Today we are discussing afflictions. Regardless of how mental factors (caitasika) are classified, for you they ultimately give rise to only two kinds of experience: “unpleasant” or “pleasant.” For example, wholesome mental factors may bring about good feelings, but they may also lead to unpleasant ones. Can wholesome mental factors produce unpleasant feelings? Yes, they can. For instance, the mental factor of non-attachment (non-greed) can originally bring a very pleasant experience—when you stop clinging to something, it is actually a kind of relaxation, and at that moment, it feels very comfortable. However, it is possible that something someone says may immediately change your mind.
For example, when two people are dating, there is strong attachment when they are together, and when they separate, the attachment disappears, bringing a sense of relief. But if someone then tells you, “Don’t leave them; it’s not good for you,” you may immediately give rise to craving once more. Or if they say that your sense of relief is actually selfishness, and you fail to examine it clearly, afflictions can flare up immediately. In other words, even wholesome mental factors can shift and give rise to afflictions.
There is another situation: if we do not understand their emptiness (śūnyatā), our attachment to wholesome mental factors can also generate afflictions. When wholesome mental factors arise, we should naturally feel happy; however, if we begin to cling to that happiness, and also cling to the mental factors that produce it, then all such attachment will ultimately lead to suffering. Therefore, Buddhism teaches us to cultivate emptiness in order to fundamentally resolve this problem.
In fact, regardless of what kind of mental factor it is—wholesome or unwholesome—we can only understand it at a relatively coarse level of consciousness; at the level of the ālayavijñāna, we do not understand it at all. Yet no matter how complex these mental factors are, they ultimately produce only three kinds of results: pleasant feeling (sukha), painful feeling (duḥkha), and neutral feeling (aduhkhasukha vedanā). For example, laziness and heedlessness may result in neutral feeling; greed, anger, ignorance, pride, and doubt may directly produce afflictions (painful feeling). Greed may temporarily bring pleasant feeling, but regardless of the mental factor, as long as there is attachment, it will ultimately lead to suffering.
A detailed discussion of the relationship between mental factors and the three types of feeling would be very complex and not clear-cut. However, as long as we resolve the issue of “feeling,” everything becomes the rest takes care of itself.
—Excerpted and compiled from The Arising and Remedies of Afflictions
This article is a preliminary translation draft and has not yet been reviewed or proofread by the speaker.
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