Search results for: "Aggregates"
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- The Brightness of Life… You can look at fabrication in terms of the five aggregates. You can look at it in terms of the three kinds of fabrication that are listed in dependent co-arising. This kind of knowledge helps get you out of that state. You see the state of becoming not in terms of narratives about who you are in the world that you’re confronting …
- The Core of Experience… And the things you’ve got—form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness, what the Buddha calls the five aggregates—are things that if you simply cling to them, are going to cause problems, going to cause suffering. In fact, the clinging will be suffering. But you can turn them into a path, which switches their role as part of the first noble truth, about …
- Training for Dispassion… The ending of desire and passion for what? Sariputta provided the answer: “Desire and passion for the five aggregates: form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness.” Then the next question those people would ask would be, “Why? For what purpose?” The answer is that if you haven’t abandoned desire and passion for those things, then when they change, there’s going to be sorrow and …
- Open Are the Doors to the Deathless… And ask yourself, “How do I cling to these things? What’s the passion? What’s the desire I have around these things? Why is that?” Part of the mind will say, “The only way you’re going to find happiness in life is by holding on to these activities of the mind”—these aggregates that the Buddha talked about. The word “aggregate” is …
- A Goal Without Limits… The consciousness of the six senses or the five aggregates covers all consciousness in space and time—near, far, past, present, future—but this is something outside of space and time. That’s why it’s so hard to talk about. Our language can cover things within space and time, but things outside of space and time really can’t be described. As for …
- Murderers, Vipers, & Floods, Oh My!… The five murderers, of course, are the five aggregates; the sixth one is passion and delight, ready to cut off your head. It’s something intimate, but it’s ready to cut off your head at any time. The empty village stands for the sense organs. The bandits attacking the village stand for the objects of the senses. The raft stands for the noble …
- Noble Priorities… Suffering is clinging to the aggregates. The body may grow ill, old, die, but that’s not the essence of the suffering. As Ajaan Lee says, those things are the shadows of suffering. The real suffering is clinging to the aggregates: form, feeling, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness. The clinging is the big problem. That’s the suffering. What causes it? The three kinds of …
- Oneness is a Water Snake… You begin to ferret out what the Buddha called aggregates. He actually called them khandhas; we call them aggregates. But these activities of the mind, you begin to see, are distinct things. Ajaan Lee’s image is useful here. He talks about heating a rock. And when it gets to one temperature, one metal will flow out. It gets to another temperature, another metal …
- Use Your Imagination… For instance, what the Buddha had to say about how suffering comes from clinging to any one of the five aggregates: Which aggregate are you clinging to? Which form of clinging are you holding on to? His terms of analysis are meant to be food for your imagination, to open up possibilities. Maybe you think of the pain as a physical thing, but remember …
- For Your Future’s Sake… With the five aggregates, he said, if they were exclusively stressful, exclusively painful, we wouldn’t be attached to them. So, they do offer their pleasures. But then, if we just stay with their pleasures, we become attached. Some people say, “Well, you can be wisely attached. Hold on for the duration of however long something is going to be there, knowing that it …
- Reading & Meditating… Ajaan MahaBoowa points out that one of the ways of getting a pain to separate out from your sense of the body is to see that the pain is a feeling aggregate, whereas the body, of course, is a different aggregate, made up of earth, water, wind, and fire. Those are two very separate things—the feeling of the pain, and the sensations of …
- Noble Right Concentration… Stress is defined as the five clinging-aggregates: form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness. Where are you going to see those aggregates? You see them in the concentration. The breath is part of form. The feeling of pleasure that arises as you stay focused: That’s feeling. The mental image you have of the breath: That’s perception. Directed thought and evaluation as you try …
- The Limits of Control… You’re taking those five aggregates and basically pushing against what they call the three characteristics. Push against aniccam:See how constant you can make your mind. Push against dukkham: See what sense of pleasure you can create out of your sense of the body, out of your present awareness. Push against anatta: How much can you control the mind to stay with the …
- Attention to Your Potentials… The radical part is when he says that it all comes down to the five clinging-aggregates. We read elsewhere that the aggregates themselves are not the problem. Arahants have aggregates, but they don’t suffer. It’s the clinging. And the idea that the clinging is the suffering: That takes a lot of getting used to. It’s also challenging us. The things …
- Overcoming Complacency… Think of the five khandhas or aggregates: The Buddha says that the khandha of fabrication or sankhara, is the one that molds the others from potentials into an actual experience of the khandhas. From the potential for form, we create forms. From the potential for feeling, we create feelings. And so on with perception and consciousness as well. An act of creating that’s …
- Putting out the Flame… The same goes for all the other aggregates. They’re basically without essence, without substance. And you’re going to create something solid out of these things that have no essence or substance? Mirages, banana trees, magic shows? It’s impossible. As for the world, when you have this frame of reference: It’s just body, feelings, mind, mental qualities in and of themselves …
- Full Attention… We forget the Buddha’s analysis of feelings, which would place feelings and emotions, in our sense of those terms, under the aggregate of fabrications, rather than under the aggregate of vedana, which is a matter of the feeling tone: pleasant, painful, or neither pleasant nor painful. We forget how fabricated our feelings are, how conditioned they are, and the fact that just because …
- Patience… As the Buddha says, we engage in different activities that he classes under the aggregates, and each of those aggregates — whether it’s form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, or consciousness — is something we fabricate for the sake of something else. In other words, we have means and we have goals. The goals are either directly or indirectly aimed at happiness. This is how we …
- Analyzing Anger… This is why we have the analysis in terms of the aggregates or the sense media—all the things that happen in the course of sensory perception: Where in the process did the narrative begin? Take it apart. When you take it apart, you find that there’s not that much there. There are just lots of little bits and pieces. You were the …
- The Reality of Emotions… After all, you know what the Buddha says about trying to find an authentic self in form and feeling and all the other aggregates: You’re not going to find it. But you can find things you can use. You take those aggregates and turn them into the path. As you do this, your renunciate grief leads you to renunciate joy. You’ve got …
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