Skandha

• 1. Introduction

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  Skandha is a Sanskrit word that appears in some of the oldest religious literature ever written. It shows up in the Vedic texts long before Buddhism, simply meaning "multitude, quantity, aggregate" in the context of bodies, trunks, stems, and anything of bulk that the senses can verify. But Buddhism took this ordinary word and built one of its most distinctive doctrines around it. The five skandhas describe how a sentient being comes to experience the world, cling to it, and suffer from that clinging. What exactly are these five things? Are they the building blocks of a person, or are they something more troubling? And why have Buddhist thinkers argued about them for more than two thousand years?

• 2. The Five Heaps

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  Rupa is the first aggregate, translated as "form" or "matter". Buddhist texts teach that the rupa of any person, sentient being, or object is composed of four basic elements: earth, which is solidity; water, which is cohesion; fire, which is heat; and wind, which is motion. The second aggregate is vedana, rendered as "sensation" or "feeling". It is the sensory or hedonic experience of an object, and it is always one of three things: pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Samjna, the third aggregate, is perception. It is the mental process that registers, recognizes, and labels experience. The source gives a telling example: the shape of a tree, the color green, the emotion of fear. These are the kinds of distinctions samjna makes. Samskara, the fourth aggregate, covers "mental formations" or "constructing activities". It includes all types of mental imprints and conditioning triggered by an object, and crucially, any process that makes a person initiate action. The fifth aggregate is vijnana, consciousness. Scholar Peter Harvey notes that consciousness is of six types, corresponding to the six sense organs. In the Nikayas and Agamas, it is cognizance, that which discerns. In Abhidharma texts, it becomes a series of rapidly changing, interconnected discrete acts of cognizance. In some Mahayana sources, it becomes the base that supports all experience.

• 3. Not Self, Not Simple

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  Damien Keown and Charles Prebish state that canonical Buddhism asserts that the notion of a self is unnecessarily superimposed upon the five skandhas. Matthew MacKenzie describes the skandha doctrine as a form of anti-realism about everyday reality, including persons. It asserts that everything perceived, each person and personality, is an aggregate of composite entities without essence. According to Peter Harvey, each aggregate is an object of grasping, at the root of self-identification as "I, me, myself". Realizing the real nature of the skandhas, in terms of both impermanence and non-self, is, for Harvey, necessary for nirvana. This state of non-identification is visible in descriptions of the Arhat and Tathagata, the enlightened figures in whom there is no longer any identification with the five skandhas. The use of the skandhas concept to explain the self is unique to Buddhism among the major Indian religions. It contrasts directly with the premise of Hinduism and Jainism that a living being has an eternal soul or metaphysical self. There is also disagreement within early Buddhist texts themselves. Some early texts consider the individual unreal but the skandhas real. Numerous Nikaya and Agama texts go further, treating the skandhas themselves as unreal and nonsubstantial.

• 4. Activities, Not Ingredients

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  Thanissaro offers a challenge to how the skandhas are usually framed. His argument is that the Buddha never tried to define what a person is, and that approaching the skandhas as a description of a person's constituents is incorrect. Thanissaro's view is that they should be understood as activities, processes that cause suffering but whose unwholesome workings can be interrupted. Rupert Gethin extends this reading. For Gethin, the five skandhas are not merely a Buddhist analysis of the human being; they are five aspects of an individual being's experience of the world, encompassing both grasping and all that is grasped. Mathieu Boisvert points out that the five aggregates of clinging do not incorporate all human experience. Vedana, sensation, can transform into either a type that is not harmful or into a type that acts as an agent bringing about future craving and aversion. This outcome is determined by sanna, perception. Boisvert's reading is strict on this point: not all sanna belong to the sanna-skandha. Wholesome sanna, the kind that recognizes the three marks of existence, namely dukkha, anatta, and anicca, does not belong to the sanna-skandha at all. Without proper sanna, Boisvert writes, a person is likely to generate craving, clinging, and becoming. Miri Albahari offered a further complication, arguing that the khandhas do not necessarily constitute the entirety of human experience and that the Pali Canon does not explicitly negate the Hindu concept of Atman. For Albahari, anatta is best understood as a practical strategy rather than a metaphysical doctrine.

• 5. Dependent Origination

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  According to Boisvert, the function of each aggregate, in order, can be directly correlated with the theory of dependent origination, especially with the eight middle links of the twelve-nidana chain. Four of the five aggregates appear explicitly in that sequence, though in a different order than the standard list. Mental formations condition consciousness, which conditions name-and-form, which conditions the precursors to sensations, which in turn condition craving and clinging, which ultimately lead to what the texts call "the entire mass of suffering". Some scholars regard the twelve-nidana chain as a later synthesis of several older lists. The first four links may even be a commentary on the Vedic-Brahmanic cosmogony, as found in the Hymn of Creation in Book X of the Veda and in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. The Theravada Abhidhamma developed a further analytical layer, the four paramatthas or ultimate realities: material phenomena, mind or consciousness, mental factors, and Nibbana. Three of these are conditioned; one is unconditioned. Bhikkhu Bodhi states that the Theravada tradition teaches the six sense bases as accommodating all the factors of existence, calling them "the all" and noting that they are "empty of a self and of what belongs to the self". Bodhi draws a structural distinction between the two frameworks: the six sense bases offer a vertical view of human experience while the aggregates offer a horizontal, temporal one.

• 6. Emptiness and Mahayana

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  The Prajnaparamita teachings developed from the first century BCE onward and placed heavy emphasis on shunyata, emptiness. According to Red Pine, these texts are a historical reaction to certain early Buddhist Abhidharmas, specifically a response to Sarvastivada teachings that phenomena or their constituents are real. The Prajnaparamita position is that the skandhas too are dependently originated and lack any substantial existence. This position is most famously articulated in the Heart Sutra, whose Sanskrit title is Prajnaparamita Hridaya Sutra. It states that the five skandhas are empty of self-existence, and contains the declaration that has echoed across traditions: "form is emptiness, emptiness is form. The same is true with feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness." The Madhyamaka school, whose foundational text is the Mulamadhyamakakarika written by Nagarjuna, refuted the Sarvastivada conception of reality. Some Buddhist thinkers found it highly problematic that certain positions simultaneously denied a self while still reifying the skandhas. The Yogacara school took yet another path. It further analyzed the workings of the mind and developed the notion of the Eight Consciousnesses. Chogyam Trungpa, drawing on the Vajrayana tradition's mahamudra teachings, identified the form aggregate as the solidification of ignorance. He described the entire five-skandha development as "an attempt on our part to shield ourselves from the truth of our insubstantiality" and wrote that the practice of meditation is to see the transparency of this shield.