The Five Aggregates

🧂 Take this with a pinch of salt and maybe a little pepper 😉

My understanding is limited 💛

"Here, bhikkhus, the instructed noble disciple understands form is subject to arising, subject to vanishing, subject to arising and vanishing. He understands feelings, perceptions, volitional formations, consciousness is subject to arising, subject to vanishing, subject to arising and vanishing. This, bhikkhus, is called true knowledge."

The five aggregates of clinging

Form <> Feeling Tone <> Perception <> Mental Formations <> Conciousness

What is really happening right now?

The arising, sustaining and passing away of the 5 aggregates.

The five khandhas (Pali) (skandha in Sanskrit), or 5 aggregates of clinging have been deeply impactful for me. They are one thing to study as a list, but a whole other ball game to bring into our experience and to actually practice. Each of the 5 can be observed, felt and experienced in their entirety.

These are what arise when we tune into our experience and ask “What is really happening right now?“.

Why they matter (to me.. in this moment)

These five aggregates are a core component in the deconstruction or disassembly of the idea of “self”. These are core to the Buddha’s teachings of “no self”, because when we look to find it, what we will come upon is these 5 aggregates that when assembled puts the self together.

You ever eat a piece of pizza and be like meh - not as a good as last time?

I know I have.
In fact, I do this with SO many things and when I don’t catch this comparison early, my experience of it is not nearly as intimate as it could be, as it would be—if “it were my first time”.
I and most of us LOVE novelty, there is nothing quite like a first experience…or is there? When first contact is fully opened to and additional layers aren’t added on it’s quite the…experience.

This is how I’ve been working with the aggregates and especially perception. A core piece of comparison is our stored memories of other times that we’ve experienced something similar. I’ve found for myself that the more present I am, the more I am able to notice this khandha in realtime, the more I am able to drop it and really experience something as if it were my first time.

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few - Shunryu Suzuki in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

This is a core component of “Beginners Mind”, the ability and capacity to open ourselves to the moment, to possibility and to experience it fresh, regardless of how many times we’ve done it before.

Engaging with this component of the aggregates is a beautiful way to begin or refine the journey of cultivating this skill of Beginners Mind.

How I’ve worked with them

While I have only stumbled into a space where the sense of self is simply non existent, in a way that is neither stable nor consistent nor sustainable and have yet to be able to confirm the deconstruction of “self” through deep investigation of the khandhas in my own experience. I do feel that as I continue working with these I will land upon this, which may result in a more stable embodiment of this insight.

Regardless of the above, applying the five aggregates in the day to day and in practice has been profoundly useful for me as I navigate my day, and have helped me increase my emotional dexterity and moment to moment “hereness”.

While it may be useful to memorize this list, I didn’t find them to really click until I started to practice with each one. There is no end goal here, it’s simply a journey of experiencing the present moment, with each one of these aggregates being a lens or filter through which we can look.

These lenses are being applied regardless of if we choose to look at them or not, but making them conscious and choosing to prioritize one over another as a practice enables us to really see it in action which in turn has helped me see them all flow into each other in real time throughout my day.

Working with these will be a key part of the workshop that I will be giving at Reforesters Lab on 02/02/2025. We will be using sound as the vessel for exploration.

The Five Khandhas

A drum is struck

1. We hear a sound
2. We feel that the sound is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral
3. We perceive the sound, we recognize that it’s a drum, we store this sound
4. What we take this to mean, how we relate to the sound. Maybe we are in a ceremony, maybe we were a drummer as a kid and were told we were bad at it. If we heard the rapid striking of drums while walking down Broadway in Manhattan on a Tuesday it would be odd, if it were St Patrick’s Day it would be normal.
5. The knowing that all of this occurred

Expanding on them

1. Rūpa: Form - the physical occurrence, but less so the fact that a sound went off, but what we actually experience when it happens. This is essential to look at, and is worked with heavily in the first foundation of mindfulness, mindfulness of body. This is where we can shift from concept into the direct felt experience of what is occurring.
2. Vedana, Feeling tone - In Buddhism Vedana simply refers to whether something is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. It’s the basic imprint of how we feel about it, not the emotionality or anything beyond 👍, 👎, 🤷‍♂️
3. Sanna Perceptions - It is perception that labels, it is perception that identifies the drum and not only that it’s a drum but it’s a particular kind of drum, or if we don’t know the kind and find out the kind in that moment, we store that memory and hold it in this space, in this skanda.
4. Sankhara: Mental Formations - This is the more complex emotional state that arises, once we identify what the thing is we then usually spin a story from it. This is where thoughts, moods and mind states arise from an experience. A key component here is that this is where we can see intention & volition begin to arise, this is where we will often “do something about it”, “take care of it” or try to get more of it. This is where greed, aversion and delusion actually play out.
5. Viññāna: Consciousness - This is the part of the mind that simply knows, it’s the bare mirror-like quality of the raw registering of something arising and occurring.
   1. As of 2025-01-21 my understanding of this aggregate is limited. I don’t know what distinction is to be made from this and Rupa.
   2. If Rupa is the direct felt experience, without adding anything, how does it differ from the Consciousness that simply knows. They seem inextricably linked to each other. And maybe that is the point, these are all dependent on each other and arising because of and with one another.

What’s next

As of 2025-01-22

Through putting together this document, I see that the Buddha also goes in depth on not only what I’ve laid out here - the basics of the aggregates, what they are and how to bring them into awareness, he goes into how to work with them through the framework of the 4 noble truths.

The origin of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the practice that leads to its cessation.

As I am still in the base awareness of these, once they have stabilized further, I hope to also work with them in this way,

Source - Rounds of the Grasping Aggregates

As long as I didn’t truly understand these five grasping aggregates in four rounds, I didn’t announce my supreme perfect awakening in this world with its gods, Māras, and Divinities, this population with its ascetics and brahmins, its gods and humans.

But when I did truly understand these five grasping aggregates in four rounds, I announced my supreme perfect awakening in this world with its gods, Māras, and Divinities, this population with its ascetics and brahmins, its gods and humans.

And how are there four rounds? I directly knew form, its origin, its cessation, and the practice that leads to its cessation. I directly knew feeling … perception … choices … consciousness, its origin, its cessation, and the practice that leads to its cessation.

Resources

From the Suttas

22.48. Aggregates
Rounds of the Grasping Aggregates
22.56. Phases of the Clinging Aggregates

Joseph Goldstein on them

Joseph Goldstein has some great talks on these
Satipatthana Sutta - part 20 - The 5 Aggregates - Material, Elements, Perception And Feelings
Satipatthana Sutta - part 21 - The 5 Aggregates: Perception & Formation
Satipatthana Sutta - part 22 - The 5 Aggregates: Formation & Consciousness
Satipatthana Sutta - part 23 - The 5 Aggregates: Non-Self