Dalai Lama Foundation Study Circle Montreal

In Tibetan there is no word for “emotion.”
Bearing in mind that the fundamental goal of Buddhist practice is the achievement of nirvana, when you study the mind what you’re really concerned with is what specific mental states impede the accomplishment of that end. That’s what the six primary states and twenty derivative states (the unwholesome mental factors) all have in common. Some are emotions and some are not, but it doesn’t really matter. What’s important is they all share that common factor of being impediments.

In contrast, modern psychology does not have the aim of nirvana. My conjecture, in terms of trying to understand why the West places such a strong emphasis on identifying emotion, is that, going back to the Enlightenment, even as far back as Aquinas, there is an enormous priority placed on reason and intelligence. What can impede reason? Emotion.

You have two categories that are set in opposition to each other. The fact that there is a specific term for emotion in Western thought does not necessarily imply that there was a special emphasis placed on understanding the nature of emotion. Perhaps initially the motive for labeling something as emotion was to enhance reason by identifying something that is unreasonable, something that is irrational. (p.159)

–from Destructive Emotions: How Can We Overcome Them? A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama narrated by Daniel Goleman, foreword by the Dalai Lama

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