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.”