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, meaning the five constituents of being for all beings in the cosmos. The Five Aggregates are extremely important because they lead to the understanding that there is no Mind-Body Problem, its root cause, and the last essential step in satisfying Buddha’s soteriological goal.
However, significant though they are in Buddhism, the Five Aggregates are widely misunderstood, even among some Buddhists.
In Buddha’s cosmos, where mentality is the only perduring reality, the five constituents of beings should be all mental. However, while four of them are obviously mental, the fifth one, rupa, meaning “body,” “form,” or “materiality,” viz., that which has shape and is composed of matter,” is often misinterpreted as being “material.” For example, The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism defines the Five Aggregates as “Of the five, only rupa is material; the remaining four involve mentality.” Buddha would have called that a delusional misunderstanding of reality. However, as explained later, delusion is unknowable, indeed unavoidable, for all unenlightened humans.
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.
In discussing “How Do We Know What We Know?” Dr. Fisch’s comments on how humans interact with the world can be listed separately as 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.”
In our 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. While Dr. Fisch’s five sensing steps precisely match Buddha’s five aggregates of beings, there are differences.
- Their difference is that Buddha’s Five Aggregates of being contain consciousness, while Dr. Fisch’s five sensing steps do not. So, in the following discussion, we will incorporate consciousness when appropriate.
- 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,” it is the first in the Five Aggregates. All other four steps are in the same order. So, we will adjust our discussion slightly by discussing the second Aggregate first to synchronize the Five Aggregates with Dr. Fisch’s five sensing steps.
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.
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.”
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).
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 their existence is dependent conditionally on the quantum field fluctuations. Without fluctuations, epiphenomena do not exist.
The following image is from Dr. David Tong, showing ripples large enough to be 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.
From these images, we understand that all phenomena in the quantum mechanical universe, from the quantum realm to galaxies in the sky, are epiphenomena. They are all ripples of the fluctuating field that connects 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. However, like the quantum fields are the foundational blocks of the scientific 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. Like the quantum mechanical universe, all phenomena in Buddha’s universe are ripples in a field that connects them all. However, unlike the quantum field, what fluctuates in non-luminosity is mentality, not quantum energy. As such, the waves of a non-luminosity are conscious.
So, when “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses,” such as with the eyes, the eyes can sense the world without the world crashing onto them because what interacts with the consciousness of the eyes are the conscious waves of the universal epiphenomena, not the phenomena themselves. 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).
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.
The fact that the definition of Samjnaskandha includes so many varied mental functions indicates that the Third Aggregates is not well understood. However, with the help of Dr. Fisch, we know the next step is “the reading-in of the mind,” which requires an active mind. Indeed, whether “perception, discrimination,” “conceptual identification,” or “thinking,” all require an active mind. Therefore, Samjnaskandha should signify 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.
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 all conscious beings in Buddha’s cosmos. The conscious waves mentioned above carry the information to the consciousness of our eyes to be sensed.
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, the fact that the definition of Samskaraskandha suggests that Samskaraskandha is a polysemous term that includes so many varied mental functions indicates that the Fourth Aggregates is not well understood as well. With help from Dr. Fisch, we can comprehend 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 contents that “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses.”
5) 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.”
In other words, there is no “command room” or “inner eyes looking out” in the Mind. Instead, Buddha teaches that the consciousness of the eyes that receive the content that “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses” is the same consciousness that allows them to become the “reading in of the mind,” conceptualize them “in ways we do not govern,” and is the same consciousness that projects the distorted content that “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses,” 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 “body,” “form,” or “materiality” of the physical world humans experience through the consciousness of our sensory faculties. 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.”
Without a doubt, from the conscious waves carrying the “experiential contents” that “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses,” to the contents becoming the “reading in of the mind,” to their “conceptualization in ways we do not govern,” to the conceptualized contents becoming “mere projections of consciousness” to their becoming “the world we experience,” there is no “body,” “form,” or “materiality” in any of the five constituents of all beings in the universe. All five constituents of beings are mental.
Additionally, since rupas are “mere projections of consciousness,” they are illusional because they cannot exist without their subject’s consciousness projecting them. This illusional nature of the universe is verifiable through Adyashanti’s enlightenment experience, as well as those of two Chinese Dharma Masters from hundreds of years ago. When their minds became quiescent at the time of enlightenment, the universe disappeared from them because projections of consciousness require an active mind.
In Diamond Sutra, Buddha teaches about the illusional nature of the world 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.”）
As it is apparent from the discussion above, Five Aggregates represent a natural human observation process. Therefore, not only is the distortion of information from the outside world by being conceptualized “in ways we do not govern” unavoidable, but it also happens without anyone knowing. Indeed, the Observation Effect is the root cause of human delusion. In a future post, we will discuss why it is often misunderstood and what its correct understanding is.
With the Observed Effect clarified, we then use the Observed Effect 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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