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3  |  The Varieties of Fabricated Experience

The term “fabrication” (saṅkhāra) refers both to intentional actions—mental or physical—as well as to the mental or physical conditions they shape. You can recognize something as fabricated when you can discern three characteristics in its behavior: its arising, its passing away, and its alteration while staying. Anything where the three opposite characteristics can be discerned—no arising, no passing away, and no alteration while staying—counts as unfabricated (AN 3:47–48).

This right here is one of the Buddha’s most radical premises. If every change you experience comes from fabrication, then you’re fabricating your experience in ways you don’t even realize. All that’s experienced in dependence on the six senses—the five physical senses plus the mind as the sixth—counts as fabrication: intentional actions and their results. This gives some idea of how subtle the goal will be, for it will have to lie totally outside of the six senses. It also indicates how important it is, in the course of the path, to become sensitive to the intentional actions that constitute fabrication. Otherwise, it’s easy to fall into the pitfall of not detecting your intentions, and so to mistake something fabricated for something that’s not.

The Buddha mentions fabrication in many different contexts, but two main frameworks dominate his analyses: one in terms of the five aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness; and the other in terms of bodily, verbal, and mental fabrication. Both frameworks deal first with the truths of suffering and its causes, but they also play a role in developing concentration, the heart of the path to the end of suffering. Here again, the Buddha shows his skill as a strategist. If you fabricate your experience under the influence of ignorance, your fabrications will have to lead to suffering. But if you fabricate with knowledge, they can form a path to suffering’s end. And the best way to bring knowledge to the processes of fabrication is to shape them deliberately into a state of mind that is still enough and sensitive enough to allow you to detect even extremely refined and subtle fabrications. That’s what the practice of concentration is for. From there, fabrications can be used to develop the insight that leads to dispassion even for concentration—and ultimately, even for the fabrications of insight itself. That’s when the mind is truly freed.

The five aggregates. The analysis into five aggregates comes primarily in the context of the first noble truth, where the Buddha’s short analysis of suffering is the five clinging-aggregates: the act of clinging to any of the five aggregates or any combination of the five. This context can be broken down into two main sub-contexts: discussions of how the mind interprets and elaborates on sensory experience in general, and discussions of how the mind creates one of the primary elements of becoming: its sense of self-identity.

The five aggregates can be defined as follows:

There’s something of an anomaly here in that the term “fabrication” covers all five aggregates and yet is listed as one of the five. The following passage helps to explain why. Its terminology is a little strange, but one point is clear: The mental act of fabrication shapes the actual experience of all physical and mental phenomena in the aggregates for a purpose.

This passage suggests that the act of fabrication is presented with potentials for any of the aggregates made available by past actions, and it acts for the sake of turning those potentials into the actual experience of those aggregates in the present. “Fabrication” as a name for one of the aggregates refers specifically to this mental process. As a term for all five aggregates, “fabrication” covers both the processes of fabrication and the fabricated aggregates—physical and mental—that result.

The purposeful role of fabrication is also clear in another passage that defines it in relation to the six sense media. This passage occurs in the larger context of a discussion defining all five aggregates:

So, putting these two definitions together, we can say that fabrication—as the fourth aggregate—provides the intentional, purposeful element in all the aggregates.

Here it’s important to note that aggregates are not just products of past activities. They themselves are also on-going activities in the present moment. SN 22:79 makes this point by defining the aggregates with verbs: Feelings are called feelings because they feel, perceptions are called perceptions because they perceive, and so on. Even form deforms.

In the course of acting in these ways, all five aggregates make use of other fabrications to create and condition still other fabrications, and they themselves then get used by other fabrications for a similar purpose, in an on-going causal process. For instance, in the standard description of dependent co-arising (SN 12:2), fabrications and intentions—the fourth aggregate—arise prior to the experience of sensory contact. In another description of the same principle, they arise in dependence on sensory contact (MN 28). In this way, they both interpret and elaborate on sensory contacts already present to awareness, as well as playing a role in shaping the next experience of sensory contacts.

A similar reciprocal relationship holds between aggregates and self-identity. On the one hand, self-identity can be built in any of four ways around any of the five aggregates:

Then, once any of these self-identity views are created around the aggregates, those views turn around and shape further aggregates. They do this by coloring the way in which sensory contact is received; from that reception, even more fabrications are brought into being.

As this last passage shows, once there is a sense of self based on ignorance, it colors all sensory experience with questions about your current and future states of becoming. Thinking in these terms is how craving for becoming and non-becoming come about.

The way out of this dilemma is first to learn how to master the processes of fabrication with knowledge. In this way, fabrications are brought out of the first noble truth into the fourth, as part of the path to the end of suffering.

And here again, the analysis of fabrications under the framework of the aggregates plays a role. As AN 9:36 points out, once you have mastered any of the four jhānas—the stages of right concentration in the path to the end of suffering—you should learn to see that each jhāna is composed of the five aggregates. For example, if the breath is your object of meditation, then the breath itself counts as form, the feelings of pleasure induced by being steadily alert to the breath count as feeling, the perceptions that anchor the mind on the breath count as perception, the intention to keep the breath in mind counts as fabrication, and awareness of all these processes counts as consciousness.

By deliberately fashioning these fabrications into the non-sensual bliss of jhāna, you’re in a position not only to see how jhāna is clearly a fabricated state but also to pass judgment on your attachments to sensual pleasures: Non-sensual bliss is much more reliable and blameless than sensual pleasures can ever be. This ability to see the fact of fabrication along with the value of alternative fabrications prepares the mind for the activities of insight, a topic we will explore further below.

But first we have to see how the Buddha’s alternative framework for analyzing fabrications—into bodily, verbal, and mental fabrications—also functions both to explain suffering and to act as part of the path to its end.

The three fabrications. This is a framework that the Buddha mentions briefly in the context of dependent co-arising (SN 12:2), where bodily, verbal, and mental fabrication are said to be conditioned by ignorance and, in turn, act as a condition for consciousness. What is meant by these three terms, though, is not defined in that context. There are, however, two other contexts where the Buddha does explain them in detail.

The first context is a description of the ways in which three types of kamma—bodily, verbal, and mental—play a role in shaping future lifetimes. In this description, these types of fabrication are analyzed in terms of the levels of skill with which they are fabricated, and the corresponding levels of the cosmos to which they lead.

An alternative way of rating these sorts of fabrication classifies them as to whether they lead to pleasure, pain, or to the imperturbable levels of concentration—the fourth jhāna and the formless dimensions of the infinitude of space or of consciousness—which can lead to rebirth on imperturbable levels of becoming.

Because future lives will entail birth, illness, and death—and in most cases, aging as well—these discussions of the three fabrications place them firmly under the first and second noble truths, suffering and its origination.

The second context in which the Buddha gives detailed explanation for bodily, verbal, and mental fabrication is in describing the factors that go into the levels of right concentration, i.e., part of the fourth noble truth, the path to the cessation of suffering.

However, the definition of these three types of fabrication doesn’t limit their application to the practice of concentration.

These definitions of the three fabrications apply to the experience of the body in all activities, as well as to the shaping of verbal and mental activity in general. After all, all bodily action has to start with the breath; all verbal action has to start with directed thought and evaluation; all mental action has to start with perception and feeling. This means that these definitions of the three fabrications can be applied to all activity and mental states. For instance, they are especially useful for understanding how to dismantle the component factors of unskillful emotions and creating more skillful emotions in their place.

As with the five aggregates, the best way to comprehend the fact and value of these three types of fabrications is to employ them in the practice of right concentration. Here they are analyzed not so much in terms of how they shape a single level of concentration, but in terms of how they separate out when moving from one level of concentration to the next higher one—much as metals in a sample of ore will separate out when their melting points are reached as the ore is subjected to higher and higher temperatures.

The following passage describes in more detail this progressive cessation of fabrications:

It has been argued that these two contexts for understanding the three types of fabrication—kamma and rebirth on the one hand, and the practice of concentration on the other—are totally unrelated, but it’s hard to see what is gained by placing walls between them. Instead, it’s much more useful to explore their relationships. That will allow the insights gained into fabrication in the present moment in the course of meditation to provide further understanding of how kamma acts on larger scales of time. Here it bears repeating: All bodily action has to start with the breath; all verbal action has to start with directed thought and evaluation; all mental action has to start with perception and feeling. Gaining sensitivity to the fact and value of these fabrications in the present moment—which the practice of concentration allows for—is precisely what allows the meditator to develop dispassion for even the most skillful levels of fabrication that lead to further becoming. It’s in this way that developing the fourth noble truth gives insight into the fabrications that normally would fall under the first truth and the second.