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concept of five aggregates?
Wikipedia says the five aggregates consist of the following:
Buddhist doctrine describes five aggregates
"form" or "matter"
"sensation" or "feeling"
"perception", "conception", "apperception", "cognition", or "discrimination"
"mental formations", "impulses", "volition", or "compositional factors" (Skt.
"consciousness" or "discernment"
I can't really grasp the concept of it. is there an easy analogy to a real situation that explains it more clear?
Buddhist doctrine describes five aggregates
"form" or "matter"
"sensation" or "feeling"
"perception", "conception", "apperception", "cognition", or "discrimination"
"mental formations", "impulses", "volition", or "compositional factors" (Skt.
"consciousness" or "discernment"
I can't really grasp the concept of it. is there an easy analogy to a real situation that explains it more clear?
0
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It's written by a very good friend of mine, and he won an Wikipedia award for how thorough and well-referenced his whole Opus was.
It's an extraordinary piece of work and took him a lot of time and effort to put together.....
Click on the 3.4 Five aggregates link.
Then click on ' Main article 'Skanda'
look at the piece called "Parts of a Chariot"....
The skandas, or aggregates are very roughly, every system that goes to make up "Who" you are.....
But because they are all impermanent, changing, in a state of flux, clinging to them as a form of security or identification, ultimately leads to attachment and suffering, which is unproductive and futile.....
Any of this help?
Rupa = Form
Nama = Feelings/ Memories/ Thoughts/ Consciousness
According to the Buddha, rupa not only refers to the physical body but also includes everything in the universe as one entity! Sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touch are received through the 5 sense organs. No matter how much we know about this cosmos, our solar system and earth including everything that is happening on the surface of this planet from domestic to global affairs – yes plus our precious education! – this entirety is referred to as a singular noun and is swept under the first grouping of rupa!
Hence, it isn’t wrong to see yourself as the centre of the universe because without your senses, the cosmos does not exist to you. When you are in any of those events, sleeping, unconscious, in a coma, your senses cease to function due to the absence of your mental self. At that moment, your very own private universe disappears too although it very much exists for other people who are fully conscious.
Once these vast diversities of sense objects walk over the bridges of perception and enter your inner world (mental world), the 5 sense objects have no choice but to abandon their material forms and turn into non-material entity (energy): memories, thoughts and feelings. In other words, sights, sounds, smells, tastes and tangible sensations carry exactly the same information and details but in different forms, that’s all.
Say you are watching a football match. Those exciting events on the football field begin their journey into your inner world as sights, sounds, smell, tastes and touch. For clearer image, let’s turn these five sense objects into 5 young men. These 5 strong men would then sprint through the five bridges (eyes, ears), and instantaneously transform into the formless energy (memories, thoughts and feelings) who is greeted by your mental self. Only then, will the whole experience of the football match be completed.
By using the five grouping approach, the Buddha has placed consciousness as an additional sense, the 6th sense! The Buddha always classes human as a life form with six senses, whereas intellectuals view it with five senses only. The 6th sense is indeed the mental eyes belonging to your mental self. If so, what then are the sense objects to our 6th sense? Memories, thoughts and feelings.
Every sense must correspond to its own sense object or every metaphoric man crosses his own bridge. They cannot cross perceive. You cannot use eyes to perceive smells; neither can you use ears to perceive thoughts, memories and feelings. They must work together in pairs:
• Eyes perceive sights
• Ears perceive sounds
• Nose perceives smells
• Tongue perceives tastes
• Skin perceives physical sensations
• Mental eye perceives thoughts, memories and feelings
• Physical self relates to the external world of sight, sounds, smells, tastes and
touch (rupa)
• Mental self relates to the inner world of thoughts, memories and
feelings (nama)
Supawan
Form is what is physical, like rock, skin, muscle, bones, food, air, water, fire, etc.
Sensation is incorrect. It is feeling. Feeling refers to pleasant feeling & unpleasant feeling. Feeling is not emotion or thought. It is the basic quality of sense experience, of comfort or discomfort.
For example, sunshine on one's body feels nice or pleasant. Looking at a flower is pleasant. Looking at a rotting corpse of an animal feels unpleasant.
Perception is labelling or classifying, from our memory bank. We label 'green', 'blue', 'man', 'woman', 'tree', 'frog, 'good', 'bad', etc. This is perception.
Mental formations is the creative process of mind. It includes intention or will (decision making). It includes urges or drives, such as love, greed, lust, hatred, anger, confusion, fear, etc. It includes thought, thinking & intelligence. It includes mind pictures or images, such as dreams. It includes emotion. It also includes ignorance & wisdom.
Even when a human being gains enlightenment, it is the mental formations aggregate that gets enlightened due to its deep accumulation of wisdom.
Consciousness is basic awareness. Mere knowing. Mere seeing, mere hearing, mere smelling, mere tasting, mere touching & mere experience of the other mental aggregates is the activity of consciousness.
Consciousness functions through & dependant on the six sense organs. The Buddha taught there are six types of consciousness, each relating to the six sense organs.
Kind regards
DD
Consciousness is stated last because all aggregates can only be known & experienced via consciousness.
But in our actual experience, it is not like that.
In experience, the body (with sense organs) functions together with consciousness to create sense experience or sense contact.
From sense contact there arises feeling.
From feeling, there arises perception.
From feeling & perception, there arises intention & craving.
From intention & craving, there arises thinking & thought/emotion proliferation.
For example, pleasant feeling & perception generates craving such as greed, love, lust and then the thoughts "I want it, I must have it" and all of the thinking that plans to obtain it.
Unpleasant feeling & perception generates craving such as hatred, anger and then the thoughts "I want to destroy it, I want to avoid it" and all of the thinking that plans to attack it.
Neither-pleasant-nor-unpleasant feeling gives rise to the craving of confusion or fear and the thoughts "what is it?" and the thinking that spins around in circles trying to understand it.
The Buddha said:
Hi
That's about as simple as I can express it:)
Mat
None of them are the screen. None of them are essential to the screen.
None of them have any correlation to what could be shown on the screen, or what it could mean to differnt people.
The layout of the screen is analogous to form or structure.
The rest, to the other aggregates, but that's where the analogy falls:)
There is no screen, only pixels:p
I'm sitting here typing into a computer. The form of the body types the words, feeling is pleasant, I hear the birds singing, the sound of my fingers tapping the keyboards. All the form in my perception is composed of parts that can ultimately be reduced from solidity.
I can discern that I am grasping to convey a gist or sense of the five aggregates as I communicate. The impulse to reach out and try this is an act of will or volition. The thoughts or mental formations that arise are doubts that this method I'm attempting will work.
Nonetheless, I wish you well. May you attain the depth of wisdom and understanding you seek.
so if i were to use "smelling an fruit" as an analogy would i say the form is our body, and we see the fruit with our eyes and smell the fruit with our nose? and then we perceive the fruit to be sweet driving us to take a bite of that fruit?
what would be consciousness?
consciousness = see the fruit with our eyes and smell the fruit with our nose
perception = perceive the fruit to be sweet
feeling = sweet
mental formation = driving us to take a bite of that fruit
driving = craving or desire = mental formation
form = fruit, smells, taste, texture(moisture, firmness), nose
perception/memory = sweet, orange, associated memories
feelings = nice, horrible, indifferent
mental formations/thoughts = planning how to get the fruit, studying about the fruit
consciousness/mental self is false identification with thoughts, memories and feelings leading to suffering.
vipassana/insight leads to disidentification with above
I would say in this case the form is your body AND its connections with the world that we don't normally think of as "you". Remember there are no boundaries. Those fruity aromas floating between your face and the fruit are part of the form of the moment. They are as much(?) a part of the experience of the moment as the synapses and the nerve cell firings.
If you imagine a snapshot of the entire fruit sniffing experience frozen in time there would only be form, the rest just wouldn't be in the snapshot, they arise from the ever changing "snapshots" of form/structure.
You are getting lots of different views on this in this thread, "conciousness":)
Imagine the other aggravate mental events that go into your experice of smelling a fruit. The sensations, volition memories, everything. Each one of them isn't the experience, they dont become and experince without the others.
You have all of the mental events right there in the moment, and those events together, are the conciousness.
(Structure of the experience (form)>events of the experience(mental events)> experience of the experience (conciousness).)
The Skahndas are not a check-list as much as a unified process:)
Mat