What Are Emotions? A Look from Classical Indian Philosophy

Imagine you’re sitting in class, and the teacher hands back a test. You got a D. Your stomach drops. Your face gets hot. You feel like you might cry—or maybe you want to throw the paper in the trash and pretend it never happened. Your friend next to you got an A, and they’re beaming. Same test. Same teacher. Completely different feelings.

Now here’s a strange question: what are those feelings, really? Are they something happening in your body? In your mind? Are they enemies of clear thinking, or part of it? And—this is the really weird one—could it be that all emotions, even the happy ones, are actually a kind of mistake?

Philosophers in classical India spent over a thousand years arguing about questions like these. Their answers are surprising—and sometimes unsettling—because they didn’t share many of our assumptions about what emotions even are.

The Problem with Feelings

Let’s start with the most radical idea you’ll encounter in this article: according to several major schools of Indian philosophy, every single emotion is a defect. Not just anger, jealousy, or fear—but also love, joy, and desire for happiness. All of them.

Why would anyone think that? To understand, we need to look at what these philosophers thought the ultimate goal of human life should be.

For many Indian philosophers, the highest aim wasn’t to be happy, or successful, or even to be a good person. It was liberation—getting free from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth (called saṃsāra) that they believed all living beings were trapped in. And the main thing keeping you trapped? Your own emotions.

Here’s how they saw it: when you feel pleasure, you naturally want more of it. When you feel pain, you try to avoid it. These desires attach you to the world—to people, to possessions, to your own body and sense of self. And attachment, they argued, is what keeps you coming back to be reborn again and again. Every time you feel pleasure and think “I want this,” you’re tightening the chains that bind you to an endless cycle of suffering.

This might sound extreme, but there’s something to it. Think about a time you really wanted something—a new game, a friendship, a success. When you got it, you felt great for a while, but then what? The feeling faded, and you started wanting something else. The pleasure never really lasts, and the wanting never really stops.

The Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika View: Emotions as Defects

One of the oldest and most systematic schools, called Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika (say “nyah-yah vy-sheh-shih-kah”), drew a sharp line between two kinds of mental stuff: cognitions (knowing or perceiving things) and feelings (pleasure, pain, attraction, aversion). They thought these were totally separate. You could have a cognition without any feeling, and you could have a feeling without any cognition.

But here’s the key move: they classified all feelings as doṣas—defects, flaws, or impurities. They divided them into three families:

Attraction (rāga): love, greed, selfishness
Aversion (dveṣa): anger, jealousy, resentment, hatred
Illusion (moha): confusion, pride, suspicion, carelessness

Notice that even love is in the first group. To these philosophers, love was just as much a problem as anger. Why? Because both make you cling to things. Both distort your ability to see the world clearly.

They thought the worst of the three was illusion, because without it the others couldn’t exist. You have to be under some kind of mistake already—thinking that something outside you can give you lasting happiness—before you feel attraction or aversion toward it. Get rid of the fundamental error, and the emotions would crumble on their own.

One of their texts puts it bluntly: ordinary pleasure should actually be seen as pain. Here’s the argument, in their words:

The ordinary person, addicted to pleasure, feels that there is nothing better than pleasure. When pleasure is attained, they feel happy and contented. Under the influence of illusion, they become attached to the pleasure and to the things that bring it. … And yet all these kinds of pain—birth, old age, disease, death, separation from pleasant things, unfulfilled desires—they regard as “pleasure.” … Such a person never escapes from the endless cycle of births and deaths.

So for the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika philosophers, emotions are obstacles to clear thinking, and clear thinking is what you need to realize you should want liberation instead of pleasure. But—and this is important—they didn’t think clear thinking was the goal. The goal was to get beyond thinking altogether. Even cognition itself had to eventually stop for liberation to happen.

The Sāṃkhya-Yoga View: Emotions and Thoughts Are Both the Problem

Another school, Sāṃkhya-Yoga (say “sahm-kyah yo-gah”), had a different starting point. They believed reality was made of two completely different things: pure consciousness (puruṣa) and primordial matter (prakṛti).

Now here’s where it gets interesting. In their view, everything mental—both your thoughts and your feelings—belongs to matter, not to consciousness. Your intellect, your sense of self, your memories, your emotions—all material. Pure consciousness is just … watching. It doesn’t think, doesn’t feel, doesn’t do anything. It’s just aware.

This means that when you think “I am sad” or “I am thinking about math homework,” you’re making a mistake. The real “you”—pure consciousness—isn’t sad and isn’t thinking. Those are just events happening in the material part of you. The confusion is thinking they’re yours.

This leads to a different picture of what’s wrong with emotions. For the Sāṃkhya-Yoga philosophers, emotions aren’t bad because they interfere with rational thought. They’re bad because they make you identify with your body and mind, when you should be realizing you’re actually something beyond both. And here’s the twist: rational thought itself is just as much of a problem. You have to get past thinking and feeling to reach liberation.

The Yoga Sūtras, a famous text from this tradition, lists five “afflictions” (kleśas) that keep you stuck: ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion, and fear of death. Notice that ignorance is listed first—again, it’s the root. But also notice that “egoism” is right there. The sense of “me” and “mine” is itself an affliction to be overcome.

The solution they proposed was a systematic practice—what we now call yoga—to strip away all the “colorings” from the mind. They used a beautiful metaphor: the mind gets “colored” by everything it knows and feels. To see clearly, you have to become transparent again. When the mind is finally empty of all content—no thoughts, no emotions, no sense of self—then pure consciousness can recognize itself for what it is.

The Buddhist View: Emotions as Part of a Chain

Buddhist philosophers had yet another approach. They famously denied that there was any permanent self at all. No soul, no unchanging “you” underneath your thoughts and feelings. Instead, there’s just a stream of momentary mental events—a “chain of cognitions”—that flows from one life to the next.

A Buddhist philosopher named Śāntarakṣita (say “shahn-tah-rahk-shee-tah”) asked a fascinating question: where do emotions like love and hatred come from? Babies seem to have them, but they haven’t had time to learn them in this life. Animals seem to have them too. So how did they get there?

His answer: they must come from previous lives. The chain of mental events is beginningless—there was no first thought, no first feeling. Each mental state causes the next one, stretching back forever.

To support this, he made an interesting argument about love and hatred: they’re different from ordinary perceptions. When you see something blue, the blueness is really out there in the world. But when you love someone, the “lovableness” isn’t necessarily in that person at all. Different people can feel completely different things about the same person. Two people can both see the same blue object and agree it’s blue, but one might feel love and the other hatred toward the same person.

This means love and hatred aren’t caused by external objects the way perceptions are. They have to come from somewhere else—from habits built up over countless previous lives. You’ve been learning to find certain things lovable or hateful for a very, very long time.

This is a genuinely weird and powerful idea. It suggests that your emotions might not be responses to the world at all—they might be projections of patterns you’ve carried for longer than you can imagine.

But here’s the most important difference between the Buddhist view and the others we’ve looked at: Buddhists didn’t think the problem was emotions versus thoughts. They thought some thoughts and some emotions were fine, while others were “afflictions” (kleśas) to be eliminated. The goal wasn’t emotion-free thinking. The goal was to be free of afflictions—and that included a lot of what we’d call “thinking” too.

Actually, the Buddhist concept of vijñāna (cognition, consciousness) includes both what we’d call thoughts and what we’d call feelings. There’s no neat separation. If you ask a Buddhist philosopher “are emotions different from cognitions?” they might look at you funny. The category doesn’t really exist in their system. They carve up the mind differently.

What Does This Mean for Us?

So here’s what we’ve found: classical Indian philosophers, across several different schools, almost all agreed that emotions were obstacles to the highest human goal. But they disagreed about why, and they disagreed about whether the alternative was pure rationality (it wasn’t—they all wanted to get beyond thinking too).

More surprisingly, they didn’t even have a word that maps neatly onto our word “emotion.” The categories we take for granted—“thinking” vs. “feeling,” “rational” vs. “emotional”—might not be universal. They might be just one way of carving up the mind, not the way.

This raises a question that still unsettles philosophers today: are our emotions really ours? Or are they more like weather patterns passing through? If you’re angry, is it “you” who is angry? Or is anger just happening, like a storm, and the mistake is thinking it belongs to you?

The Indian philosophers would say: identifying with your emotions—saying “I am angry” instead of “anger is present”—is the fundamental error. It creates a sense of self that clings and suffers. Liberation, whatever form it takes, starts with seeing emotions differently.

Maybe the goal isn’t to get rid of emotions. Maybe it’s to stop being tricked by them into thinking there’s a permanent “you” that needs to be satisfied.

Appendix A: Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
kleśa	A mental affliction that keeps you trapped in suffering; includes both emotions and mistaken beliefs
rāga	Attraction, love, or attachment—seen as a defect or affliction
dveṣa	Aversion, hatred, or dislike—another defect or affliction
doṣa	A defect or impurity of the mind, especially emotions
vijñāna	A broad term for mental events that includes both thoughts and feelings
ātman	The permanent self or soul that Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika philosophers believed in
puruṣa	Pure consciousness in Sāṃkhya-Yoga, which doesn’t think or feel
prakṛti	Primordial matter in Sāṃkhya-Yoga, which includes mind, thoughts, and emotions
liberation (mokṣa)	The ultimate goal: freedom from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth

Appendix B: Key People

Śāntarakṣita: An 8th-century Buddhist philosopher who argued that love and hatred must come from previous lives because they can’t be learned in this one
Patañjali: The author of the Yoga Sūtras, who described five afflictions that keep the mind from seeing clearly and proposed yoga as the way to remove them
The Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika philosophers: A school that thought emotions were defects that interfered with cognition and kept people attached to the world; they didn’t leave us individual names, but their collective ideas were influential for centuries

Appendix C: Things to Think About

If all emotions are defects that distort your thinking (as the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika philosophers thought), does that include love for your family? Can you love someone and still see them clearly?
The Sāṃkhya-Yoga philosophers thought your thoughts and feelings aren’t really “yours”—they’re just events in matter. What would change about how you live if you really believed that?
Śāntarakṣita argued that love and hatred must come from past lives because babies seem to have them without learning them. But there might be other explanations—like instincts, or brain development. Does his argument still work if you don’t believe in past lives?
None of these philosophers thought that emotion-free thinking was the goal. They all wanted to go beyond thinking and feeling. What would it even mean to exist without either?

Appendix D: Where This Shows Up

Every time you say “I’m so angry” or “I’m sad”: You’re identifying with an emotion as if it’s part of your permanent self. The Indian philosophers would say this habit is the root of suffering.
In debates about mental health: Some modern therapies, like mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, draw on Buddhist ideas about observing emotions without identifying with them.
In science fiction: Stories about uploading consciousness or creating artificial minds often wrestle with whether emotions are essential to intelligence or bugs to be fixed.
In arguments about free will: If thoughts and feelings just happen to you (as the Sāṃkhya-Yoga school claimed), then who’s doing the choosing? The question is still very much alive.