Korean Journal of Buddhist Studies ISSN:1598-0642(Print) 불교학연구

Treating emotion as something that inherently “exists” tends to fix it as an unavoidable inner reality and thereby keeps individuals under its influence. By contrast, when emotion is understood as a process constituted through conditions and context, emotional experience can be reconsidered not as a necessity but as something transformable. This study examines the limitations of emotional essentialism and argues for the fluidity of emotion through a comparative analysis of contemporary constructivist theories of emotion and the early Buddhist doctrine of dependent arising (paṭiccasamuppāda).
Within constructivist accounts, emotion is constituted when the brain’s real-time processes of prediction and conceptualization render ongoing affective states meaningful through conceptual knowledge and linguistic categories, thereby forming specific emotion categories. The apparent sameness or continuity of emotion is stabilized through repeated categorization and the recurrent application of emotion concepts, a process often described as naming. Early Buddhism, by contrast, presents emotion as an impermanent phenomenon that arises, changes, and ceases within networks of dependent conditions. In Pāli sources, affective experience is described as a conditioned flow in which phassa, vedanā, saññā, saṅkhāra, and viññāṇa operate in mutual dependence; when representational processes, linguistic naming, and hypothetical designation converge, experience is discriminated and recognized as a particular emotion. The aggregate of formations (saṅkhāra-khandha) functions as a background condition within cognition, suggesting how patterned repetition can sustain and reinforce the appearance of emotional identity over time.
Both traditions thus understand emotion not as a fixed essence but as a constituted process shaped through categorization and naming, forming a significant point of convergence. Nevertheless, they diverge in emphasis: constructivist approaches focus on the possibility of emotional change through socio-cultural learning and the reconfiguration of conceptual systems, whereas early Buddhism identifies the appropriation of emotion as “I” and “mine” as the central problem that intensifies clinging and underscores the necessity of dismantling such identification. On this basis, the present study proposes emotion as a fluid mode of experience that arises and changes through conditions, interpretation, and conceptual categorization, thereby extending a non-reductionist and non-essentialist framework within which affective practice and ethical reflection may be grounded.