What Is Feeling Pain?

When perceiving pain, four consciousnesses are functioning: the body consciousness, the mental consciousness, the manas, and the eighth consciousness. Only through the combined operation of these four consciousnesses can foot pain be perceived; the absence of any one renders it impossible. Specifically, the body consciousness and mental consciousness feel the pain, while the manas and the eighth consciousness do not feel pain. How can one distinguish these four consciousnesses? If one can differentiate them, one possesses great wisdom.

The sensation of pain belongs to the aggregate of feeling (vedana-skandha). Only when the aggregate of feeling is exhausted can one cease to feel pain. To cultivate to the exhaustion of the aggregate of feeling, one must attain the fourth dhyana or higher. After realizing the mind and seeing one's true nature, one must cultivate to the stage of a fourth-ground Bodhisattva or above. The Indian master of Xuanzang in the Consciousness-Only school still suffered from headaches so severe that he wished to leave, but the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara came to stop him, instructing him to first complete teaching Xuanzang the Consciousness-Only doctrine and then revealing to him the causes and effects from past lives. Do practitioners today exist who have attained the same level of wisdom as Xuanzang’s Indian master? Even if they have, they have not reached the stage of exhausting the aggregate of feeling, nor perhaps even the stage of exhausting the aggregate of form. How then can the absence of pain sensation be discussed?

Those without pain sensation fall into three categories: one is a karmic result obtained by birth, which vanishes when the merit is exhausted. Another is bestowed through the empowerment of other beings, which is even more impermanent and unreliable. Still another is attained through cultivating the four dhyanas and eight samadhis, which is also a conditioned, impermanent phenomenon. However, Bodhisattvas of the fourth ground and above can maintain it. Those who are not sages who have realized the mind and attained the fruit fundamentally cannot sustain it.