Phassa

Meaning

Phassa is contact, the sixth link of dependent origination. It is the meeting of three components:

• a sense faculty
• an object of perception
• the corresponding consciousness

For example: eye plus form plus eye-consciousness gives eye-contact. In essence it marks the fact that experience has taken place: world and consciousness have touched, setting off a new thread in the chain of dependent origination.

The birth point of experience

Before contact there is only readiness: the six sense bases wait in standby. And the consciousnesses corresponding to those bases do not exist in advance - they arise precisely at the moment of contact and simultaneously with it.

Once contact appears, feeling tone arises (vedanā); out of feeling tone comes craving (taṇhā), then clinging (upādāna), becoming (bhava), and so on to suffering.

Contact is the nutriment, the fuel (āhāra) of feeling. Hence the practice of guarding the sense doors (indriya-saṁvara): as far as possible, not arranging unnecessary encounters between one’s sense faculties and objects whose outcome is unknown.

In MN 143, Sāriputta instructs the dying Anāthapiṇḍika: “I will not cling to the eye, and my consciousness will not be dependent on the eye. I will not cling to eye-contact… to the feeling born of eye-contact…” - and so through all six doors.

Contact is inevitable, clinging is optional

Contact is not a problem in itself. As long as there is a body and consciousness, contacts will keep happening - even an arahant’s eye meets forms.

For an untrained mind, however, contact is automatically followed by “tasty, not tasty, boring,” with craving and clinging as the result. For a trained mind, contact remains simply an event, a drop on a lotus petal: it touches and rolls off.

In practice

Contact can be noticed in ordinary life - in the moments when:

• the gaze catches on a shop window or a person
• the ear picks out one’s own name in someone else’s conversation
• the mind latches onto a sudden memory

Catching the moment of contact itself takes considerable training. But the whole chain can be reconstructed while the trail is warm: notice what carried you away, then work out where the touching occurred.