Our discussion on epistemology began with the Mind-Body Problem. There is the Mind-Body Problem because “it is not obvious how the concept of the mind and the concept of the body relate.” The central question that has never been answered over the centuries is: “Are the mind and body two distinct entities or a single entity?”
The debate between philosophers John Locke (1632-1704) and George Berkeley (1685-1753) was used as an example in our discussion. Locke thought that “our notion about what actually exists – and therefore our understanding of the reality of the world – must always derive ultimately from what has been experienced through the senses.” To which Berkeley wondered, “What possible warrant can we have for asserting that the existence of these mental contents is caused by things of an entirely and fundamentally different character from them to which we can never have direct access, namely objects.”
This post discusses Buddha’s doctrine of the Five Aggregates or the five aggregates of being for all beings in the cosmos. It is a fundamental doctrine for Mahayana Buddhists who believe that Buddha’s central message to humanity is their misunderstanding of reality. Simply put, humanity’s misunderstanding of reality is their insistence that the body and the mind are different and the body is the real of the two. Buddha calls that understanding delusional and the root cause of humanity’s existential suffering.
Therefore, Buddha’s soteriological goal is for humanity to understand that the body and the mind are not distinguishable because both are the mind. Furthermore, everything in the world deemed physical or material does not exist separately from the mentality underlying them all.
In his doctrine of The Five Aggregates, Buddha shows that the delusional misunderstanding of reality is built into the aggregates of all human beings without them knowing. Furthermore, in his Three Delicate Marks doctrine, Buddha teaches that the delusional misunderstanding of reality begins with the conscious epiphenomena deep in the quantum realm.
In our current discussion of the Five Aggregates, we leverage Dr. Fisch’s insight into humanity’s five sensing steps to help us explain the five aggregates of being Buddha teaches. While Dr. Fisch’s five sensing steps match Buddha’s five aggregates of beings precisely, their difference is that Buddha’s five aggregates of being involve consciousness.
In discussing “How Do We Know What We Know?” Dr. Fisch enumerates the following five “sensing” steps.
- “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses,”
- “the content imparted on those stimuli is the reading-in of the mind,”
- “the content gets fashioned and conceptualized by our minds in ways that we do not govern,”
- “Sitting in the command room of our minds with the inner eyes and looking out,”
- “seeing on the screen the world that we experience.”
Aggregates are known in Romanized Sanskrit as Skandha.
Skandha (Chinese=蘊), according to The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, is “in Sanskrit, lit. “heap,” viz. “aggregates,” or “aggregates of being.”
Buddha’s Five Aggregates are:
- Rupaskandha (Chinese=色蘊), the Aggregage of Rupa;
- Vedanaskandha (Chinese=受蘊), the Aggregate of Sensing or Receiving;
- Samjnaskandha. (Chinese=想蘊), the Aggregate of Active Mentality;
- Samskaraskandha (Chinese=行蘊), the Aggregate of Action; and
- Vijnanaskandha Chinese=識蘊), or the Aggregate of Consciousness
Although Buddha’s Five Aggregates and Dr. Fisch’s five sensing steps are comparable, their orders differ slightly. While Dr. Fisch’s last step is “seeing on the screen the world that we experience,” that step is the first in the Five Aggregates. All other four steps are in the same order. So, since Dr. Fisch’s five sensing steps start with “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses,” the equivalent to this step, the second of the Five Aggregates, will be presented first.
2) Vedanaskandha (Chinese=受蘊), according to the Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, is “in Sanskrit and Pali, “sensation,” or “sensory feeling.” The Chinese translation of Vedana is “to receive or accept.”
It corresponds to Dr. Fisch’s first sensing steps, “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses.” Both suggest that our sensory faculties sense the content from the outside world. Human sensory faculties are the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and bodily parts.
In Buddha’s cosmos, where there is Nothing but Mentality, all beings have consciousness, including the sensory faculties.
Indeed, Buddha assigns each sensory faculty its own consciousness (Romanized Sanskrit=vijnana, Chinese=識):
- Visual Consciousness (Romanized Sanskrit=caksurvijnana, Chinese=眼識);
- Auditory Consciousness (Romanized Sanskrit=srotravijnana, Chinese=耳識),
- Olfactory Consciousness (Romanized Sanskrit=ghranavijnana, Chinese=鼻識),
- Gustatory Consciousness (Romanized Sanskrit=jihvavijnana, Chinese=舌識),
- Tactile Consciousness (Romanized Sanskrit=kayavijnana, Chinese=身識),
- Mental Consciousness (Romanized Sanskrit=manovijnana, Chinese=意識).
By starting with “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses,” Dr. Fisch essentially agrees with Locke that “our understanding of the reality of the world – must always derive ultimately from what has been experienced through the senses.” However, as no one has since Berkley had, he could not answer the question of how material reality from the outside world can impact our senses without crashing in on them to become “reading in of the mind” in the following step.
Indeed, as someone who relies exclusively on inferentially connected vocabulary to understand the world, even world-renowned scholars like Dr. Fisch are not in a position to answer this question.
To answer these questions, we turn to quantum mechanics and Buddha.
As discussed earlier, Dr. David Tong firmly said in his video lecture that “there are no particles in the world.” Furthermore, in this episode of Closer to Truth, Dr. Frank Wickek, a 2004 Nobel Laureate physicist, said that Newtonian particles are no longer building blocks of the universe. He said, “The most basic objects out of which to construct the universe are not particles but objects we call quantum fields. We think of them as space-filling ethers that create and destroy the objects, the particles. …….. We see particles as epiphenomena. They are kind of ripples on the deep structure.”
In other words, quantum fields have replaced Newtonian particles as the building blocks of the universe. Additionally, particles no longer exist because they have become epiphenomena.
Epiphenomena, by definition, are secondary phenomena derived from another phenomenon. In this case, epiphenomena are derived from quantum fields.
The following image is from Dr. David Tong, showing what epiphenomena looks like. Indeed, as Dr. Wilczek put it, epiphenomena are ripples in the quantum fields which connect all the ripples.
The following image is from Dr. Tony Tyson. As the writings on the images suggest, these “peaks” represent clusters of galaxies. However, the image does not show these clusters of galaxies as separate entities. Instead, they are shown as connected, similar to the ripples in Dr. Tong’s image. In other words, these clusters of galaxies are also epiphenomena, ripples in the quantum fields, only much bigger.
From these images, we understand that all phenomena in the universe, from the ripples in the quantum realm to clusters of galaxies in the sky, are epiphenomena because they are all ripples in their underlying fluctuating field connecting them all. In other words, there are no particles, only waves of quantum fluctuations.
These critically essential teachings from quantum mechanics are mentioned because they apply to Buddhism. As shall be discussed, Buddhism has its version of epiphenomena, and its equivalent to the quantum realm known as non-luminosity. While they will be addressed in the future, they are mentioned here to indicate the information from quantum mechanics applies to Buddhism. Their difference is that epiphenomena and non-non-luminosity are conscious.
So, “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses” is possible without the world crashing on our senses because there is nothing material in the world, only waves of quantum fluctuations. While these waves are quantum energy in quantum mechanics, they are consciousness in non-luminosity. These conscious waves of nature are what impact our sensory faculties.
3) The third Aggregates is Samjnaskandha. (Chinese=想蘊), the Aggregate of Active Mentality.
Samjna, according to The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, is “in Sanskrit, “perception,” “discrimination,” or “(conceptual) identification.” The Chinese translation of samjnaskandha is the Aggregate of Thinking. Whether it is perception, discrimination,” or “conceptual” identification, the Samjnaskandha signifies an active mind.
As an active mind, Samjnaskandha makes it possible for Dr. Fisch’s “the content imparted on those stimuli” to become “reading-in of the mind.”
Again, Dr. Fisch did not elaborate on where the “contents imparted” on the sensory faculties come from or what they are.
In Buddha’s view, the contents imparting our sensory faculties are carried by the conscious waves of the world.
As discussed in a previous post, these are “experiential contents.” By definition, experiential contents are contents that can be experienced or sensed, as Vedanaskandha defines them. In his discussion with Dr. Lawrence Kuhn about How We Know What We Know, Dr. Fisch calls the experiential contents empirical facts that can be “felt.”
Whether they are called experiential contents that can be experienced or empirical facts that can be felt, they are information embedded in the conscious construct of everything in the cosmos carried by conscious waves imparting our senses.
4) The fourth Aggregate is Samskaraskandha (Chinese=行蘊), the Aggregate of Action.
Samskaraskandha, according to the Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, is “in Sanskrit, a polysemous term that is variously translated as “formation,” “volition,” “volitional action,” “conditioned,” and “conditioning factors.” The Chinese translation of samskaraskandha is “action.”
With help from Dr. Fisch, we realize that after the experiential contents become the “reading-in” of the mind, the action in the mind is their conceptualization “in ways we do not govern.”
Conceptualization, of course, distorts the experiential contents of the world to become mental constructs of human minds.
5) The fifth Aggregate is Vijnanaskandha Chinese=識蘊), or the Aggregate of Consciousness. It corresponds to Dr. Fisch’s description: “Sitting in the command room of our minds with the inner eyes and looking out.”
Vijnana, according to the Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, is “consciousness.”
To discuss the meaning of the Aggregate of Consciousness, we turn to the Consciousness-Only School of Buddhism.
Consciousness-Only School of Buddhism (Romanized Sanskrit=vijñanavada; Chinese=唯識宗), “also known as the Yogachara school, is one of the two major Mahayana schools in India. Maitreya, who is thought to have lived around 270-350 (350-430 according to another account), is often regarded as the founder of the Consciousness-Only school. This school upholds the concept that all phenomena arise from the vijnana or consciousness and that the basis of all functions of consciousness is the Alaya-consciousness.”
According to The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, “the cardinal doctrine of the Consciousness-Only School is that the objects of experience are mere projections of consciousness. Thus, all objects are mere representations, and all categories are mere designations. No object is the natural basis of its name; rather, the mind itself instead designates the object.”
In other words, there is no “command room” or “inner eyes looking out” in the mind. Instead, Buddha teaches that the consciousness that receives the “experiential contents” from the world, allowing them to become the “reading in of the mind,” then distorting them “in ways we do not govern,” also projects the conceptualized mental constructs to be seen on the “screen“ as “the world that we experience,” as Dr. Fisch described them.
Indeed, from the Aggregate of Consciousness, we enter “the world we experience,” the last of Dr. Fisch’s five sensing steps. It corresponds to the first Aggregate, Rupaskandha (Chinese=色蘊), or the Aggregate of Rupa.
1) Rupa (Chinese=色), according to The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, is “in Sanskrit and Pali, “body,” “form,” or “materiality,” viz., that which has shape and is composed of matter. More generally, rupa refers to materiality, which serves as the object of the five sensory consciousness (vijnana): visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile.”
In other words, rupa represents the material world that humans experience through seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. Rupa, therefore, is what Dr. Fisch called “the world that we experience.” In the Body-Mind Problem, the rupa represents the “body.”
However, in Buddha’s words, rupas are “mere projections of consciousness. As “objects of experience,” not only is there nothing “body,” “form,” or “materiality” about rupas, but they cannot even exist without their subject’s consciousness projecting them.
Undoubtedly, all the aggregates of all the beings in the world are consciousness, the “mind” in the Mind-Body Problem. Indeed, there is no “body,” “form,” or “materiality” in the aggregates of any beings.
Our discussion on Epistemology began by saying that Buddha considers the Mind-Body Problem a delusional misunderstanding of reality. Furthermore, Buddha teaches that delusional misunderstanding of reality is the cause of existential suffering in humans and that Buddhism exists because Buddha wanted humanity to correct that delusional misunderstanding and be liberated from existential suffering.
In the following post, we will discuss how a well-known Bodhisattva liberates himself from his existential suffering by recognizing the mental nature of everything in the world through understanding the Five Aggregates. His example shows why Buddha’s teachings, based on his unique epistemology, are the only self-sufficient, logically consistent, and verifiable education on the nature of reality about the world.
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