Sensation

Trees are down all over the neighborhood due to Hurricane Dennis. As I drive around, my mind is aware of the fallen trees in a way that it never was when the tree was standing. Trees which my eyes certainly had perceived never really entered my consciousness until they fell and were considered of interst to my mind, which still ignores the other trees standing around their fallen neighbor.

Back during the June 18 Zen hike, our eyes took in countless appearances as we walked through the woods, from wildflowers to the trail ahead, but we immediately focused on the rattlesnake when we came across it on the path. The rattlesnake represented a form that could affect our continued existence, and therefore was perceived as "important," and our consciousness was then much more aware of the snake than of the wildflowers or the trail.

As I blogged back in my April 16 post, the Sanskrit word namarupa means name (namu) and form (rupa). Rupa refers to the things we know, namely the world of external objects, while namu refers to the means by which we know the things we know, namely the inside world. Division of reality into namarupa, therefore, is a division of reality into objective mind and subjective mind.

The Buddha began his analysis of subjective mind with sensation, or vedana. The word vedana is derived from vid, meaning "to know" or "to experience," and refers to our evaluation of form. Once one establishes the existence of form, sensation necessarily follows as the interface between namu and rupa, between inner mind and outer mind, although to call it an interface does not mean that it is separate.

Vedana looks at our experience as a process of evaluation. This is not the same as sensory input but rather the evaluation of that input, which the Buddha rarely described in any more detail than positive, negative or neutral. Suffering arises because of the mental habit of craving. Whenever an external object is experienced through the five physical senses or the sixth sense of mind, craving arises, and by exploring our minds, we find that between our experience of the external object and the mental reflex of craving is vedana, or sensation, our evaluation of the experience.

For the most part, our experiences are neutral, and therefore ignored. But certain experiences appear to satisfy a need or pose a danger ("there's a rattlesnake on the trail") and are classified accordingly. Therefore, sensation is not the passive collection of data from an outside world, but is the active sorting and grading of appearances and their transformation into objects according to categories supplied by our perception. Therefore, the immediate cause of the arising of craving is not something outside of us, but rather the sensations that occur within us.

In zazen, we allow all experiences to enter our consciousness without discrimination, be they positive, negative or neutral. In other words, we discard sensation, and perceive the world as it is, thusly, without classification of the experience. When this same mode of perception is turned inward, our true nature is revealed to us.