This post discusses Buddha’s doctrine of the Five Aggregates.
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.” In other words, the Five Aggregates are Buddha’s enumerating the constituents of all beings in the universe. The Five Aggregates are extremely important in Buddhism because correctly understanding the Five Aggregates satisfies Buddha’s soteriological goal.
In his discussion on “How Do We Know What We Know?” Dr. Fisch preceded his discussion on inference by first introducing the five steps of human “sensing,” i.e., seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. The five steps are:
- “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.”
That these sensing steps end in “the world we experience” indicates that the world appears from what humans see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. Therefore, these five sensing steps can be considered the five constituents of every being in the world.
That is the meaning of the Five Aggregates. The Five Aggregates are the constituents of all beings in the universe because they are Buddha’s sensing steps that match precisely with the five steps Dr. Fisch described above, with one significant difference: Buddha’s Five Aggregates are all conscious.
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.
However, although Buddha’s Five Aggregates and Dr. Fisch’s five sensing steps are comparable, the arrangement of their sensing steps differs slightly. While Dr. Fisch’s last step is “seeing on the screen the world that we experience,” it is the first of Buddha’s Five Aggregates. All other four steps are in the same order. In the following discussion, we will slightly adjust our discussion by discussing Dr. Fisch’s first step with the second Aggregates so everything is synchronized at the end.
Dr. Fisch’s first sensing step is “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses,” and it corresponds to the second Aggregate: Vedanaskandha.
Buddha’s second Aggregate is Vedanaskandha (Chinese=受蘊), which, 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.”
Both Dr. Fisch’s first step and Buddha’s second Aggregate suggest that human interaction with the outside world begins with their sensory faculties sensing/receiving the content from the outside world. Human sensory faculties are the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and bodily parts.
In Buddha’s universe, where everything deemed “physical” is conscious, all human bodily parts 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).
In this discussion on sensing, we use visual consciousness as the example of the sensing faculty because observation is by far how humans sense the world.
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, “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.”
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.
Quantum mechanics plays a role because, with the advent of Quantum Field Theory, “there are no particles in the world,” as Dr. David Tong said firmly in his video lecture, Quantum Fields: The Real Building Blocks of the Universe.” Furthermore, in this episode of Closer to Truth, Dr. Frank Wickek, a 2004 Nobel Laureate physicist, indicated that Newtonian-style 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, there are no particles in Quantum Field Theory because quantum fields have replaced them. When waves fluctuate, ripples form. When ripples are large enough to be measured, they become epiphenomena, replacing the Newtonian particles. They are called epiphenomena because they are secondary phenomena whose existence is dependent conditionally on the quantum field fluctuations. Without fluctuations, epiphenomena do not exist.
The following image is from Dr. David Tong, showing the large ripples as epiphenomena.
The following image is from Dr. Tony Tyson. As Dr. Lawrence Krauss explained in “A Universe From Nothing,” “The spikes are where the galaxies are.” However, the image does not show galaxies as separate entities. Instead, they are shown as connected, similar to the ripples in Dr. Tong’s image. In other words, these galaxies are also epiphenomena, and, like ripples in the fluctuating quantum field, they also exist conditionally.
In other words, according to the Quantum Field Theory, all phenomena, from the ripples in the quantum realm to galaxies in the sky, are epiphenomena, large ripples in the wavy field connecting them all.
These critically essential teachings from the quantum field theory are mentioned because they apply to Buddhism. In Buddhism, there is also a fluctuating realm known as non-luminosity (Romanized Sanskrit=tamasa; Chinese=無明), although what fluctuates in it is mentality, not quantum energy. There are many reasons why the quantum field and non-luminosity are comparable. For the discussion at hand, they are similar because, like the quantum fields are the foundational blocks of the quantum universe, non-luminosity is where the conscious universe originated.
So, like the quantum mechanical universe, all universal phenomena in Buddha’s universe, from the quantum realm to galaxies in the sky, are epiphenomena. However, unlike the quantum mechanical epiphenomena, Buddha’s epiphenomena are conscious because they are fluctuations in the mental field.
So, when “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses” through the eyes, the eyes can observe the world without the world crashing onto them because what interacts with the visual consciousness are the conscious waves emanating from everything in the universe, which are the epiphenomena. There is nothing solid in these conscious waves to crash onto the eyes.
3) Dr. Fisch’s second sensing step is “the content imparted on those stimuli is the reading-in of the mind,” and it corresponds to the third Aggregate, Samjnaskandha (Chinese=想蘊).
Buddha’s third Aggregage is Samjnaskandha, which, 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.
The fact that the definition of Samjnaskandha includes so many varied mental functions indicates that the third Aggregate signifies an active mind. Indeed, an active mind is necessary for “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.
As discussed in the previous post, “contents imparted” are “experiential contents” in Buddhism. By definition, experiential contents are contents that can be experienced or sensed, as Vedanaskandha defines them. In Dr. Fisch’s words, they are 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 Buddha’s cosmos, which, as mentioned earlier, are the epiphenomena. The waves of these epiphenomena carry the embedded information to the visual consciousness to be observed.
4) Dr. Fisch’s third sensing step is “the content gets fashioned and conceptualized by our minds in ways that we do not govern,” and it corresponds to the fourth Aggregate, Samskaraskandha (Chinese=行蘊).
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.”
Again, whether “volition,” “volitional action,” “conditioned,” or “conditioning factors,” they all signify mental actions. With help from Dr. Fisch, we understand that the action in the mind is the conceptualization of the contents that “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses” “in ways we do not govern.”
Conceptualization, of course, distorts the contents that “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses.”
Dr. Fisch’s fourth sensing step is “sitting in the command room of our minds with the inner eyes and looking out,” and it corresponds to the fifth Aggregate, Vijnanaskandha Chinese=識蘊).
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.”
Indeed, there is no “command room” or “inner eyes looking out” in the mind. Instead, there are projections of consciousness. In other words, the consciousness in the brain not only senses the content that “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses” but allows them to become the “reading in of the mind,” conceptualize them “in ways we do not govern,” also projects the conceptualized content to be seen on the “screen“ as “the world that we experience,” as Dr. Fisch described them.
Indeed, from the fifth 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 “body,” “form,” or “materiality” of the physical world humans experience through what they see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. Described by Buddha as “objects of experience,” rupa is the same as what Dr. Fisch called “the world that we experience.” In the Body-Mind Problem, the rupa represents the “body.” However, there is no “body, form, or materiality” in “the world that we experience” because as “objects of experience,” all phenomena in “the world that we experience” are but “mere projections of consciousness.”
In other words, “the world that we experience” exists only in the mind when it is active and projections of consciousness are possible. Therefore, it should disappear when the mind is quiescent, and projections of consciousness are impossible.
As discussed earlier, a quiescent mind is a “no thought” mind, which is Buddha’s definition of enlightenment. In other words, “the world that we experience” should disappear upon enlightenment.
Indeed, from the enlightenment experience of the contemporary Adyashanti and the two Chinese Dharma Masters from hundreds of years ago, the universe disappeared when their minds became quiescent at the time of enlightenment. When the “physical” universe disappeared, what they realized was the Ultimate Reality, where there is Nothing but Mentality.
However, the Ultimate Reality also exists in the mind only when the mind is inactive. When the mind becomes active again, it disappears.
In other words, everything that exist, exists in the mind. While the enlightened Ultimate Reality exists in a quiescent mind, the unenlightened “the world we experience” exists in an active mind.
Therefore, in Diamond Sutra, Buddha teaches about the illusional nature of “the world we experience” by stating:
“All conditioned phenomena (Romanized Sanskrit=dharma, Chinese=法) are like the illusions of dreams and shadows of bubbles (Chinese=一切有為法; 如夢幻泡影),
like dew and lightening, this is how to have insight into all phenomena (Chinese=如露亦如電, 應作如是觀.”）
Our discussion on epistemology began with the Mind-Body Problem. The Mind-Body Problem “is a philosophical problem concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness in the human mind and body. It addresses the nature of consciousness, mental states, and their relation to the physical brain and nervous system. The problem centers on understanding how immaterial thoughts and feelings can interact with the material world, or whether they are ultimately physical phenomena.”
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.“
While Locke was right that “our understanding of the reality of the world – must always derive ultimately from what has been experienced through the senses,” and Berkely was also right to question Locke, “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,” ultimately not only they could not find a solution, but neither did anyone following them centuries later. The reason is that humanity knows what it knows using inference. On the other hand, by using direct perception, Buddha realized that there is no “body,” “form,” or “materiality” in the cosmos because there is Nothing but Mentality.
From the discussion above, it is apparent that while all sensing distorts information received from the outside world but also conceptualizes it “in ways we do not govern,” the effect of observation is the most significant since it is the most common way humans interact with the world. Indeed, by changing the invisible information received from the outside world to become the visible “world we experience,” the Observation Effect causes misunderstanding of reality in humanity without its knowledge or control. In a future post, we will discuss why the Observer Effect is often misunderstood and what its correct understanding is.
With the Observed Effect clarified, we then use it to answer “Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?” which has remained unanswerable since German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz asked it in the seventeenth century.
However, we first use the example of a well-known Bodhisattva in the next post to illustrate the critical importance of understanding the Five Aggregates correctly because it can allow one to become a Tathagata, be like our Buddha, and satisfy Buddha’s soteriological goal.
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