What Is It That Suffers

And the Buddha said: "What, in brief, are the Five Aggregates connected with cleaving? They are bodily form, feeling, perception, (mental) formations and consciousness." In so stating, the Buddha not only taught that what we consider "the self" is nothing more than an aggregate of what arises when five conditions come together, but was also describing the entire universe, as we experience it. For on close examination, these are not two separate things, but one.

The "self" is nothing more or less than the collection of the five aggregates; the "self" is what arises when these conditions come together. The first of the five aggregates is bodily form, or rupa. To the Buddha, form includes not only what we normally think of as our body, but also the means by which the body is perceived - his definition of form included not only the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue and the skin, as well as their powers (sight, sound, smell, taste and touch), but also the objects they invoked. So "form" included the sun and the wind and the sounds of laughter and the smell of sweat and whatever else we might find in and through the five senses.

Rupa, according to the noted translator Red Pine, "is simply the outside world, in contrast to what we presume is an inside world. Thus, the word rupa does not actually refer to a concrete object but to the appearance of an object. Form is like a mask that cannot be removed without revealing its own illusory identity." So form is actually the outside world, by which we presume the existence of an inside world.

With the backdrop of an outside world established, the Buddha continued with an analysis of the inside, which he divided into four additional aggregates. Feeling, or sensation, is the second aggregate, the first of the four interior components. Once one establishes form, sensation follows as the interface between inner mind and outer form. Sensation looks at our experience as a process of evaluation. Sensation in this regard is not the same as mere sensory input, which the Buddha rarely described in more detail than positive, negative or neutral. For the most part, our experiences are neutral and ignored. But certain experiences appear to satisfy a need or pose a danger and are classified accordingly. As we walk through a forest our eyes take in countless appearances, but we quickly focus on a snake or a wildflower or some object that might affect our continued existence. Thus, the Buddha did not consider sensation as a passive collection of data from an outside world but as the active sorting and grading of appearances and their transformation into objects according to categories supplied by the third aggregate, perception.

Without perception, our sensations cannot be classified as positive, negative or neutral. Perception supplies the framework that allows us to make judgments as well as the framework that allows us to objectify or subjectify our experience. It also supplies the means that allow us to manipulate our sensations, so that we see what we want to see and don't see what we don't want to see. Thus, sensation is dependent not only upon form but also on perception. And likewise, perception is dependent on sensation as well as the fourth aggregate.

This fourth aggregate, sanskara, has been translated as "mental formations," "impulse," "volition" and "attention;" The word sanskara is derived from a combination of san (together) and kri (to make); thus it means "put together" and refers to those things we have "put together" that have a direct bearing on the way we think or perceive. According to Red Pine, what this term refers to "is our karmic genome, the repository of all that we have previously intended, whether expressed in the form of words, deeds, or thoughts. Thus, sanskara embraces all the ways we have dealt with what we have experienced in the past and that are available to us as ways to deal with what we find in the present." He therefore chose to use the word "memory" as a translation for sanskara. Thus, sanskara supplies the templates that perception applies to sensations and form.

And how do we know this? Because of the fifth aggregate - consciousness. "Consiousness" refers to the faculty of the mind in general, the ability to be aware, aware of anything, but always something - form, sensation, perceptions, memories, and of course, a "self." Thus, consciousness always has an object, and therefore a subject is implied. It is the least discussed and analyzed of all the aggregates because to discuss or analyze consciousness would be like the hand trying to grab itself. But consciousness brings its awareness to the outside objects, and therefore invents an inside subject, or "self." Alan Watts once described consciousness as something like a radar system, and as long as we identify ourselves as our radar system, well of course we're always going to feel under attack.

So, putting this all together, there is clearly an outside world, isn't there? Look, you can see it. And the way that we see it is sensation, which is filtered through perception. And that perception is conditioned by our past experience as stored in memory. And consciousness uses that awareness of that outside world to infer an inside world. So the perceived "outside world" is actually created by processes on the inside, while the "inside world" is just an assumption based on the perception of the "outside world," and the closer one looks at this process, the more the line between inside and outside disappears, and we begin to wonder why we put the limitations that we do on what we consider to be the "self."

I said at the onset of this whole series of postings that these concepts weren't easy to talk about. When the Emperor Wu asked the Indian monk Bodhidharma who he was, Bodhidharma replied, "I don't know."