Am I my five khaṅdhas?

Dhammānupassanā Series

One day, the awakened nun Vajirā Bhikkhunī, having returned from Savatthi with her daily alms, having eaten and having set­tled down in the Blind Men’s Grove for the day’s abiding, was confronted by the infamous Māra, who tried to disrupt her samādhi by raising a thorny philosophical question: What is a liv­ing being (satta)? Her famous answer surprised and frustrated the Evil One:

Just as, with an assemblage of parts,
The word “chariot” is used,
So, when aggregates are present,
There’s the convention “a living being.” (SN 5.10)

Several centuries later, as recorded in the Questions of Milinda, the wise Buddhist monk Nāgasena won his first debate with the Bactrian Greek king Milinda by drawing on Vajirā’s analysis, pointing out that just as the king’s chariot is nei­ther axle, nor wheels, nor chassis, nor reins, nor yoke, nor something apart from them, Nāgasena is neither nails, nor teeth, nor skin or nor other parts of the body, nor any of the aggregates, nor something apart from them. No chariot can be found, no Nāgasena can be found, yet by convention we say “chariot” and “Nāgasena.”

The five aggregates – in Pali khaṅdha or in Sanskrit skaṅdha – are form (rūpa), feeling (vedanā), perception (saññā), fabrications (saṅkhārā) and consciousness (viññāṇa), products of cognitive analysis, as we will see. In later Buddhist thought Vajirā’s and Nāgasena’s analysis of the unsubstantiality of concepts like “char­iot” and “living being” was taken, not as laying bare the unsub­stantiality of concepts, but as an attempt to define these very con­cepts. Even in modern discourse, the five khaṅdhas are more of­ten than not defined as the five constituents of the person or psychophysical organism and sometimes translated “the five per­sonality factors,” rather than “the five aggregates.”

And so I wish to consider herewith: Are you or I five aggregates? And if so, are we really the five aggregates, or only as a matter of linguistic convention?

What are the five khaṅdhas, exactly?

The five khaṅdhas, as a matter of doctrine, appear to have a precedent in no pre-Buddhist tradition.[1] However, tradition tells us that the Buddha referred to this concept in his very first dis­course, “The Turning of the Wheel,” in explaining the first noble truth as follows:

“Birth is painful, aging is painful, illness is painful, death is painful; sorrow, lamentation, physical pain, unhappiness and distress are painful; union with what is disliked is painful; separation from what is liked is painful; not to get what one wants is painful; in brief, the five aggregates of attachment.” (SN 56.11)

Its occurrence here must have been puzzling for anyone not al­ready familiar with the concept. I suspect that either the expres­sion actually was already in common discourse, or a later redac­tor projected what had later become a fundamental concept in the Buddha’s teachings back into this early discourse. What we can infer from this first mention is that the five aggregates seem to encompass a wide swath of human experience and that they be­come a problem when attachment to them arises.

Given the foregoing analogy of a being and a chariot, we might expect each of the khaṅdhas to be a thing, a concrete part like an axle, a wheel, a chassis or a yoke, that can be assembled together to produce “me.” Again, the khaṅdhas in English and Pali are:

aggregate, khaṅdha
form, rūpa
feeling, vedanā
perception, saññā
fabrications, saṅkhārā
consciousness, viññāṇa

The names indicate cognitive capabilities. This might suggest that maybe the khaṅdhas are an array of mental faculties, functional units charged with interpreting the world. However, keep in mind that a khaṅdha itself is an aggregate, that is, a heap, a collection, an assembly, a pile or a bundle. The word khaṅdha unambigu­ously expresses plurality. Perception, for instance, cannot be a single something that perceives, but must rather be the heap, or stream, of perceptions produced by such an alleged perceiver, each of which arises, undergoes change and ceases. This makes sense in terms of the way we are instructed to contemplate the khaṅdhas:

Whatever kinds of form[…] there is, whether past, future or present, internal or external, gross or subtle, inferior or superior, far and near, a bhikkhu inspects it, investigates it, and it would appear to him to be void, hollow, insub­stantial. (SN 22.95)

This passage is a pericope, a fixed formula repeated with slight variations. The suttas are full of pericopes. In this passage the same formula is then repeated four times, but each time replacing “form” with one of the other khaṅdhas. I will use the notation “form[…]” to indicate substitution of each of the five khaṅdhas in turn, starting with “form” in a pericope.

Consciousness, in particular, has been vulnerable in other con­texts to interpretation as a fixed functional thing, rather than as a stream of comings and goings. One day the Buddha summoned the monk Sāti, who was reported to have a pernicious view, and he states his view:

“As I understand the Dhamma taught by the Blessed One, it is this same consciousness that runs and wanders through the round of rebirths, not another.”
“What is that consciousness, Sāti?”
“Venerable sir, it is that which speaks and feels and experiences here and there the result of good and bad actions.”
“Misguided man, to whom have you ever known me to teach the Dhamma in that way? Misguided man, have I not stated in many ways consciousness to be de­pendently arisen, since without a condition there is no origination of consciousness? (MN 38)

Consciousness manifests contingently, not as a fixed thing. If we take up the khaṅdhas as topics of practice, it is important to be clear what we are supposed to look for; few teachers seem to do this. If we eat bread, we eat a morsel at a time, not all bread and not the bakery. It is in the morsel that we experience taste and texture. Likewise we experience perception and the rest one morsel at a time as phenomena that arise contingently. Let me try out, just for the time being, new names that avoid the ambiguity between mental faculties and their products inherent in the con­ventional name.

form, appearances
feeling, valuations
perception, features
fabrications, structures
consciousness, configurations

The khaṅdhas represent different facets of the world of increas­ing depth or complexity. Think of these as building layers of physical reality, unfolding progressively: colors and shapes, af­fective tones, things and qualities, structural relations among things and complex configurations of things and relations, as they arise in our experience interdependently. Let’s discuss each of these khaṅdhas briefly in turn:

form. The Pali word rūpa means “form,” “shape” or “experi­ence,” and therefore has to do with the physical world as it arises in experience.[2] “Body” or “matter” therefore would be a poor translation, though it is a common assumption by students of the Dhamma that form refers in this context to the physical body as part of the “personality.” However, this would give us no way to refer to the sensual facets of insentient objects in experience, such as our chariot, objects that are not our body or someone else’s body.[3] Moreover, as will soon be apparent, a body is consti­tuted of all the khaṅdhas.

feeling. This is defined as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral and can be thought of as interest. This is the single affective instance among the khaṅdhas. Although the other khaṅdhas most typi­cally are aspects of physicality, the valuation that tags appear­ances, characteristics, structures and configurations plays a criti­cal role in determining where in the experiential situation con­sciousness and the other factors arise.

perception. This manifests as specific colors, recognizable shapes and other features of physical objects, at the level of words or concepts. An appearance can manifest as a face, for in­stance, or as a tree or as a dog, or as my dog, or as a chariot. Ex­perientially it is here that the designation “chariot” or “living be­ing” arises. Here we begin to see its insubstantiality. For instance, “chariot” might arise quite readily from a perception of a sound or motion.

fabrications. Structures are composites, things made out of pieces. From the parts, the whole emerges, for instance, from eyes and mouth, a face emerges, from conditions and goal a plan emerges. From sound and motion a chariot emerges. From attach­ment identification arises. Fabrications represent choices of inter­pretation or execution, and so are volitional or karmic in nature. This lends particular importance to fabrications, since this is where we learn to make better choices. Other khaṅdhas are actu­ally kinds of structures at different levels of complexity.

consciousness. An arising of consciousness can be far reaching in its discernment, insight, imagination and abstraction, generally pointing to something complex far beyond itself – notice that we are always conscious of something –, painting a picture of a real­ity often bordering on fantasy. The Buddha compares conscious­ness to a magic show.[4] It can see entire objects when only a tail or a tail fin is visible to perception, or tell us that objects ob­served at different times from different angles are the same ob­ject. It arises as an objective world “out there,” consisting of things and people, and convinces us that it is all real. It can even take shapes and colors flashing on a video screen and transplant us into a world of the remote past, as in a western movie, or into the future,as in a science fiction move, and make that world seem real. None of the other khaṅdhas exists without consciousness[5] – we wouldn’t know about them if they did.

Our experience is composed from the khaṅdhas, which present an unfolding of the experienced world, accumulating different facets of reality, level by level, element by element. The Buddha de­scribes the process with a metaphor:

“Suppose, bhikkhus, an artist or a painter, using dye or lac or turmeric or indigo or crimson, would create the figure of a man or a woman complete in all its features on a well-polished plank or wall or canvas. So too, when the uninstructed worldling produces anything, it is only form that he produces, only feeling that he produces, only per­ception that he produces, only fabrications that he pro­duces, only consciousness that he produces.” (SN 22.100)

The objects that arise layer by layer are insubstantial and com­posed of insubstantial elements, and therefore the objects are in­substantial. The Buddha makes the following analogies:

form, foam
feeling, a bubble
perception, a mirage
fabrications, a plantain tree (with no discernible core)
consciousness, a magic show

For each, he says, “it would appear to [the observer] to be void, hol­low, insubstantial.”[6] This is why a chariot or a living being, or person, are insubstantial, they are fabri­cated in our experiential world from insubstantial elements.

We live in two worlds, an internal (ajjhatta) subjective world of direct experience, and an external (bahiddhā) objective world world which we imagine to exist with or without us. Khaṅdhas pertain to the internal world and only to the internal world. When Ven. Varijā says, “When the aggregates are present, there’s the convention ‘a living being’,” she can only be referring to the composition of the being within internal experi­ence. When she breaks down the chariot into its component parts, she is speaking externally.[7]

It is critical that we recognize this distinction, for the Buddha pri­oritized the subjective world: It is the world in which suffering arises, it is the world in which we seek liberation; it is the world in which we immerse ourselves when we sit on the cushion, it is the world in which we awaken. Since this world is entirely of ex­perience, the question, “What exists?” does not apply, only the question “What arises under what circumstances?” Investigation of the external world is ontological, investigation of the internal is epistemological. The Buddha gives us alternative ways to view the world of experience, each highlighting different aspects. The main alternative is the sixfold (sense) sphere,[8] about which he spoke,

In the six the world has arisen,
In the six it holds concourse.
In the six it has woes. (SN 1.70)

How do we practice the five khaṅdhas?

A doctrine is only as good as the practices it supports. The doc­trine of the khaṅdhas concerns our world of experience and the factors that arise in experience, which is to say phenomena (dhammas).[9] It presents these as material for investigation and in­sight, on and off the cushion, specifically suited for the fourth foundation of mindfulness, dhammānupassanā, or contemplation of phenomena.

The qualities of our experiential world that come forward with the khaṅdhas are its constructedness and its insubstantiality, for it is a fragile reality fabricated in small cognitive increments, cogni­tive morsels. The Buddha applies a common formula to approach investigation of the khaṅdhas, that is, in terms of gratification, danger, and escape.

The gratification (assāda) of the khaṅdhas is the pleasure and joy dependent on khaṅdhas.

The danger (ādīnava) is that the khaṅdhas are imperma­nent, suffering and subject to change.

The escape (nissaraṇa) is the removal of desire and lust for the khaṅdhas.[10]

The first expresses where we begin in our practice, the second ex­amines how the first creates problems for us in terms of the salvific goals of practice, and the third is where we want to be in our practice. The Buddha stated with regard to this formula,

“So long as I did not directly know the gratification, the danger and the escape in the case of the five aggregates of attachment, I did not claim to have awakened.” (SN 22.27)

Let me take these up in order.

Gratification. Our job here is to examine how pleasure and joy tend to come up around the khaṅdhas and moreover how these lead to attachment (upādāna), which in turn involves identifica­tion, appropriation and even the arising of pernicious views with regard to the khaṅdhas. Because the khaṅdhas really represented an unfolding of the experienced world, an accrual of different facets of reality, we might notice in our practice at which point in an unfolding experiences we crave or attach. For instance, I may be attached to, and even identify with, my chariot. What aspects am I attached to, or do I identify with? If it is the shine of the chrome trimmings, my attachment centers on form; if the quality of the wooden parts, the length of the yoke or the diameter of the wheels then on perception; if the many uses I find in my chariot and the prestige I gain by appearing on the byways and cross­roads in it, then on consciousness. We may discover that all of these play a role.

One of the functions of bringing such contemplations onto the cushion is that, as the mind stills, the experienced world folds up again, in particular retreating from consciousness, fabrications, perception, and so on, and, with that, the craving, attachment, identification and appropriation that accompany them. We begin to notice as the mind stills, the world undergoes a noticeable shift. This highlights the unsubstantiality of the khaṅdhas.

An oft-repeated formula shows how identification or appropria­tion occur within attachment.

“The uninstructed worldling sees form[…] as self, self as possessing form[…], self as in form[…], self as in form […].” (SN 22.1, etc.)

Khaṅdhas evoke attachments. The intersection of attachment and the khaṅdhas is called the aggregates of attachment or aggregates subject to attachment (upādānak-khaṅdha), a very important con­cept in the Buddha’s teaching. The nun Dhammadinna equated identity (sakkāya), one’s sense of self, exactly with the five aggre­gates of attachment (MN 44). Basically, you are what you attach to. But moreover, it is from attachment that specific views about identity – such as, “this I am, this is mine, this is my self” – arise (SN 24.2).

Danger. Contemplating the five aggregates of attachment, we ask, What is the problem here? Well, to begin with, the five ag­gregates of attachment are misery (SN 22.31), “form is burning, feeling is burning, perception is burning, fabrications are burning, consciousness is burning” (SN 22.61). What we attach to we want to be permanent, so when we discover it is impermanent we have a problem.

“The uninstructed worldling regards form[…] thus: ‘this is mine, this I am, this is my self.’ That form[…] of his changes and alters. With the change and alteration of form […], there arise in him sorrow, lamentation, pain, displea­sure and despair.” (SN 22.8)

Impermanence is why craving leads to suffering. I often advice students that if they acquire a new chariot, the best thing they can do for themselves is to take out a hammer and put a few dents in it. Get it over with. Otherwise they will make themselves miser­able in anticipation before the first dent even occurs. Moreover, an uninstructed worldling who identifies with or appropriates forms, feeling, perceptions, fabrications or instances of con­sciousness is tethered to samsara, like a dog leashed to a pole. (SN 22.98)

Escape. The escape is renunciation, loosening the grip of attach­ment to me and mine. Just as kids lose their lust and desire for a sandcastle – also insubstantial and yet initially a locus of great significance and attachment – then destroy and scatter it, so we must destroy our lust and desire for the khaṅdhas and destroy and scatter what we have built (SN 23.2). This metaphor is directly en­acted by Tibetan monks who painstakingly construct a mandala of colored sand over many days, then sweep it away upon com­pletion. The scattering begins with the contemplation of the dan­ger of the aggregates:

“Bhikkhus, a bhikkhu sees as impermanent form[…] which is actu­ally impermanent: that is his right view. See­ing rightly, he experi­ences revulsion. With the destruction of de­light comes the de­struction of lust; with the destruction of lust comes the destruction of delight. With the destruction of delight and lust the mind is liberated and is said to be well liberated.” (SN 22. 51)

Most of the practices of the Khaṅdhasamyutta involve prying up the identification with the khaṅdhas. These are recurring refrains:

“This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.”

“He does not consider form[…] as self, or self as possess­ing form […], or form[…] as in self, or self as in form[…].”

Sometimes it drills down into more detailed analyses:

“Bhikkhus, form[…] is nonself. For if, bhikkhus, form […] were self, this form[…] would not lead to affiction, and it would be possible to have it of form[…]: ‘Let my form […] be this; let my form[…] not be thus.’” (SN 22.59)

Understanding gratification, danger and escape, we hope for lib­eration:

“If, bhikkhus, a bhikkhu’s mind has become dispassionate towards form[…], it is liberated from the taints by non-at­tachment. By being liberated, it is steady; by being steady, it is content; by being content, he is not agitated. Being unagitated, he personally attains Nibbāna. He under­stands: ‘Destroyed is birth, the holy life has been lived, what had to be done has been done, there is no more for this state of being.’” (SN 22.45)

The practices around the khaṅdhas and the upādānak-khaṅdhas are clearly very important. We should note that there is no men­tion in the suttas of a practice of investigating the person by de­composing the person into five parts.[11] That is not the role of the khaṅdhas in the Buddha’s teaching. Quite the opposite: the prac­tice is to deny the relationship of the khaṅdhas to the self.

Am I my five khaṅdhas?

The quick answer is: Yes, But! … Let’s consider how a person, me, arises in your experiential world. First certain colors and shapes arise, largely maroon in color. A sense of foreboding en­sues. The features arise “monk,” “shaveling,” then the discern­ment “worthy of offerings” The features arise “wire-rimmed glasses,” “wry grin” and finally “Bhikkhu Cintita,” then the dis­cernment “maybe not so worthy of offerings.” At some point in this process you are convinced that I really exist out there in the external world, independent of your experience of me. In this way you fabricate me and furthermore take this insubstantial fab­rication as real. I am in your experiential world fabricated en­tirely of five khaṅdhas. However, I am no different in this sense from the book you left lying on your table, nor your chariot, for they are fabricated as well of five khandas. So there is no reason, so far, to call the khandas “personality factors”; they are “every­thing factors.”

Nonetheless, lest the reader be disappointed with this conclusion, there is another and very interesting way I might be my five khaṅdhas: I have a flip side, which your book and your car do not. You will discern that I am much like you, and that just as you live in an internal world of experience, I must similarly live in a internal world of experi­ence, compose of five khaṅdhas, in which ob­jects of my experience will arise, including you. Although once again they are not “personality fac­tors” per se, we can at least say that person­hood, as conventionally understood, relies on having a flip side born of khaṅdhas.

Rohitassa in a previous life had been a deva who could travel at astonishing speed. He had tried, by running for a hundred years, to reach the end of the world where he expected to encounter lib­eration, but without success. In this life he asked of the Buddha whether this quest was even possible. The Buddha replied,

“I say, friend, that by traveling one cannot know, see or reach that end of the world where one is not born, does not grow old and die, does not pass away and get reborn. Yet I say that without having reached the end of the world there is no making an end of suffering. It is in this fathom-long living body endowed with perception and mind that I proclaim the world, the origin of the world, the cessation of the world and the way leading to the cessation of the world.” (AN 4.45)

The Buddha’s enigmatic statement is resolved when we realize he has shifted his perspective from the conventional person to the flip-side of the person, where we have woes, where we practice and where we attain liberation.

The khaṅdhas answer the question, How do we experience? This is an epistemological question. The khaṅdhas provide insight into the constructed nature of the experiential world. We learn that if we imagine a personal identity this causes us problems, so our practice is to remind ourselves that the khaṅdhas are not our selves. Vajirā’s response to Māra was intended to emphasize the insubstantiality of that personal identity.

Early in Buddhist history the khaṅdhas were taken to answer an­other question, What is the person? The Buddha never attempted to answer this question.[12] Those who have, unfortunately, have generally been encouraged to offer an ontological answer in which the khaṅdhas are our selves. This resulted in a history of thorny metaphysical speculation,[13] eventuating in the idea of the “person” (S: pudgala, P: puggala) as a fully reified entity in the Pudgalavāda tradition.

As an afterthought, our understanding of the khaṅdhas allows us to gain insight into another puzzling issue. In the twelve links of dependent coarising, two of the early links are consciousness and name-and-form (nāma-rūpa) in a very tight relationship.[14] Now, the factors that constitute name-and-form (form, feeling, percep­tion, volition, contact, attention) plus consciousness come very close to the five khaṅdhas. Let us therefore take them as roughly equivalently as modeling our experiential world. Now, the puz­zling issue involves this passage:

“If consciousness were not to descend into the mother’s womb, would name-and-form take shape in the womb?” “No, Lord.”
“If the consciousness of a young boy or girl were to be cut off, would name-and-form grow up, develop and reach maturity?” “No, Lord.” (DN 15)

This passage has been use to justify a biological interpretation of a large segment of the twelve links for centuries, whereby name-and-form is equated with the person, or psychophysical organism, that acquires or sustains consciousness, much like the five khaṅdhas have generally been assumed to define the person dur­ing the same period.[15] However, there are several reasons why the biological interpretation cannot be right: First, the biological in­terpretation is speculative and rather uninteresting in itself, and provides no material for practice or insight. Second, the biologi­cal interpretation displaces a much more viable interpretation that lays bare the role of cognition in creating the subject-object dual­ity upon which craving depends, and that does provide material for practice and insight.[16] Finally, the role in biological concep­tion of consciousness makes consciousness into something sub­stantial that can move through space and enter the mother’s womb in order to run and wander through the round of rebirths, which seems suspiciously similar to Sāti’s pernicious view discussed earlier.[17]
The puzzle arises from confusing external and internal worlds. The person is clearly referred to twice in an objective sense, first as the occupant of the womb and then as the boy or girl. How­ever, the consciousness and the name-and-form, like the khaṅd­has, must refer to the flip side of the person, to the person’s inter­nal world, much as in the instructions to Rohitassa discussed above. This passage thereby serves to correlate processes in the internal world with external events as a means of demonstrating a causal relation between consciousness and name-and-form.

References

Bodhi, Bhikkhu, 1995 [1984], The Great Discourse on Causa­tion: the Mahānidāna Sutta and its commentaries, BPS.

Cintita, Bhikkhu, 2016, :Name and Form: nāmarūpa in the sut­tas,” online at

Gethin, Rupert, 1986, “The Five khaṅdhas: their treatment in the Nikāyas and Early Abhidhamma,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 14, 35-53.

Hamilton, Sue, 1996, Identity and Experience: the constitution of the human being according to early Buddhism, Luzac Oriental.

Hamilton, Sue, 2000, Early Buddhism: the I of the beholder, Routledge.

Ñāṇānanda, Ven. Katakurunde, 1974, The Magic of the Mind: an Exposition of the Kālakārāma Sutta, Buddhist Publication Soci­ety, also 2007, Dharma Grantha Mudrana Bharaya: Sri Lanka, also on-line.

Ñāṇānanda, Ven. Katakurunde, 2015, The Law of Dependent Arising: the Secret of Bondage and Release (draft), Vol. 1-4, Pathgulala Dharmagrantha Dharmasravana Mādhya Bhāraya (PDDMB), Sri Lanka.

Thanissaro, Bhikkhu, 2010, “The Five Aggregates: a study guide,” online at accesstoinsight.org.

 

Copyright 2018, Bhikkhu Cintita (John Dinsmore)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

1. Hamilton (2000, 70).

2. Gethin (1986, 36).

3. Gethin (1985, 40).

4. Ñāṇānanda (1974), based on the Kālakārāma Sutta (SN 22.95), explores this metaphor.

5. See SN 22.53.

6. SN 22.95.

7. Hamilton (1996, 194) states, “There is no suggestion in the Sutta Pitaka that the Buddha had any concern for ontological matters. … We don’t find information concerning what we are comprised of, but only how we work.” Gethin (1986, 49) points out furthermore that this particular way of constituting the person as five khaṅdhas would have no particular psycho­logical or logical merit.

8. The main source for the six-fold sphere is The Saḷāyatana Sutta (MN 137), also the Saḷāyatanasaṃyutta (SN 35).

9. A phenomenon in western philosophy is an object as experienced by the senses, as opposed to a noumenon, which is an object as it exists indepen­dent of the senses.

10. This formula is repeated throughout the Khaṅdhasaṃyutta (SN 22), for in­stance in SN 22.26, and in MN 108.

11. There is, by way of analogy, a practice of contemplating the body as being composed of thirty-two parts found in many suttas, such as the Sati­paṭṭhāna Sutta (MN 10).

12. Thanissaro (2010).

13. ibid.

14. For instance, see Ñāṇānanda (2015, vol. 2, 31-35).

15. On the biological interpretation see Bodhi (1995, 18).

16. Ñāṇānanda (2015), Cintita (2016).

17. The word commonly translated as “descends” in this passage can also mean “arises.”