Is joy (pīti) a feeling (vedanā)? Perspectives from early Buddhism

Abstract

Different schools of systematic Buddhist thought disagree on whether joy (pīti) belongs to the bundle of feeling (vedanakkhandha) or to the bundle of conditioning factors (saṅkhārakkhandha). In this paper I suggest this discrepancy may stem from how different traditions solved a scholastic problem concerning the meditative states known as jhāna. Scholars have projected the Theravādin conception of pīti as a saṅkhāra back onto the suttas, interpreting it as a conative element, mostly intense or agitating, and bodily, none of which is apparent in canonical pīti. Instead, I argue we have grounds to read joy in the Pali suttas as a feeling (vedanā), and as roughly synonymous with happiness (somanassa). I base this on texts that show pīti and somanassa as interchangeable, therefore possibly pointing to the same experience; and on how their subtypes—domestic/renunciant (gehasita, nekkhammasita) for somanassa, carnal/spiritual (sāmisa, nirāmisa) for pīti—seem equivalent as well. These equivalences reveal how various early Buddhist practices have basically the same outcome in affectivehedonic terms, allowing us to see the underlying hedonic curve of that soteriology. But they also raise the question of why have different terms, which I explain with recourse to the parallelism between Buddhist pīti and Brahmanical ānanda.