminating with the body.’ When he feels a feeling terminating with life, he understands: ‘I feel a feeling terminating with life.’ He understands: ‘With the breakup of the body, following the exhaustion of life, all that is felt, not being delighted in, will become cool right here.’
“Just as, Assaji, an oil lamp burns in dependence on the oil and the wick, and with the exhaustion of the oil and the wick it is extinguished through lack of fuel, so too, Assaji, when a bhikkhu feels a feeling terminating with the body … terminating with life … He understands: ‘With the breakup of the body, following the exhaustion of life, all that is felt, not being delighted in, will become cool right here.’” - SuttaCentral
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Hi @Polarbear … The Buddha in many sutta speaks of the subduing of desire and passion, yes, indeed; and in many others, as I already mentioned, he also speaks of the subduing of vedana as well. For, tanha arises only because vedana arises as condition. And the destruction of tanha results, therfore, consequently, in vedananirodha. We cannot bring vedana to an end directly, but only through ending tanha. And it does not take one to be arahat to witness this very process in experience, but even a beginner is able to see it in themselves, enjoy it, and develop faith in Dhamma based on directly experiencing it by and for themselves. The less tanha goes, the less go emotional responses and impulses. Everything keeps getting better after that!!
What I’m saying is that arahants do not experience emotional attachments at all. So if you wish to understand vedana as emotion, then yes; if you understand it as sensation, then obviously no. It’s not impossible that vedana may refer to both in different contexts, but it always refers to emotion in the context of the pañcupadanakhanda - always. So that is what I’m suggesting. What I’m also suggesting is that the psychological significance of vedana appears in so far as it refers to emotion rather than just sensation, especially given that, when ever Buddha (or in this particular case ven. Sariputta too) wished to examine and explain sensation specifically, they mostly did so by talking about phassa and slayatana.
So to make it more acceptable to you (hopefully), arahat will recognise the emotional content of contact, but will not feel it as such; in just the same way as you can discern how someone else feels though you don’t experience that feeling yourself.
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I do not know any Pali so I am just curious to know if emotion and sensation are not different shades of feeling. Are there Pali words for emotion and sensation?.
With Metta
Hi @Nimal … well … neither Pali nor English are so clear on these lexical matters. Both feeling and sensation can be understood as descriptions of the mere registering of sensorial input; that’s actually why I prefer “emotion”, since it unmistakably points to something beyond contact, something psychological, which is the point of the teaching on the upadanakhandha. Same in Pali: we have a multiplicity of words which actually have neither exact nor consistent meaning, such as vedana, and also “citta”, which is often a reference to emotion as well but can be a reference to about anything of mental or psychological nature. So there’s no hidden key in the midst of that lexical pile, and unfortunately stuff like that you cannot pin down scholastically! I have found Dhamma to be evidently apparent in experience, and hidden in language!!
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I appreciate you taking the time to explain your understanding bhante, but I must admit I’ve always heard it presented that vedana is more basic than emotion so I still tend towards that explanation.
I think we agree wholly or at least in part on the freedom of the arahant from negative emotions but that they have bodily feelings that will register as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, hence the Buddha resting his back when it ached, but we simply disagree on where we place that understanding in the context of the Buddha’s words.
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@Polarbear … Of course!! You know though there is no particular consensus on these issues, you could say however that only a minority regards vedana in the way I do (in fact I know only of A. K. Warder and no other).
Note however that a certain consensus has arisen that even an arahat would experience pain, only without emotional suffering; I myself used to repeat that widespread view but I no longer believe it is sound. The Buddha “recognises” that his back is stimulated “thus”, but he does not “feel” uncomfortable. He stretches his back just the same, but not to remove a bad feeling, rather to remove a bodily or sensorial condition that naturally stimulates and summons the attention. It means that the absence of such bodily condition is “preferred”, for sure, but not because it feels bad, rather because attention is limited and is needed elsewhere apart from an aching back! This is the distinction between recognition of a state, and feeling it; a great difference, as I said earlier, just as recognising feelings in others without actually feeling them oneself. And that happens due to the realisation of anatta in experience, to its farthest possible extent. However that is only my position and in this case I have not come across anyone else who espouses it as well. Yet there is much in the suttas, and in life, which supports the position that even bodily pain is wholly transcendeable. Though admittedly in few occasions the Buddha is represented in the suttas (mahaparinibbana for example) as enduring great pain; yet I take these expressions by way of viewing Buddha’s experience from a mundane perspective, that is, how worldlings would have felt then, but not as a reference for the actual experience of a Buddha or an arahat.
In all cases, I can’t for my life see how is it even conceivable that upadana may arise with vedana if the latter did not necessarily involve emotion. But who knows . . .
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Bhante, according to your understanding is it the case that the arahant no longer experiences form?
I like what Gombrich has said about the upadana-khanda, that they are masses of fuel, implicit in the concept is the notion that the masses of fuel are burning with greed, hate, and delusion for the unawakened but for the arahant the fires have been extinguished and there is only that small remainder of fuel left (the cooled aggregates) in this life until there is nibbana without remainder at the “death” of the arahant.
No no, nothing like that!
Gombrich’s is very colorful and nice, doesn’t help though for practice!
Bhante, is it not the case that upadana may arise with form and yet it is conceivable that form does not necessarily involve emotion? To get to my point, if form can arise or at least persist without upadana then I don’t see how using the idea of upadana-khanda as an argument for translating vedana as emotion works. You might have another reason for thinking it should be translated so, but if form, apperception, and consciousness are part of the arahants experience then why not vedana?
Friend @Polarbear,
I’m afraid I can give no further explanation.
It is not easy to understand these matters. Let us strive on to augment our understanding of Dhamma and bring it to perfection. Respecting this matter, I shall say no more.
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Vid does not always have the meaning of “knowledge” in Vedic “Sanskrit” (VS). It also mean “to have the feel of”.
Vedana is an experience, as Ajahn Brahm rightly says. The experience of that “feel of”.
But it is not just the experience. Vedana is also accompanied by a wish to know more.
Sanna is an inquiry into that wish, that yields an assumption. It is usually called “perception”.
And Vinnana is the realized knowledge of that assumption (might it be correct or not).
I suppose that in the case of Buddhism, patisamvedi means, like in VS (pratisamvid), “an accurate knowledge of the particulars of anything”.
It occurs after the progression that is Vedana - Sanna - Vinnana.
Athough that last remark is purely speculative, the definitions of vedana, sanna and vinnana seems not so.
Patisamvedi is Vinnana that has attained a better knowledge of that “feel of”. Closer (prati = towards) to the true knowledge of that “feel of”. A more accurate Vinnana of the Vedana.