Week 4: Contact

Contact is defined as “the full sensing of the change in the sense faculty in accordance with pleasant or painful feelings occuring due to the meeting of object, sense faculty, and mental engagement.” The more words there are in the definition, the murky the meaning is to me. Acharya Sherab Gyaltsen’s teaching in Mind & Its World II states that this contact comes about through the meeting of the object, the sense faculty, and consciousness (ie: the “external” object, an apple, the eye sense faculty and its corresponding mind/consciousness). Contact is the basis for feeling to arise (feelings of happiness, suffering, or indifference).

Because contact is the result of the meeting of object, sense faculty, and consciousness, it can be classified into six categories, one for each sense faculty. The six categories of contact multiplied by the three types of feeling yields eighteen kinds of feeling that arise from contact.