We spend our entire lives caught between pain and pleasure. Escaping the one and chasing the other is at the root of most, if not all, our activity, and this struggle may seem necessary to human life. But what if it’s not? What if we could fully feel our feelings, even extreme pain or pleasure, without being controlled by them? The Buddha not only thinks we can do so—he taught his disciples exactly how.
Welcome to SEEKER TO SEEKER! My name is Simeon, I have an MA in Buddhist Studies, and here I explore the wisdom traditions of the world. Today, we’ll look at one of the most powerful texts of early Buddhism, and by the end, we’ll have a practical guide on how to skilfully process our feelings. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by strong emotions, desires, or just plain old suffering, I think you’ll find much guidance in this teaching. I know I have.
Part I. An Unlearned Ordinary Person
Sallatha Sutta, a text that goes back over two millennia, begins with the Buddha posing a question to his followers:
Monks, an unlearned ordinary person feels pleasant, painful, and neutral feelings. So does a learned noble disciple. What, then, is the difference between the two?
Sallatha Sutta; SN 36.6
This is already a loaded question. First, the Buddha alludes to his definition of a “feeling”, that is, the perception of any experience as either pleasant, painful, or neutral. Your favourite ice-cream flavour brings you a pleasant feeling; stubbing your toe results in a painful feeling, and sitting on a chair that is neither comfortable nor uncomfortable feels neutral.
More importantly, the Buddha says that whether you’re an ordinary person or an accomplished monk, you still experience these feelings. (This will disappoint anyone who expects spiritual awakening to remove pain from their lives…) But then what distinguishes between those who have cultivated their minds and those who haven’t? The Buddha says:
When an unlearned ordinary person experiences painful physical feelings, they sorrow and wail … falling into confusion. They experience two feelings: physical and mental.
When they’re touched by painful feeling, they resist it. The underlying tendency for aversion toward painful feeling underlies that…
It’s like a person who is struck with an arrow, only to be struck with a second arrow. That person experiences the feeling of two arrows…
Sallatha Sutta; SN 36.6
Some commentators believe the Buddha is strictly speaking about bodily feelings here. Others, myself included, find it more useful to focus on the bodily aspect of any feeling whatsoever. Let me demonstrate how this reading can serve us.
A painful feeling arises within the body. The pain may not have a physical source—it may come from the hurtful words of somebody close—but it arises as some kind of physical discomfort in the chest, the throat, the stomach, or elsewhere. This is the first arrow we receive, courtesy of life, and we can call that “pain”. We don’t like pain, so we immediately start feeling miserable for feeling miserable. This, then, is the second arrow we receive, courtesy of ourselves, and we can call that “suffering”.
The first mistake ordinary people make is that we feel bad for feeling bad. But here’s one detail easy to overlook: the Buddha says that we resist pain due to an “underlying tendency for aversion toward painful feeling”. In other words, our resistance to pain is not a choice, but an unconscious, automatic reaction. And it leads us straight into our second mistake: we try to feel good.
The Buddha says:
When touched by painful feeling, [ordinary people] look forward to enjoying sensual pleasures. Why is that? Because [they don’t] understand any escape from painful feeling apart from sensual pleasures... [T]he underlying tendency to desire for pleasant feeling underlies that.
They don’t truly understand feelings’ origin, disappearance, gratification, drawback, and escape. The underlying tendency to ignorance about neutral feeling underlies that.
If they feel a pleasant feeling, they feel it attached. If they feel a painful feeling, they feel it attached. If they feel a neutral feeling, they feel it attached... They are attached to suffering, I say.
Sallatha Sutta; SN 36.6
These lines have been analysed and discussed for centuries, so don’t worry if they don’t sink in immediately. We’ll go over them slowly.
An ordinary person experiences a painful feeling. Her mind is distracted and unaware of its own mechanics, so it instinctively deepens the painful feeling with the added mental resistance to it. The pain, now fermented into suffering, is too much to bear, so the mind looks for an escape. And here we arrive at a curious but profound statement: ordinary people don’t know of any escape from suffering other than pleasure.
Different people react to suffering differently, of course. Some flee from their depression in the gym; others in pornography. Some fight boredom with books, others with Instagram. Some find satisfaction in helping people, and others in hurting people. Obviously, some methods are more constructive than others, but the underlying mechanism is the same. There is some painful feeling (like loneliness, sadness, anxiety, etc.), and we seek to replace it with a pleasurable feeling. We don’t do this consciously, but again due to an “underlying tendency to desire for pleasant feeling”. It’s just how we’re wired.
But having fled from suffering into pleasure, we become “attached” to the pleasant feeling. We lose all objectivity about it, mistaking it for salvation from suffering. Eating a slice of cheesecake turns into an obsession, smoking turns into a lifeline, and even a healthy habit like working out degenerates into an opiate, into a way out of feeling what we are actually feeling. Being attached to a pleasant feeling, we do not perceive it as a feeling, as something fleeting and unreliable. The Buddha puts it more precisely:
[Ordinary people] don’t truly understand feelings’ origin, disappearance, gratification, drawback, and escape. The underlying tendency to ignorance about neutral feeling underlies that.
Sallatha Sutta; SN 36.6
This statement is full of technical terms, and we’ll return to it. For now, notice that twist at the end. The Buddha has now demonstrated how ordinary people react compulsively to both pain and pleasure due to underlying—or unconscious—tendencies. This is bad news, because anything unconscious is terribly difficult to change through conscious effort. The least we can do is understand why we have these underlying tendencies and what feeds them. So, why do we resist pain and pursue pleasure?
Here is what I think the Buddha would answer, based on this sutta and on his teaching of dependent origination. We have an unhealthy relationship with pain and pleasure due to ignorance, but that ignorance arises long before we experience either pain or pleasure. It arises through our “ignore-ance” of neutral feelings, feelings that are neither painful nor pleasurable. Since neutral feelings are unremarkable, they are our best opportunity to study the nature of feeling objectively. And yet exactly because they are unremarkable, we mostly ignore them. For example, we don’t notice that we are bored; we simply reach for the phone, or we start ruminating about yesterday’s argument… This is how ignorance evolves into desire for pleasure and into aversion to pain. Thus, ignorance, desire, and aversion create a closed loop of suffering that imprisons most of us for our entire lives. It is easy to despair once we comprehend how efficiently we are producing our own suffering. As the Buddha points out:
… an unlearned ordinary person doesn’t understand any escape from painful feeling apart from sensual pleasures.
Sallatha Sutta; SN 36.6
But this is exactly the difference between an ordinary person and a skilful disciple of the Buddha. The latter understands how the trap works and how to get out of it.
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Part II. A Learned Noble Disciple
Let’s see how the Buddha describes a skilful person’s relationship with feeling:
When a learned noble disciple experiences painful physical feelings they don’t sorrow or wail or lament … They experience one feeling: physical, not mental.
It’s like a person who is struck with an arrow, but was not struck with a second arrow…
When they’re touched by painful feeling, they don’t resist it. There’s no underlying tendency for aversion toward painful feeling underlying that.
When touched by painful feeling they don’t look forward to enjoying sensual pleasures. Why is that? Because a learned noble disciple understands an escape from painful feeling apart from sensual pleasures … there’s no underlying tendency to desire for pleasant feeling underlying that.
They truly understand feelings’ origin, disappearance, gratification, drawback, and escape. There’s no underlying tendency to ignorance about neutral feeling underlying that.
If they feel a pleasant feeling, they feel it detached. If they feel a painful feeling, they feel it detached. If they feel a neutral feeling, they feel it detached… They are detached from suffering, I say.
Sallatha Sutta; SN 36.6
You’ll notice the Buddha mostly describes the mistakes a skilful person doesn’t make. He also mentions the three underlying tendencies—aversion to pain, desire for pleasure, and ignorance of neutral feeling—as inactive in skilful individuals. While that does sound nice, it doesn’t really say how we ourselves can process feelings this way. We get only a hint in one curious line: “a learned noble disciple understands an escape from painful feeling apart from sensual pleasures”. Now this may be the key we are missing.
Had we only this sutta to go on, the Buddha’s words could serve for all kinds of theories, interpretations, and spiritual mumbo jumbo. Thankfully, the whole collection of early Buddhist scripture has survived, and if a term shows up without elaboration in one sutta, we can find it defined in another.
To learn what the Buddha means by “escape from painful feeling apart from sensual pleasures”, let’s briefly move to one of the most memorable and touching scenes within the Canon. It is a childhood memory the Buddha recalls at a moment of profound desperation. At this point in his journey, he had mastered the techniques of the best gurus of his time, and had pushed himself almost to the point of death, but liberation was still out of reach. It was then, when his best efforts had failed him, that the memory came:
‘I recall that when my father the Sakyan was occupied, while I was sitting in the cool shade of a rose-apple tree, quite secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states, I entered upon and abided in the first jhāna…
Then, following on that memory, came the realisation: ‘That is indeed the path to enlightenment… I am not afraid of that pleasure since it has nothing to do with sensual pleasures and unwholesome states.’
Mahāsaccaka Sutta; MN 36
To understand this fascinating passage, we must know what the Pāli word jhāna means. Jhāna is the Buddha’s trademark meditation technique. It is meant to purify the mind through several ever-deepening stages of absorption, leading straight into enlightenment and liberation. The tradition refers to the different stages of it as “the first jhāna”, “the second jhāna”, and so on. If you want to learn more, you can watch my interview with Mugen Roshi, who is an authorised teacher of jhāna meditation.
But for all the apparent complexity of jhāna, the Buddha says he first experienced it by accident as a child. He had no teacher, he practised no technique, he knew no mantras or asanas… He was just a kid resting in the shade of a tree. And it was then that his mind naturally entered a pleasurable state which, in his own words, “has nothing to do with sensual pleasures and unwholesome states”.
Decades later, having become the greatest teacher of his age, the Buddha had complete understanding and mastery of meditation. By then, he could point out precisely where we can find that pleasure which is not of the senses:
And what is pleasure not of the flesh? There is the case where a monk — quite withdrawn from sensual pleasures, withdrawn from unskillful qualities — enters & remains in the first jhāna [or] the second jhāna [or] the third jhāna…
Niramisa Sutta; SN 36.31
I won’t go into the different stages of jhāna here, as this is a whole different discussion, but let me know in the comments if you want me to explore it in the future. For now, we are only searching for what the Buddha means by an “escape from painful feeling apart from sensual pleasures”—the key to facing pain without resistance.
Some interpreters identify this escape with the non-sensual pleasure of mental absorption; they identify it with jhāna. Now, it would be absurd to imagine that any time a monk stubs his toe, he sits down for a thirty-minute meditation! We must remember that the Buddha’s first experience of jhāna occurred when he was not “meditating” at all. He was “just sitting”, as they sometimes say in Zen. Instead of using the intimidating term jhāna, let’s use that image of a child at rest, which is familiar to all of us. We can then paraphrase the Buddha’s words like this:
When [skilful individuals] are touched by painful feeling, they don’t resist it… they don’t look forward to enjoying sensual pleasures. [They understand] an escape from painful feeling apart from sensual pleasures …
[Like children at rest, their minds unoccupied, they know of a kind of pleasure which is independent of the senses. Nourished by that pleasure, they do not resist painful feelings, they do not desire pleasurable feelings, and they do not ignore neutral feelings.]
Sallatha Sutta; SN 36.6
This is how a skilful individual escapes pain without the need to resist it or to compensate for it with pleasure. But this skilful kind of escape is different from how we normally imagine escape from pain.
When ordinary people get struck by one arrow (meaning pain), we immediately want to get rid of it. Our escape from pain is essentially the non-acceptance of pain; this, ironically, adds the second arrow (meaning suffering).
When a skilful individual gets struck by one arrow (pain), their escape actually consists of allowing the pain to be there. Accepting the arrow that’s struck them is what prevents the second arrow (suffering). So, when the Buddha speaks of “an escape from painful feeling apart from sensual pleasures”, he doesn’t mean some kind of trance state that makes us numb to pain. On the contrary, he is explicit in that a skilful individual does receive the first arrow. The Canon records that the Buddha himself often had backaches. (Meditating your way to nibbāna will do that...) We also know that he died in excruciating pain. So, the first arrow stays. Our very desire to get rid of the first arrow is the second arrow that strikes us.
The point of cultivating the mind is not to make it so dull that it doesn’t register pain. The Buddha’s approach is actually to make the mind even more sensitive, so that it gains access to a new source of support that makes desire, aversion, and ignorance unnecessary. And this doesn’t happen through some feat of willpower. It happens through developing insight into the nature of feelings, into the nature of reality itself. In the final part of this essay, let’s see what that insight is, and how we can apply it ourselves.
Part III. Liberating Insight
Let’s return to that passage from Sallatha Sutta where the Buddha describes how skilful individuals process feelings:
They truly understand feelings’ origin, disappearance, gratification, drawback, and escape…
If they feel a pleasant feeling, they feel it detached. If they feel a painful feeling, they feel it detached. If they feel a neutral feeling, they feel it detached…
They are detached from suffering, I say.
Sallatha Sutta; SN 36.6
The above is the Buddha’s summary of how we can skilfully process our feelings—painful, pleasurable, and neutral alike. The Buddha means something very specific by every term here, so let’s go over the passage slowly. We will do so using an example familiar to all of us, which is being hurt by the words of another.
Somebody, often a loved one, says something that wounds us. We may try to resist the hurt (pretending like we’re above it or it didn’t happen) or we may seek to compensate for it with pleasure (like the pleasure of saying something mean back or the pleasure of our favourite drink). If, however, we’ve been trained by the Buddha, we will be aware of “feelings’ origin, disappearance, gratification, drawback, and escape”. Let’s unpack this five-fold understanding.
The Origin of Feeling
Buddhist philosophy defines the origin of feeling as contact. (We’ve covered this in my essay on Dependent Origination.) The words of our loved one come into contact with our ears, and their meaning comes into contact with our mind: as a result, a painful feeling arises.
The Disappearance of Feeling
The disappearance of feeling comes with the disappearance of contact. Once we are no longer hearing our loved one’s words and once our mind is no longer dwelling on them, the painful feeling disappears, having lost its support.
Now, for the gratification, drawback, and escape from feeling, we can get clear definitions from another discourse of the Buddha, the Sattatthana Sutta.
The Gratification of Feeling
The gratification of feeling, he says, is pleasure and happiness. As naive as it may sound when you say it out loud, what we all really want is to feel good, and if possible—to feel good all the time. This obsession with pleasure and happiness makes the mind biased and impatient with feeling, clinging to it when it is pleasurable, resisting it when it is painful, and ignoring it when it is neutral.
The Drawback of Feeling
The drawback of feeling is that it is impermanent and constantly changing. Hence, any pleasure and happiness we might find in feeling is temporary, and our clinging to it always results in suffering.
The Escape from Feeling
As for the escape from feeling, here are the Buddha’s exact words:
Removing and giving up desire and greed for feeling: this is its escape.
Sattatthana Sutta; SN 22.57
We have escaped feeling when we have released our hold on it, when we no longer insist that it should be pleasant, or really that it should be anything other than what it presently is.
So, when somebody’s words hurt us, the skilful escape from the hurt is simply staying mindful of that feeling without any agenda to make it go away. Understanding the impermanence of feeling, we know the hurt will leave on its own; all we have to do is not get in the way. And we have the same attitude regardless of whether the words we hear are painful, pleasurable, or neutral. As the Buddha says:
If [skilful individuals] feel a pleasant feeling, they feel it detached. If they feel a painful feeling, they feel it detached. If they feel a neutral feeling, they feel it detached…
They are detached from suffering, I say.
Sallatha Sutta; SN 36.6
Remember, all of this becomes possible once we are familiar with that escape from feeling other than pleasure. That is, the ability of the mind to rest in self-sufficiency, needing and seeking no external sources of pleasure. This is the state of jhāna, which is, as we learned, nothing other than the childlike joy of a clear and restful mind.
Now, let’s see how we can put all we’ve learned into practice the next time we are overwhelmed by feeling.
Putting the Teaching into Practice
The key to everything we’ve covered is noticing. Noticing when a feeling arises and noticing it as a feeling. Noticing our tendency to resist and flee from painful feelings. Noticing our tendency to pursue and cling to pleasurable feelings. And also, noticing our tendency to ignore neutral feelings. The point is not to try to stop the mind’s reactions, which are automatic anyway. The point is rather to notice the mind in the act of desire, aversion, or ignorance. The noticing itself punctures the reactivity of the mind, and allows us to respond to feeling skilfully. It allows us to process our experience through the five-fold understanding.
We remember that feelings appear with the stimulation of our sense organs and disappear when our sense organs are no longer stimulated. Seeing them as such, we realise feelings are impersonal and impermanent. They are not us, and they do not belong to us. And as the Buddha says, letting go of what is not ours is for our long-term welfare and happiness.
We remember that the mind is wired to seek joy in feelings, but that any joy it finds there is temporary and leads to further craving and disappointment. We realise that the only true escape from this trap is to drop our preferences for feelings. Holding on to nothing, resisting nothing, we simply notice what arises.
All of this, of course, is easier said than done, and it is impossible if pleasure is the only escape from suffering at our disposal. To process feelings skilfully, we must cultivate the mind’s innate capacity for restful and awake presence. Centred in the non-sensual pleasure of jhāna, the mind is like a deeply rooted tree and can withstand the winds of pain, pleasure, and neutral feeling. Feelings persist for as long as they must, but the mind is no longer tethered to them. Pain does not give rise to suffering, pleasure does not give rise to desire, and neutral feelings do not give rise to ignorance. As the Buddha concludes in Sallatha Sutta:
[Regarding the skilful and well-instructed,]
Desirable things don’t disturb their mind,
nor are they repelled by the undesirable.
Both favoring and opposing
are cleared and ended, and are no more.
Sallatha Sutta; SN 36.6
Again, all of this happens not through harsh discipline, great effort, or through the dulling of the senses. It happens as a natural consequence of sustained noticing and allowing. Notice and allow whatever comes to come. Notice and allow whatever goes to go. Most importantly, remember that all that is of the nature to come is also of the nature to go. This is the path to freedom.
To see the Buddha’s insights into suffering in a different light, I invite you to my essay that puts them in dialogue with Nietzsche’s philosophy. Thank you for reading, and remember: What you seek is seeking you.
Simeon, October 2026
