Acharya Mahaprajna
Our body is the medium through we feel happiness and misery. That is a fact. But we shall have to go beyond it. It is necessary to know how and due to what reasons happiness and misery are experienced. Events are events. It brings neither happiness nor unhappiness by itself. When our consciousness is linked with that event, we experience happiness and misery. Any event, by itself, does not cause happiness and misery. Had it be so, no big surgery would be possible. The patient is given anaesthesia when a major surgery is to be done, or other methods are used to benumb the affected organ of the body. With that, the sensation of pain cannot reach the brain. Its passage is obstructed so that the patient does not experience pain. From this it is clear that one experiences happiness or unhappiness by any particular event, but it happens when the consciousness of our brain is linked with it.
Our body is merely the medium through which we experience happiness or unhappiness, but actually it is experienced by our consciousness. Therefore, we shall have to understand consciousness. We have to understand under what influence our consciousness experiences happiness and misery. When we think about this question, we come face to face with karma. There are eight karmas, one of which is the vedaniya karma' whose function is to influence consciousness. It causes the sensation of happiness and sensation of unhappiness. In a pleasant and favourable condition, one feels the sensation of happiness and in an unpleasant and unfavourable condition; one feels the sensation of unhappiness. This happens under the impact of vedaniya karma. This is the necessary material to cause that sensation for the vipaka. This is called no-karma. Karma and no-karma are distinct. No-karma is the auxiliary material of karma. It can become the cause of a disease. Whenever there is the sensation of asat vedaniya karma, a condition leading to the disease of the body and the mind is created. Then alone the asat vedaniya karma can yield the result, that is, can cause the sensation.
