Search results for: "Aggregates"

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  2. Habits & Practices
    It’s something we chant every day—the Buddha’s formula for comprehending suffering, the five clinging-aggregates—but it tends to go right past us even if we read the translation: the form clinging-aggregate, the feeling clinging-aggregate, perception, fabrications, consciousness clinging-aggregate. That’s because we’re not familiar with our clinging on this level. It’s easier to relate to … 
  3. Clinging
    The Buddha identified suffering as the five clinging-aggregates. And the problem is not the aggregates. It’s the clinging. It comes in four forms: clinging to sensuality, to views, to habits and practices, and to doctrines of the self. But regardless of the form, you can feel it physically, as a tightening in the breath energy in the body. Now, the physical feeling … 
  4. Me, Me, Me
     … To begin with, he talks about the different kinds of aggregates around which we can create a sense of self: form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness. That gives you five. In each of those cases, you can either identify directly with the aggregate or you can think of yourself as someone who has that aggregate, or somehow you’re in the aggregate, or the … 
  5. Awaken to Your Potentials
     … He saw that you can put the aggregates together as a state of concentration. You can use them to create right view, right resolve, all the other factors of the path, and those factors will deliver you to something that’s not fabricated. So, as I said, the four noble truths are about potentials. You’ve got these aggregates and you could hang on … 
  6. Remembering Ajaan Lee
     … We’ve got a lot of good things in these aggregates. The trick is learning how to figure out what’s good in here. It’s not all misery. The Buddha was able to take his aggregates and not only create states of concentration. He was also able to use the aggregates to act as discernment, to develop all kinds of psychic powers, to … 
  7. All for the Sake of Freedom
     … You’ll see that even the concentration state involves aggregates. There’s the aggregate of form: your breath, your sense of the body as you feel it right now. Feeling: the feeling of pleasure or equanimity. Perception: the perception of breath, or—as the sense of the body begins to dissolve away—the perception of the space that permeates the body and then spreads … 
  8. Focus on the Precepts
     … It’s the act of clinging to the aggregates. The aggregates are actions, too. The Buddha defines them as verbs. Form deforms, feelings feel, perceptions perceive, and so on. Then you apply the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and non-self to those actions and their results, because the duty with regard to those five clinging-aggregates is to comprehend them. To comprehend them means … 
  9. A Passion for the Path
     … After all, the path as a whole is created out of aggregates. There has to come a point in the practice where you’ve developed the path and then you have to let it go. Otherwise, you’re still holding on, you’re still clinging to aggregates, and there’s still going to be suffering. So you work on developing concentration, getting it as … 
  10. The Need for Evaluation
     … What exactly is the breath of the body? What’s the fire element? What’s the earth element? What’s the water element? How can you manipulate them in ways that allow for pleasure to flow through the body? You can also read your experience in terms of the five aggregates: The different elements here are the aggregate of form. And when you get … 
  11. The Duty to Understand
    In the first noble truth, the Buddha defines suffering or stress—the Pali word is dukkha—as the five clinging-aggregates, and the clinging is the important part of the compound there. The suffering that eats into the heart is made up of those five types of clinging: clinging to form, clinging to feelings, clinging to the perceptions or mental labels, clinging to thought … 
  12. The Buddha’s Conventions
     … He didn’t call them aggregates. “Aggregates come here. Aggregates go away.” Rahula, he called Rahula; Sariputta, Sariputta; Citta the elephant trainer, he called Citta. There’s nothing inherently wrong with developing a sense of self. In fact, you need one in order to function in this world. If you’re not trained in a wise sense of self, you’re going to pick … 
  13. Three Parts of Right View
     … He gives some examples with which we’re all familiar, but then he boils it down ultimately to what he calls the five clinging-aggregates. At first glance, those aggregates seem less of an explanation, and more something that obscures what’s going on. The other forms of suffering we recognize: There’s birth, aging, illness, and death; separation from things you like, having … 
  14. Cornered
     … There’s no more enjoyment of the food of the aggregates, and there’s no more desire and no more passion for fixing more food. That’s how disenchantment leads to dispassion, and the two of them together lead to the cessation of the aggregates—because when you’re not creating them, they just fall away. This is one of the surprises of awakening … 
  15. Learning from Determination
     … You’re going to learn a lot about the aggregates as you get the mind to settle down. Remember: The aggregates are activities, not things. The translation “aggregate” for khandha is kind of unfortunate. It sounds like they’re bits of gravel. They’re actually activities. You see that the first aggregate is form, so you might wonder: How is form an activity? If … 
  16. The Dhamma Mirror
     … But then he says, “What makes them all suffering, what makes them all stressful?” What they all have in common is five clinging-aggregates. This is where the analysis gets unfamiliar. So you learn the names of the aggregates: Form is the form of your body. Feelings are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions are the labels you put on … 
  17. The Buddha Didn’t Play Gotcha
     … You realize that even when you let go of outside aggregates, or the grosser aggregates, there are still these subtler aggregates inside. It’s right here that the work can be done. So the Buddha’s teachings are very straightforward. Here, he says, is a better, safer, more blameless form of happiness. Go for it. As you master it, you find there are even … 
  18. In the Context of the Path
     … In other words, your discernment is made out of aggregates. Your concentration is made out of aggregates. Your intention to observe the precepts: Those are aggregates as well. So you don’t take them apart until they’ve gotten you over to the other side. It’s important to keep remembering that we’re here training, that there’s a course of action with … 
  19. Strategic Thinking
     … In other words, you learn how to use the aggregates in a way that helps pry loose the clinging part, and you learn how to use craving for becoming in a way that eventually gets you beyond becoming. For instance, when you practice concentration, you’ve got all five aggregates here. You’ve got form, which is the form of the body, the breath … 
  20. Insight from Jhana
     … In English, we call them aggregates. For a long time, I wondered why “aggregate” was chosen to translate the word khandha. It sounds like piles of gravel, and there is that image in the Pali, that khandha means heap or pile. But why “aggregate”? It turns out back in the 19th century, they made a distinction between organic unity, when you had an organism … 
  21. The Buddha’s Map
     … It’s not any of these insubstantial things that the Buddha calls aggregates. All the aggregates, he says, are empty of any essential worth. He compares the body to a lump of foam on a river. You may have seen these lumps in a river going through a forest. Tree sap gets mixed with the water, and it turns into a lump. Bubbles come … 
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