The Five Categories

“The Bodhisattva, Lord Avalokita, was faring deeply in the prajñāpāramitā when he realized that the five constituents of experience are empty, and thus freed himself from all pain.” --Prajñāpāramitāhrdāyasutra

In the reading I.2(2), entitled “The Anxiety Due to Change,” we are told that whereas the uninstructed worldling projects the notion of a self on to the five khandha, or assimilates the five khadha to the sense-of-self, the noble disciple does not identify with the five khandha. He “does not regard form as self, or self as form…he does not regard feeling as self, or self as feeling…he does not regard perception as self…volitional formations as self…consciousness as self, or self as possessing consciousness. That consciousness of his [!] changes and alters, etc.”

Just as in the opening lines of the Heart Sutra, here we have the key doctrine of non-self expressed in terms of the selflessness of the five existential categories. Let’s review the terminology briefly.

Khandhā are piles or heaps, categories into which the events that constitute our lives can be sorted. Together they comprise the raw materials out of which we construct the illusion of immutable selves, experience, mind, and consciousness. Note the Buddha’s characteristic analytical method.

“I am not a generalizer. I am an analyzer (“divider,” vibhajjavādi).” M. 2. 197 Subhasutta

At the same time the Buddha does not wish us to suppose that the five heaps are anything like elements or atoms, ultimate constituents of the world. The heaps are themselves contingent, arising and changing in accord with causes and conditions. The word most often found in association with “khandha” is “upādāna,” which is usually translated as “clinging.” “Entangled” or “involved” would serve as well or better. The phrase, “upādānakkhandhā” can be understood in more than one way. Bhikkhu Bodhi’s translation, “aggregates subject to clinging,” is clearly intended to suggest that everything we crave for and cling to belongs, ultimately, to one of these five categories of things and events. They are therefore the basis of suffering.

But let us not overlook another, more subtle meaning that the Buddha was at some pains to point out, namely , that the heaps are mutually clinging; that is, they are entangled with each other inseparably, they occur together, and support both each other and the illusion of a permanent and immutable self. The Mahāvedallasutta of the Majjhima Nikāya contains a passage in which the Awakened One asserts the inseparability of consciousness, ideation and feeling, and associates them both with wisdom (paññā)!

“That which is called wisdom, venerable one, and that which is discriminating awareness (viññāna)…and that which is feeling (vedanā)…and that which is ideation (saññā), are these states associated or disassociated? And is it possible to lay down a difference between them, having analyzed them again and again? That which is distinguishing awareness and that which is feeling and that which is ideation—these states are associated, and not dissociated, and it is not possible to lay down a distinction between them, having analyzed them again and again. Venerable one, whatever one feels, one perceives; whatever one perceives, that one discriminates; therefore these states are associated, not dissociated, etc.”  --M.43

It is not that an autonomous Person erroneously identifies with one or another of the khandas, or that a unitary Self mistakes the khandas for phases or attributes of itself, or that an independent Agent arrogates the khandhas to itself, or anything like that. For starters, the ordinary person has no idea of the khandhas. The main defect of all such explanations is that they begin by positing the very entity the existence of which the Buddha sought to refute. The Buddha’s conception of the matter is very much more radical and a good deal more interesting. What’s happening, the Buddha tells us, is that the interaction and co-operation of the khandas produce, all together, the closely linked illusions of Self, World, Mind, Experience and Consciousness. In other words, the five kinds of process are themselves, at one and the same time, the illusion of self/world and the conventional self who is “experiencing” the illusion.

The notion that a contingent sense-of-self can be derived from multiple contributors accords remarkably well with the pictures of consciousness and selfhood that are emerging from the increasingly collaborative disciplines of cognitive psychology, neuroscience and philosophy. According to the new consensus, the person is a complex and intermittent agglomeration of functions and faculties that emerges from massive parallel processing within cooperating areas of the brain stem, midbrain and neocortex.

The khandha is one of the most fundamental and versatile concepts in the Buddha’s world view. (The six senses, objects, and sense-fields are perhaps its only serious competition.) It is also accords astonishingly well with what the biological sciences are telling us about the way human beings come to see themselves and others as persons It behooves us to become intimate with this cluster of concepts because

· It is an instrument that can be used to refute the idea, and overthrow the illusion of a permanent, unchanging Self, together with the closely related illusions of constant awareness, personal experience, and an enduring, self-existent mind. (Mind, consciousness, experience, and self are useful conventions that we cannot do without. It is only our mistaken notions of them that we need to dismantle and throw out. The Buddha did not abolish the use of the personal pronoun.)

· It is the key to understanding the mechanism of the arising of dukkha. "The Noble Truth of Suffering is this, monks: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering, association with what is unpleasant is suffering, separation form what is pleasant is suffering; in short, the five clinging heaps are suffering." --Dhammacakkapavatanasutta, S.56.11

· The same conceptual schema serves to explain how the self-illusion works. It’s the answer to the question, “If there is really no permanent, independent 'I,' then how do you account for the persistence and strength of a sense-of-identity?” or “Why does the existence of an immutable core of me seem to be self-evident to so many people?”

A quick review of the five khandha should be sufficient to establish the basis of the Buddha’s answer to such questions as these. Our understanding turns on adopting his vision of events as arising and ceasing contingently as part of a universal process.

First, a note on personhood as the Buddha conceived of it. The person, or “being” has two primary aspects. One is form (rūpa) and the other is name (nāma).

“What is name-and-form? Feeling, ideation, volitions, sensory stimuli and attention, those constitute Name. The five elements and the form derived from them are Form.” –S.2.3

Rūpa is not merely the physical body, or matter as such, but the body as it appears, having a particular, recognizable form and therefore capable of being given a name. When we have taken sufficient notice of a body’s form that it becomes useful and desirable to call it by name, it is no longer just a body. One has by that point become aware to some extent of how that form manifests its inner life. It has a special way of conducting itself, a certain range of passions, a style of communicating. In short, it has character.

Rūpa, “form” as one of the five constituent groups, refers first and foremost to bodily form. It is what others see when they look at us and what we see when we look at, say, photographs of ourselves. Although our bodies change in countless ways over the course of a lifetime, in the short term they maintain a relatively stable appearance such that, barring horrific mishaps, when I look in the mirror in the morning, the form I see is very similar to the one I saw yesterday. It is not hard for me to paste in a certificate of continuity and declare it to be, in fact, my image. Another consequence of having a fairly stable human form is that I have at all times a sensory perspective that is unique. We will see the importance of perspective as we proceed.

Vedanā, “feeling.” This term refers to the hedonic tone of what we call sensory experience. Do I perceive this feeling to be pleasant, unpleasant or neutral? Whatever the case, it is unusual for my present hedonic judgments to be markedly different from past feelings. If I found the taste of chocolate ice cream to be pleasant over the course of my life, I am likely to find it pleasant today and, if I don’t, it may well be a sign that something is wrong with my body. We are able to make such measurements because of the complex of faculties that are found in the next several categories,

Saññā, “ideation.” This group includes all mental functions that involve memory and pattern-recognition. Association, comparison, concept-formation, analytical and synthetic operations, imagination, logic and language all fall under this rubric. (Recent findings of neuroscience suggest that this category corresponds to a baker’s dozen of crucial neural networks and processing areas of the brain stem, midbrain and cortices.) Each of our self-images is assembled out of fragments of a particular history. Each of us develops cognitive habits that distinguish this mind from all others. Not only do our individual perceptual landscapes become the familiar ground of thought, the many faculties and functions of our minds enable us to revise and augment our personal narratives as needed, to create and re-create our self images in accord with our desires of the moment as well as the exigencies of long-term survival. In the process of self-maintenance, we arrange the elements of the story with an eye to what serves our various, not always perfectly compatible interests and agendas, and the result is not always complete consistency. Have you ever told a story about your past only to learn that events could not have occurred the way you remember it? That disparity is one result of our amazingly complex data-processing ability. Another is the relatively narrow extent and range of awareness, as determined by the prime directive of consciousness, to wit, the need to eliminate redundancy.

Sankhāra, “impulses.” (san + kr, that which accompanies performance), i. e., motivating factors. In this category we find urges, wishes, dispositions, drives, preferences, moods, etc. Again, we become accustomed to observable patterns of motivation. When we find ourselves experiencing a novel desire or aversion, or an inner conflict, we are likely to react by dismissing such events as anomalies. “That’s not like me.” Such reactions testify to the strength of the illusion of a unified person. In fact the many impulses that arise in the course of a day are each the product of diverse causes and condition occurring over wide range of mental processes (neural networks) in response to an enormous number of sensory stimuli. 

Viññāna, “sense-specific awareness." Sensation comes in six kinds, namely, visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, bodily sensations, and the other stuff—the sensations that can’t conveniently be allocated to one of the five bodily senses—that we throw together under the rubric of “mind.” For the Buddha, “consciousness,” as this term is sometimes translated, is always sense-specific. It also conforms to perspective. That is, when we are sitting across a table from one another, I see you and you see me. Such experiences, repeated over months and years, result in the expectation of a comfortably predictable pattern of events. Taken together, and operating in concert, the khandha produce a compelling illusion of permanence, continuity, immutability and agency.

The fact remains, however, that consciousness is intermittent, incomplete, subject to decay, and the product of complex events outside of our awareness. The events of our lives are impersonal, contingent phenomena over which we have only limited and sporadic control. The Buddha’s point in introducing us to the five categories is to reveal the true nature of life as summarized in the Three Marks of Existence.

“All impulses (or motives) are impermanent,

All impulses are pain;

All phenomena are without self.”

Whose Dharma?

The Buddha lived and died approximately 2500 years ago. The mostly agrarian and pastoral culture in which taught is as far removed from the USA of the 21^st-century as can be imagined. The Awakened One spoke a language that is imperfectly understood today, and his words have been imperfectly translated into a number of “canonical” languages, none of which are extant. The various cultural spheres through which Buddhism moved in its journey from Southeast Asia to North America and Europe—as different from each other as ours is from them—shaped the teachings to their own needs. In short, there are many good reasons to doubt that what the Buddha taught, or even what his contemporaries understood his dharma to be, are exactly what you and I believe them to be. If I am right about that, then Buddhism is a kind of mirror-cum-trampoline for both individual and social development, intellectual, moral and spiritual. I can live with that. Having studied and practiced Buddha-dharma in several traditions and with varying degrees of rigor for—can it be?—45 years plus, I am less certain than ever of what Buddhist awakening is, and who, if anyone, has attained it. Should I stumble upon nirvana myself one day, no one will be more surprised than I.

Nevertheless, I make bold to declare that, if the account of the Buddha’s Dharma set forth in the Nikayas is not a gross misrepresentation of his thought, the Buddha was not in the business of making blanket judgments about the nature of Reality. He certainly suggested that things are not always what they appear to be, and that we are mistaken in our views of various sorts of things. Yet, stripped down to its bare bones, his project is metaphysically noncommittal: He was always talking about this or that, and never (or rarely) about whatever might underlie phenomena. When he spoke of the goal, it was in the most frustratingly vague of terms. He successfully avoided the kind of ontological ultimates and metaphysical skyscrapers in which the Advaita Vedantins, among others, entombed themselves. Even so, his immediate successors, and their successors, were unable to resist the temptation to elaborate on his intentionally incomplete worldview. And so we have the Abhidhamma, the schools, and a vast corpus of apocrypha.

The inventors of Chan had their favorite sources, of course, among them (besides the ever-popular and foundational Prajñāpāramitā literature) the Lankāvatara, Vimalakīrti, and Samdhinirmocana Sutras. Dōgen’s apparent favorite was that hardest of all scriptures to fathom, the Lotus of the Marvelous Dharma. As we progress through the assigned reading, we will discover not only alternate versions of Buddha-Dharma, but multiple Buddhas as well.

The Practice & the Life, or Whatever

Only a few weeks into the one-year practice period, the rhythm of my life in Santa Cruz was punctuated by a trip to Florida for a family reunion and the celebration of multiple birthdays. Too many activities had to be squeezed into a week that seemed to comprise a continuous round of breakfasts, lunches, dinners out, barbeques, shopping, visits to this person and that, and even a museum. Different agendas, different sets of priorities, different personal preferences—expressed in Spanish, English or a combination of the two—led to a series of decisions-by-committee, all of them unsatisfactory to one or more parties. Reasonable compromises were arrived at in the end, but the process was, to put it charitably, irksome.

You will not be surprised to learn that it occurred to me more than once that the whole week was a test of my patience, humanity, and skill in social relations. Where, I asked myself, does

Zen fit into all this? We often talk about integrating our practice with daily life, or “practicing with” our families, jobs, and assorted travails. But how, exactly, do we do that?

When we speak, as we often do, of applying Zen to the daily round (or grind, as the case may be) we assume that we have a clear sense of what our practice is, and what aspects of it might be useful in quotidian situations. Do we, really? Zazen, we are told, is not a method at all. If so, there must be something else in Zen that we can apply to the constantly accelerating, highly stressful process that we continue to call “everyday life” as though next year will be just like this one. There are the precepts, of course, to serve as guidelines for conduct, and there is “the mindfulness thing,” as I’ve come to think of it, features of mainstream Buddhism that the authors of Zen found it useful to retain as part of the movement’s literary and technical scaffolding. There is a lot to be unpacked in this topic, and I will set myself to that task when I can. In the meantime, I would very much like to know the thoughts of my fellow students.

During the first meeting of the group, when we briefly discussed the term “detachment” as used in the Pali texts, it was thought that “non-attachment” better conveyed the sense of the desired state of mind. There is a fine line to be negotiated in our dealings with others. To the extent that I am committed to the bodhisattva’s way of life—a way of constantly renewed aspiration—I will strive to respond to every situation with skill and compassion. I must be sensitive to the needs of others. I must retain the capacity to view changing relations with empathy for all, and from multiple perspectives, while at the same time stepping out of the usual narrative of my life, with its constant assertions of  personal priorities. I must be at once fully present and as free as possible from the constraints of ignorance, craving and aversion. As an immediate, practical consequence of my efforts to embody those criteria, I am not allowed to withdraw into a Never Never Land of aloof “spirituality” or self-alienation. A tall order!

The rhetoric of non-duality, so much in favor with teachers of Zen, does not help us to get our bearings on this slippery ground. Even so, I cannot help noting that in the very act of asking how we can carry over our practice into our daily lives, or harmonize our lives with our practice, we drive a conceptual wedge between Zen and Daily Life. Let me paraphrase Sakimura Roshi’s words.

“Maybe you think that by doing zazen you can improve your life. Sure, after a while you may see some changes, some benefits. But that is not the right understanding of our practice. Except for zazen, you have no life!”

Readings (3)

At I.2, the Simile of the Mountain, we learn that when old age and death are “rolling in,” there is nothing else to do but to “live by the Dhamma, live righteously, and to do wholesome and meritorious deeds.” In light of the adage, “Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” that response, though admirable, may not strike us as necessarily the most obvious one. The key to the argument appears in the very last lines.

“When one conducts oneself by Dhamma

With body, speech and mind,

They praise one here in the present life

And after death one rejoices in heaven.”

Based on this and succeeding passages, we can tease out the following principles:

There is not only this one life, but a series of lives.

One’s actions are judged after death.

Merit accrues to the doer of good deeds, demerit to the doer of bad deeds.

Good deeds are rewarded and bad deeds punished in this life or in a future life.

The person is responsible for her own actions and only she will experience the results of them. In other words, merit is not transferrable.

We can begin to discern the bare outlines of the Early Buddhist teachings about action, renewed becoming, the fruits of action (results), and samsāra (literally, “passing through”), the process of rebirth whereby one appears, now here and now there among the various realms of existence, over incalculably vast periods of time, driven by the moral value of one’s past actions. Much more could be said about the ideas that make up this very important conceptual cluster. For now it is enough to note that the “laws of karma” comprise much more than ordinary cause-and-effect relations. 

Midnight Song

For so long that I cannot remember him

A man of glass has lived within me.

Within him lives a woman of iron whose heart

the first snowfall of winter might bruise.

Inside of her is a child of flesh and blood.

The place where they sleep in front of the fire

is dark and silent now.

Coyotes’ laughter settles in the branches of the cottonwoods,

And the fruit trees like so many moonlit specters

Freeze in their tracks.

Shall I stand on the porch with upraised arms

and implore the lost to return home

or shall I dance the dance of wakefulness under the bright moon?