Search results for: "Aggregates"

  1. The Not-Self Discourse
     … In other words, you no longer think that “I am any of the five aggregates.” You no longer think that “I own any of the five aggregates,” or that “the five aggregates exist in me,” or that “I exist in the five aggregates.” With the letting go of this fetter, that kind of identification with the five aggregates is gone. But there still is … 
  2. The Not-Self Discourse
     … After all, all five of the brethren had attained the Dhamma eye, and one of the consequences of that attainment is that you let go of identity views—views in which you define yourself either as an aggregate, as the owner of the aggregate, as in the aggregate, or as having the aggregate in you. Yet, it turns out, even then there’s still … 
  3. Mud Houses
     … But first you’ve got to see yourself—the being you’ve created out of these aggregates—in those terms. You have to get familiar with what an aggregate is. In other words, before you make them unfit for play, you’ve got to play with your aggregates to get to know them. That’s what we’re doing as we practice. When you … 
  4. Clinging-Aggregates in Context
    When the Buddha talks about the five clinging-aggregates, it’s always in the context of the four noble truths. In fact, it’s his definition of the first noble truth, the truth of suffering, or stress: Clinging to the five aggregates is stress. It’s important to keep that context in mind because sometimes you hear the five clinging-aggregates defined as the … 
  5. Borrowed Goods
    We read about how the clinging-aggregates are suffering, so our first reaction is that we want to get rid of them, but it doesn’t work. Remember the Buddha’s statement that our duty with regard to them is to comprehend them. You get rid of craving, but with the clinging-aggregates you’ve got to know them, really understand them, to the … 
  6. Analyzing Suffering
     … He talks about suffering in various terms in different contexts, but his most condensed analysis is the five clinging-aggregates. Form as a clinging-aggregate, feeling as a clinging-aggregate, perception, fabrication, and consciousness as clinging-aggregates. He talks about the aggregates to help make suffering a bit more impersonal. We tend to identify so much with our sufferings. Our strongest sense of our … 
  7. Understanding Aggregates
    In the Buddha’s first sermon, he defines suffering—or stress, the word dukkha—as the five clinging-aggregates. He states that our duty with regard to those five clinging-aggregates is to comprehend them. Elsewhere, he says that comprehension means getting rid of all passion, aversion, and delusion around them. In his second sermon, he shows how to do that. He talks about … 
  8. Focus on Your Intention
    There’s an interesting passage where the Buddha defines the different aggregates in terms of verbs. Form deforms, feelings feel, perceptions perceive, fabrications fabricate, and consciousness cognizes—the point being that these are activities. The word “aggregate” has an unfortunate connotation. It sounds like gravel, little bits and pieces of rock. The aggregates probably got that name in English from a convention in early … 
  9. Feeding on Feeding
     … It’s the five clinging-aggregates: the form clinging-aggregate, feeling clinging-aggregate, perception clinging-aggregate, fabrications clinging-aggregate, consciousness clinging-aggregate. People have often asked: Where did the Buddha get this analysis? Because you don’t see it in any pre-Buddhist teachings. He mentions it in his first discourse, explains a little bit more in his second, and the people that were … 
  10. The Logic of Not-self
     … We create a sense of self around the aggregates, either identifying directly with the aggregates or believing that we own the aggregates or that we are in the aggregates or the aggregates are in us. For example, you may decide that you are your consciousness. Consciousness may be impersonal, but you can still identify with it, have a sense of self around it, even … 
  11. The Not-Self Discourse
     … The Buddha had taught them earlier that suffering was the five clinging-aggregates. In the second sermon, he went through all five of the aggregates and pointed out how each was not-self. In the first part of the sermon, he focused on how none of the aggregates lie totally under your control. You can’t have them always be the way you want … 
  12. A Good Dish of Concentration
     … So here you’re taking the aggregates and you’re making good use out of them. From this vantage point, you can look at other aggregates. And here it’s good to think of aggregates not as things—and that’s one of the problems with the word “aggregate” in English, it sounds like little bits of gravel—but as activities. There’s a … 
  13. Observe Your Concentration
     … So, while you’re listening to the talk on the aggregates, you can look at your mind in concentration and see that the concentration is made up of those same five aggregates. That other passage in the suttas then goes on to explain that when you see the aggregates in the concentration, you then incline the mind to the deathless. If, when you encounter … 
  14. Feeding Instructions
     … All this comes down to the five clinging-aggregates—form as a clinging-aggregate; feelings as a clinging-aggregate; perceptions, fabrications, consciousness as clinging-aggregates. And the real problem is the clinging. The word for clinging, upādāna, can also mean “to take sustenance,” in other words, to feed. We’re feeding off of our sense of our body as we feel it from within … 
  15. Rebirth & Not-Self
    As you’re sitting here, you’ve got the potential for all five aggregates, and you have the choice as to what you want to do with those potentials. Most often, we’re not aware of the fact that we have those choices, or we have a very limited sense of what those choices are. We end up creating a lot of suffering around … 
  16. The Battle of Your Selves
     … What are these activities that make your self? That’s where the Buddha uses his teachings on the aggregates. Sometimes the aggregates are presented as the Buddha’s answer to the question of what you are. Actually it’s the answer to the question: What do you think you are? What you think you is made up out of these aggregates. You don’t … 
  17. To Suffer Is an Active Verb
     … We grab after the aggregates. We grab after the allure of the aggregates. And they bite. The irony in all of this is that the aggregates themselves are things that we put together. We’ve got potentials coming in from the past for form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. And then, for the sake of having aggregates to use, we fashion them—we put … 
  18. Doing Aggregates
     … When you’re engaged in these activities, and one of the activities is creating a sense of self around these five aggregates, what makes it suffering? This clinging: How do you cling? You might identify with the aggregates or you might have the sense that you are whatever it is that owns the aggregates. You might feel that you’re inside the aggregates, like … 
  19. Cutting the Fetters
     … either identifying directly with the khandha or aggregate itself, or seeing that you’re the owner of the aggregate, or that you’re in the aggregate, or that the aggregate is in you. Four times five gives twenty: twenty identity views. You think about how, yes, the aggregates are the things that make up what you are, but they’re obviously impermanent, so they … 
  20. Squeezing Goodness Out of the Aggregates
     … Try to get a sense of what you’ve got here in terms of these aggregates, and what you can do with them. Like the aggregate of form: What can you do with the different elements or the properties of earth, water, wind and fire? Ajaan Lee himself was able to recover from a heart attack out in the middle of the jungle just … 
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