What is resistance (patigha)?

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SarathW
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What is resistance (patigha)?

Post by SarathW »

What is resistance (patigha)?
:thinking:
“As the lamp consumes oil, the path realises Nibbana”
LXNDR
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Re: What is resistance (patigha)?

Post by LXNDR »

patigha

1. In an ethical sense, it means: 'repugnance', grudge, resentment, anger, and is a synonym of vyāpāda, 'ill-will' (s. nīvarana) and dosa, 'hate' (s. mūla). It is one of the proclivities (anusaya, q.v.).
2. '(Sense-) reaction'. Applied to five-sense cognition, p. occurs in the following contexts:
(a) as patigha-saññā, 'perception of sense-reaction', said to be absent in the immaterial absorptions (s. jhāna 5). Alternative renderings: resistance-perception, reflex-perception;
(b) as patigha-samphassa, '(mental) impression caused by 5fold sensorial reaction' (D. 15); s. phassa;
(c) as sappatigha-rūpa, 'reacting corporeality', and appatigha, 'not reacting', which is an Abhidhammic classification of corporeality, occurring in Dhs. 659, 1050. Sappatigha are called the physical sense-organs as reacting (or responding) to sense stimuli; and also the physical sense-objects as impinging (or making an impact) on the sense-organs. All other corporeality is appatigha, non-reacting and non-impinging. These 2 terms have been variously rendered as resistant and not, responding and not, with and without impact.
http://www.palikanon.com/english/wtb/n_r/patigha.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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DCM
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Re: What is resistance (patigha)?

Post by DCM »

Ven. Nanananda says in Nibbana- The Mind Stilled;

“"Where name and form
As well as resistance and the perception of form Are completely cut off,
It is there that the tangle gets snapped."
The reference here is to Nibbāna. It is there that the tangle is disen- tangled.
The coupling of name-and-form with patigha and rūpasaññā in this context, is significant. Here pa ptigha does not mean ‘repugnance’, but ‘resistance’. It is the resistance which comes as a reaction to inert matter. For instance, when one knocks against something in passing, one turns back to recognize it. Sense reaction is something like that.
The Buddha has said that the worldling is blind until at least the Dhamma-eye arises in him. So the blind worldling recognizes an object by the very resistance he experiences in knocking against that object.
Patigha and rūpasaññā form a pair. Patigha is that experience of resistance which comes by the knocking against an object, and rūpa- saññā, as perception of form, is the resulting recognition of that object. The perception is in terms of what is hard, soft, hot or cold. Out of such perceptions common to the blind worldlings, arises the conventional reality, the basis of which is the world.”

Is the generally accepted explanation?
chownah
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Re: What is resistance (patigha)?

Post by chownah »

Can someone bring some sutta references where this term is used?
chownah
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aflatun
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Re: What is resistance (patigha)?

Post by aflatun »

DN15

Contact

“It was said: ‘With mentality-materiality as condition there is contact.’ How that is so, Ānanda, should be understood in this way: If those qualities, traits, signs, and indicators through which there is a description of the mental body were all absent, would designation-contact be discerned in the material body?”

“Certainly not, venerable sir.”

“If those qualities, traits, signs, and indicators through which there is a description of the material body were all absent, would impingement-contact be discerned in the mental body?”

“Certainly not, venerable sir.”

“If those qualities, traits, signs, and indicators through which there is a description of the mental body and the material body were all absent, would either designation-contact or impingement-contact be discerned?”

“Certainly not, venerable sir.”

“If those qualities, traits, signs, and indicators through which there is a description of mentality-materiality were all absent, would contact be discerned?”

“Certainly not, venerable sir.”

“Therefore, Ānanda, this is the cause, source, origin, and condition for contact, namely, mentality-materiality.

patigha
"People often get too quick to say 'there's no self. There's no self...no self...no self.' There is self, there is focal point, its not yours. That's what not self is."

Ninoslav Ñāṇamoli
Senses and the Thought-1, 42:53

"Those who create constructs about the Buddha,
Who is beyond construction and without exhaustion,
Are thereby damaged by their constructs;
They fail to see the Thus-Gone.

That which is the nature of the Thus-Gone
Is also the nature of this world.
There is no nature of the Thus-Gone.
There is no nature of the world."

Nagarjuna
MMK XXII.15-16
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dylanj
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Re: What is resistance (patigha)?

Post by dylanj »

“It was said: ‘With name-form as condition there is contact.’ How that is so, Ānanda, should be understood in this way: If those qualities, traits, signs, and indicators through which there is a description of the name-group were all absent, would verbal impression be discerned in the form-group?”

“Certainly not, venerable sir.”

“If those qualities, traits, signs, and indicators through which there is a description of the form-group were all absent, would resistance impression be discerned in the name-group?”

“Certainly not, venerable sir.”

“If those qualities, traits, signs, and indicators through which there is a description of the name-group and the form-group were all absent, would either verbal impression or resistance impression be discerned?”

“Certainly not, venerable sir.”

“If those qualities, traits, signs, and indicators through which there is a description of name-form were all absent, would contact be discerned?”

“Certainly not, venerable sir.”

“Therefore, Ānanda, this is the cause, source, origin, and condition for contact, namely, name-form."
mahānidāna sutta
dīgha nikāya 15
Born, become, arisen – made, prepared, short-lived
Bonded by decay and death – a nest for sickness, perishable
Produced by seeking nutriment – not fit to take delight in


Departure from this is peaceful – beyond reasoning and enduring
Unborn, unarisen – free from sorrow and stain
Ceasing of all factors of suffering – stilling of all preparations is bliss
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mikenz66
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Re: What is resistance (patigha)?

Post by mikenz66 »

chownah wrote: Mon Apr 09, 2018 3:10 am Can someone bring some sutta references where this term is used?
chownah
https://suttacentral.net/sn1.23 has translations from Sujato and Bodhi
“Where name-and-form ceases,
Stops without remainder,
And also impingement and perception of form:
It is here this tangle is cut.”

https://suttacentral.net/sn1.23/en/bodhi#sc4
and impingement and perception of form:
Paṭighaṃ rūpasaññā ca,

https://suttacentral.net/sn1.23/en/sujato#4.3
Ven Nananda's discussion is in the first Nibbana Sermon:
http://seeingthroughthenet.net/wp-conte ... d_HTML.htm
Just search for "tangle".

:heart:
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aflatun
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Re: What is resistance (patigha)?

Post by aflatun »

I have to admit despite familiarity with various readings of these passages (Ven. N. Nanamoli, Nanananda, Sylvester, Sujato) I still find them incomprehensible. Providing Bhante Sujato's take just for reference (the bolded and underlined part makes me feel better ;))
Bhante Sujato wrote:Let us con­tinue the story of name & form in the specif­i­cally Buddhist con­text of de­pen­dent orig­i­na­tion. There, name & form is shown to be de­pen­dent on cog­ni­tion. This sug­gests that ‘name’ is a term for cer­tain men­tal func­tions ex­clu­sive of cog­ni­tion, while ‘form’ des­ig­nates phys­i­cal phe­nom­ena. There is a very in­ter­est­ing pas­sage in the Mahā Nidāna Sutta which high­lights the root mean­ing of ‘name’. I would there­fore con­sider this to be an early con­cep­tion of ‘name’. The pas­sage is ob­scure even in Pali and nearly in­com­pre­hen­si­ble in a lit­eral English trans­la­tion, so I para­phrase.

‘Name’ and ‘form’ are each shown to cor­re­late with a par­tic­u­lar kind of ‘con­tact’. Name cor­re­lates to ‘la­bel­ing con­tact’, while form cor­re­lates to ‘im­pact con­tact’. So let us have a look at this ‘con­tact’. In the nor­mal analy­sis of con­tact, it is said to be the co-operation of three fac­tors: the ex­ter­nal sense ob­ject (e.g. ‘im­age’), the in­ter­nal sense or­gan (e.g. ‘eye’), and the cor­re­spond­ing class of cog­ni­tion (e.g. ‘vi­sual cog­ni­tion’). In the case of the five phys­i­cal senses, then, the ‘im­pact con­tact’ would be the ‘im­pact’ of the ex­ter­nal sense ob­ject on the in­ter­nal sense or­gan – light ‘hit­ting’ the eye, or sound ‘hit­ting’ the ear. In the case of men­tal cog­ni­tion, we have the men­tal ob­jects (dham­mas), mano (usu­ally ren­dered ‘mind’), and mano -cog­ni­tion.

...

But we di­gress. To re­turn to the Mahā Nidāna Sutta, we now have form giv­ing rise to ‘im­pact con­tact’ con­sist­ing in the im­pact of ex­ter­nal sense ob­jects on the sense or­gans, and name, ap­pro­pri­ately enough, giv­ing rise to ‘la­bel­ing con­tact’ con­sist­ing in con­cep­tual pro­cess­ing of sense data. I am des­per­ately flail­ing about here in a prob­a­bly doomed at­tempt to avoid mak­ing this dis­cus­sion too tech­ni­cal. There are im­por­tant qual­i­fi­ca­tions to be made to my dis­cus­sion both above and be­low, but I hope that by sim­pli­fy­ing some­what I can clar­ify the out­lines with­out dis­tor­tion. We can see that ‘im­pact con­tact’ deals pri­mar­ily with re­ceiv­ing data from out­side, while ‘la­bel­ing con­tact’ deals pri­mar­ily with pro­cess­ing in­ner, con­cep­tual in­for­ma­tion. Thus the ear­lier, mys­ti­cal un­der­stand­ing of name & form re­ceives a strictly ra­tio­nal, psy­cho­log­i­cal treat­ment. Name & form are shown to be in­ter­de­pen­dent. If there were no name, there could be no la­bel­ing, i.e. no con­cep­tual pro­cess­ing of sen­sory ex­pe­ri­ence. If there were no form, there would be no aware­ness of the world out­side. Finally the pas­sage pro­ceeds by way of syn­the­sis to show that both of these processes are es­sen­tial as­pects of ‘con­tact’.

So far I have treated this analy­sis as gen­eral psy­chol­ogy. But the con­text, and else­where too, sug­gests that it may be ap­plied rather more specif­i­cally to the field of in­fant de­vel­op­ment. Thus we can see that with­out sen­sory stim­u­lus the infant’s mind would not de­velop past an un­dif­fer­en­ti­ated, ‘oceanic’ sub­con­scious, like a fe­tus in the womb. And with­out de­vel­op­ing con­cep­tual abil­i­ties one could not learn to as­sim­i­late and process sen­sory in­put in a mean­ing­ful and use­ful form.

But I have omit­ted the most im­por­tant as­pect of this pas­sage for un­der­stand­ing early Buddhist on­tol­ogy. Normally in de­pen­dent orig­i­na­tion, ex­is­tence is sim­ply de­scribed in terms of the ex­is­tence of the fac­tor it­self, as in the fa­mous for­mula: ‘This be­ing, that is…this not be­ing, that is not’. But our present pas­sage speaks, not of the ex­is­tence of, say, ‘name’, but of the ex­is­tence of ‘the fea­tures, prop­er­ties, signs, and sum­maries by which there is a con­cept of name’. If these ‘prop­er­ties’ are ab­sent, no ‘la­bel­ing con­tact’ re­gard­ing ‘form’ can be ‘found’. Conversely, if the ‘prop­er­ties’ by which there is a ‘con­cept’ of ‘form’ are ab­sent, no ‘im­pact con­tact’ re­gard­ing ‘name’ can be ‘found’.

This demon­strates in a most em­phatic and ex­plicit way that the ‘prop­er­ties’ by which phe­nom­ena are known are, for all Dhamma pur­poses, equiv­a­lent to the phe­nom­ena them­selves, since they per­form the iden­ti­cal func­tion in de­pen­dent orig­i­na­tion. We can­not dis­tin­guish be­tween a thing’s prop­er­ties and the thing it­self, since the la­bel we give a ‘thing’ is just a con­cept de­not­ing the ex­er­cise of cer­tain func­tions. To say a thing ‘ex­ists’ is to say it is ‘found’. And the very work­ings of ex­pe­ri­ence, the fun­da­men­tal struc­ture of in­for­ma­tion pro­cess­ing, is nec­es­sar­ily de­pen­dent on this con­cep­tual ap­pa­ra­tus. Without ‘la­bel­ing’, with­out the prop­er­ties by which a thing is ‘con­cep­tu­al­ized’, stim­u­lus, and hence the en­tire per­cep­tual process can­not work. Thus this pas­sage thor­oughly de­mol­ishes any at­tempt to wedge a di­vi­sion be­tween ‘ul­ti­mate re­al­ity’ and ‘con­ven­tional re­al­ity’. Wisdom does not con­sist in go­ing past con­ven­tion to the ul­ti­mate sub­stra­tum, but in un­der­stand­ing how con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing is in­her­ent in the cog­ni­tive process it­self. Hence the Buddha said that the ex­tent of con­cepts, lan­guage, and la­bel­ing is pre­cisely the do­main of wis­dom; that is, birth, age­ing, and death, cog­ni­tion to­gether with name & form.

Bhikkhu Bodhi, how­ever, reads this pas­sage in just the op­po­site way. For him, the men­tion of the ‘prop­er­ties’ im­plies that they are con­cep­tu­ally dis­tinct from the thing in & of it­self. But he is surely just read­ing a later agenda into an ear­lier teach­ing...
The Mystique of the Abhidhamma
"People often get too quick to say 'there's no self. There's no self...no self...no self.' There is self, there is focal point, its not yours. That's what not self is."

Ninoslav Ñāṇamoli
Senses and the Thought-1, 42:53

"Those who create constructs about the Buddha,
Who is beyond construction and without exhaustion,
Are thereby damaged by their constructs;
They fail to see the Thus-Gone.

That which is the nature of the Thus-Gone
Is also the nature of this world.
There is no nature of the Thus-Gone.
There is no nature of the world."

Nagarjuna
MMK XXII.15-16
DCM
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Re: What is resistance (patigha)?

Post by DCM »

Hi Aflatun, I’ve not read as much as you, you’ve probably seen it, but in case you missed it, the questions and answers at the back of ‘Meanings’ by Ven. N.Namaoli on Resistance and Desigantion (P416), offer a good explanation;

“Resistance and Designation (R&D) could be described using ‘behaviour’ and ‘appearance’ in the following manner:
—Those tokens... by which the name-body is described,—they being absent, would designation-contact appear in the matter-body...
—Those tokens... by matter-body is described,—they being absent would resistance-contact behave in name-body...
[You will notice the absence of the term ‘manifestation’. Cf. R&D, para. 1, where “manifestations of ‘designation’ and ‘resistance’” are said to be the problem].
Or you could simply say:
—Those tokens... by which the name-body is described,—they being absent, would designation contact the matter-body...
—Those tokens... by which the matter-body is described,—they
being absent would resistance contact name-body... Or the way you put it is also fine, with a slight change:
—He assumes that behaviour of this appearance is that which is
‘matter’.
—He assumes that appearance of this behaviour is that which is ‘name’.
Assuming that it is ‘this appearance’ that behaves, that because of which behaviour is there manifests in the name-body. What is that because of which behaviour is there? ‘Matter’ is that because of which behaviour is there. But, since ‘matter’ can only be known as ‘behaviour’ then it is correct to say that behaviour is that because of which behaviour is there; or “in behaviour there is only behaviour,” or even more concisely: behaviour behaves. Thus, in thinking that it is the appearance that behaves, that behaviour, that resistance, contacts the name-body (it is manifested in it).
Assuming that it is ‘this behaviour’ that appears, that because of which appearance is there manifests in the matter-body. What is that because of which appearance is there? ‘Name’ is that because of which appearance is there. But, since ‘name’ can only be known as ‘appearance’ then it is correct to say that appearance is that because of which appearance is there; or “in appearance there is only appearance”; or even more concisly: appearance appears. Thus, in thinking that it is the behaviour that appears, that appearance, that designation, contacts the matter-body (it is manifested in it).
Thus, behaviour behaves and appearance appears, or resistance resists and designation designates. In this way behaviour does not manifest in appearance and appearance does not manifest in behaviour. (Or behav- iour does not contact appearance, appearance does not contact behaviour.)“
justindesilva
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Re: What is resistance (patigha)?

Post by justindesilva »

patigha is not a simple subject. It turns out to be resistance in the mind arising with greed and ignorance. Patigha nimitta arising with greed and ignorance as of ayoniso manasikara ( inappropriate attention ) creates ' vyapada' or anger that can remain fixed through the journey of samsara. It is explained with Jataka stories of buddas former lives.
Abandoning and its effects of patigha is explained well in
Sallekha sutta. ( please refer to this sutta from internet) .
With metta.
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