Search results for: "Aggregates"
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- The Particulars of Your Suffering… Once you’ve isolated them, you’ve got the raw material for understanding why there’s suffering, because the Buddha said that suffering is clinging to these aggregates. You’ve got hands-on experience with all these fabrications. In fact, one of the most important insights in all of this is to see how all of these different aggregates are fabricated. There’s an …
- Reflect… But the Buddha’s saying, “No, the real suffering that weighs down the mind is the way we cling to things, and particularly the way we cling to the aggregates.” The aggregates are our tools of processing experience. So we cling to certain ways of processing our experiences, and that’s why we suffer. We also discover that we do that because of our …
- The Noble Truth of Suffering… thesis—in which the author was saying the Buddha defines *dukkha *as the five aggregates, and the five aggregates are basically what you experience, which means that the four noble truths are not about suffering, they’re about experience. Another scholar said that the way the Buddha names the four noble truths is ungrammatical. And because the Buddha would speak only in standard grammatical …
- The Riddle Tree… There’s a sutta called The Riddle Tree in which a monk goes to different senior monks and asks them, “What topic do you contemplate in order to gain awakening?” One monk says, “the five aggregates,” another one says, “the six sense media,” another one says, “the six elements,” another one says “dependent co-arising.” The monk was not satisfied with all these different …
- Discernment in Concentration… What are you doing? And how are you doing it? You’re doing it through the aggregates. Remember, the aggregates are activities. When the Buddha defines them, he defines them as verbs: Even form he says deforms; feelings feel; perceptions perceive; fabrications fabricate; consciousness cognizes. These are activities, and you use them as you get the mind to settle down. In this way, you …
- Body as Path… So this is how you take the body, this aggregate of form, and turn it into part of the path. When you get the mind in a good state of concentration like this, all the aggregates are here. There’s the form of the body, there’s a feeling of pleasure, there’s the perception of breath. Directed thought and evaluation are the fabrications …
- Count Yourself Lucky… Even these five khandhas, these aggregates: The word “aggregate” makes it sound like pieces of rock, but they’re not. They may be as heavy as rock but they’re actually activities. Everything is a means to something else. And the “something else” that it’s a means to becomes a means as long as it’s fabricated, too. The only thing that can …
- Approaching the four noble truths… When the five aggregates, having been comprehended, are abandoned together with the craving—the aggregates as they function in suffering, the aggregates as they function in getting the mind into concentration, those get abandoned—then you find that there’s an intense happiness that’s not dependent on any conditions at all. This is why the Buddha uses the image of the path. He …
- The End of Karma… The first quality is that it is a type of consciousness, called consciousness without surface: *viññāṇaṁ anidassanaṁ. *It’s consciousness outside of the aggregates. The aggregates arise and pass away, and they can be clung to. They exist in space and time. But this is a consciousness outside of space and time, which means it’s not subject to the changes in space and …
- The Spider on the Web… The five aggregates: That’s it. But we can create all kinds of variations, some of which can have a huge impact. You want to see why a particular combination has that impact. Why do you treat some thoughts as if they were sacrosanct? “I don’t want to touch them. I don’t want to analyze them. I just want to wallow in …
- Beyond Inter-eating… You realize that the concentration is made up of aggregates. The Pali word for aggregate, khandha, can also mean masses: just masses of form, masses of feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and sensory consciousness. You’ve taken these aggregates and you’ve turned them into your path. Even so there’s still a little bit of clinging there. And the clinging also relates to feeding. It …
- Scribe Knowledge, Warrior Knowledge… You’ve pretty much given up on the idea that the aggregates can provide any happiness, so you just say, “Well, I’ll just give up on the idea of happiness and try to find some peace in being equanimous.” The Buddha was not a warrior who gave up. He found that we can turn these aggregates into the path, as when we’re …
- How We Cling… After all, the aggregates are actions. Form deforms, as the Buddha said. Feelings feel. Perceptions perceive. Thought fabrications fabricate things, and consciousness cognizes. We’re not holding on to things here. We’re holding on to actions. When you gain that insight into the aggregates through your concentration, then you can turn it on to the things you hold on to, and you realize …
- Questioning Your Conviction… In each case, the five brethren said No. **So which is it? Can you do things, or can you not do things with these aggregates? Well, you can do some things. And it’s the **some things **that are important. It’s in that area of **some things that you can actually create a path out of those aggregates that’ll take you to …
- Craving & Desire on the Path… We cling to the aggregates, and you use the aggregates on the path. You focus on the breath, developing a feeling of ease using a perception of the breath to hold you in place. You fabricate the processes of directed thought and evaluation to settle in, and you’re aware of all these things. Well, that’s the five aggregates right there—creating right …
- The Uses of Right Concentration… To do that, you want to see the origination and the passing away of the five aggregates: form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness. On the surface this may sound like the same sort of thing as developing mindfulness and alertness, but the word “origination” here signals something different. It points not to the fact that things come and go, but to the fact that …
- A Good Buddhist Ego… But the fact that you’ve experienced a level of consciousness that has nothing to do with any of the aggregates, not even the aggregate of consciousness, means that when you come back, you’ll never think of identifying with the aggregates ever again. You never hold to the view that you are the aggregates or that you own the aggregates or that they …
- A Questioning Attitude… They come under the physical aggregate, the aggregate of form, which is different from the feeling aggregate. So when you’ve got those sensations accounted for, what’s left? Where is the pain? You see it flitting around. You’ve unglued it. You see it as something separate. Then there’s also the perception of the pain. You want to learn how to see …
- On the Surface of Things… two different aggregates that we’ve glommed together. Can you see them as separate things—separate notes in the bird song? The same goes for perceptions, thought constructs, acts of consciousness: They’re all happening right here. Our problem is that we tend to be conspiracy theorists. We want to know: What’s happening behind the scenes? Who’s operating the lasers that shot …
- Selfing & Not-selfing… So you can exert some control over the aggregates. If you couldn’t exert any control, there’d be no path. Discernment, right view, is a matter of perceptions and thought fabrications. Right resolve—a matter of fabrications and perceptions. All the elements of the path—all the factors of the path—are composed of aggregates. So you learn how to develop skillful ones …
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