From Greg Williams (930904)
Bruce Nevin (Fri 93093 07:53:28 EDT)
Some of our friends in the eastern hemisphere have directed a lot of
systematic investigation to these and related questions, and, at least in
the literature written in Sanskrit (or its descendant, Pali), can be most
exhaustive in identifying and categorizing what is going on. Greg
Williams, do you have any references to works summarizing these findings
specifically with respect to different kinds of emotions and the error
signals that occasion them? Preferably a translation that lets it be
simply a report of disciplined investigation into the perceptual universe
rather than trying to make it an instance of category "religion" or
"mysticism".
I haven't been able to come up with any detailed ancient Eastern
cartographies and etiologies of emotional states in my own library,
which is heavily biased toward Buddhism (Mahayana Buddhism,
especially). There are extensive lists of categories of mental
phenomena, some of which we would deem "emotions," in certain early
Buddhist texts (e.g., a list of more than 70 such categories in one
ABHIDHARMA text), but so far as I am aware, none of the lists
associate particular causes (whether they be what we know as error
signals or otherwise) with particular mental phenomena. Rather, the
lists lump large numbers of "passions" (considered undesirable)
together as resulting from not (not surprisingly!) following the
Buddhist Path.
Perhaps there are some examples of what you are looking for in the
Hindu literature, of which I have little.
On the other hand, even to this day, Chinese medicine relies on a
complicated phenomenology relating organ "disharmonies" with well-
defined "emotions" (seven of them: joy, anger, sadness, grief,
pensiveness, fear, and fright). The causal processes here are viewed
as going both ways: from organ problems to emotional manifestations,
and vice versa. See, as an introduction, THE WEB THAT HAS NO WEAVER,
Ted J. Kaptchuk, Congdon & Weed, New York, 1983.
As ever,
Greg