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 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 to have all beings be liberated from their delusional misunderstanding of reality and existential sufferings. While the Five Aggregates play a critical role in the process, they are also widely misunderstood. As far as I know, no one has ever tried to explain it epistemologically. This is what we try to do.
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 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 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 epistemologically. 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,” that step 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 final 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 Aggregates: 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.”
Dr. Fisch’s first step and the second Aggregate both suggest that our sensory faculties sense/receive 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, there are no particles in quantum mechanics because quantum fields have replaced them. When waves fluctuate, ripples form. The ripples in quantum fluctuations are what Dr. Wilczek called the epiphenomena. They are called epiphenomena because, by definition, these ripples are secondary phenomena derived from the quantum fluctuations.
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. The characteristic of these epiphenomena is that they are connected by the quantum field in which they fluctuate. In other words, they do not exist independently. They disappear when the fields stop fluctuating.
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 the spikes are the ripples connected by the quantum fields, only much bigger.
From these images, we understand that all phenomena in the universe, from the quantum realm to galaxies in the sky, are epiphenomena. They are all ripples of their underlying fluctuating field connecting them all. There are no particles, only ripples in quantum fluctuations in quantum mechanics.
These critically essential teachings from quantum mechanics 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). However, while what fluctuates in quantum mechanics is quantum energy, what fluctuates in non-luminosity is mentality. Like the quantum fields in quantum mechanics, non-luminosity serves as the foundational block of Buddha’s universe. Of course, as a field of fluctuations, non-luminosity has its ripples and epiphenomena, except that Buddha’s epiphenomena are conscious. They will all be addressed in the future. They are mentioned here to indicate the information from quantum mechanics applies to Buddhism.
So, what “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses” are waves of consciousness, thus making it possible for our sensory faculties to sense the world without the world crashing on them.
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. 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 can understand that whether it is “perception, discrimination,” “conceptual identification,” or “thinking,” 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.
As discussed in a previous post, these are “experiential contents” in Buddhism. By definition, experiential contents are contents that can be experienced or sensed, as Vedanaskandha defines them. They are equivalent to what Dr. Fisch mentioned as 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 our eyes to be sensed.
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.”
Again, the fact that the definition of Samskaraskandha includes so many varied mental functions indicates that the Fourth Aggregates is not well understood as well. 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 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 of our sensory organs that receives the “experiential contents” from the world is the same consciousness that allows them to become the “reading in of the mind,” then conceptualize them “in ways we do not govern,” also projects the conceptualized 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 “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 represents 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 “mere projections of consciousness,” not only is there nothing “body,” “form,” or “materiality” about rupas, but even their appearances are illusional because they cannot exist without their subject’s consciousness projecting them.
Indeed, from the Aggregate when the conscious waves first impact our sensory organs to the final Aggregate becoming “the world we experience,” there is no “body,” “form,” or “materiality” in any of the five aggregates of all beings in the cosmos. All the aggregates are mental, and “the world we experience” is but an illusional “projection of consciousness.” In other words, in the Mind-Body Problem, everything is the mind, and the body is illusional.
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 become Tathagatas like him. Only when one becomes Tathagatas can one correct one’s delusional misunderstanding of reality and be liberated from existential suffering.
In the following post, we will discuss how the well-known Avalokiteśvara Bodhisattva liberates himself from his existential suffering by recognizing the mental nature of the Five Aggregates. By understanding that all the Five Aggregates are mental, Avalokiteśvara is on his way to becoming a Tathagata, thus satisfying Buddha’s soteriological goal.
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