In the Buddha's Words - Bhikkhu Bodhi [161]
In section 4 we arrive at what I call “the domain of wisdom,” the areas to be explored and penetrated by insight. Many of the texts in this section come from the Saṃyutta Nikāya, whose major chapters are devoted to the principal doctrines of Early Buddhism. I include selections here on the five aggregates; the six sense bases; the elements (in different numerical sets); dependent origination; and the Four Noble Truths. As we survey these selections we will notice certain recurrent patterns.
IX,4(1) The Five Aggregates. The five aggregates (pañcakkhandha) are the main categories the Nikāyas use to analyze human experience. The five are: (1) form (rūpa), the physical component of experience; (2) feeling (vedanā), the “affective tone” of experience—either pleasant, painful, or neutral; (3) perception (saññā), the identification of things through their distinctive marks and features; (4) volitional formations (saṅkhārā), a term for the multifarious mental factors involving volition, choice, and intention; and (5) consciousness (viññāṇa), cognition arisen through any of the six sense faculties—eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind.
Examination of the five aggregates, the topic of the Khandhasaṃyutta (Saṃyutta Nikāya, chapter 22), is critical to the Buddha’s teaching for at least four reasons. First, the five aggregates are the ultimate referent of the first noble truth, the noble truth of suffering (see the exposition of the first truth in Text II,5), and since all four truths revolve around suffering, understanding the aggregates is essential for understanding the Four Noble Truths as a whole. Second, the five aggregates are the objective domain of clinging and as such contribute to the causal origination of future suffering. Third, clinging to the five aggregates must be removed to attain liberation. And fourth, the kind of wisdom needed to remove clinging is precisely clear insight into the true nature of the aggregates. The Buddha himself declares that so long as he did not understand the five aggregates in terms of their individual nature, arising, cessation, and the way to their cessation, he did not claim to have attained perfect enlightenment. The full understanding of the five aggregates is a task he likewise enjoins on his disciples. The five aggregates, he says, are the things that must be fully understood; their full understanding brings the destruction of greed, hatred, and delusion (SN 22:23).
The word khandha (Skt: skandha) means, among other things, a heap or mass (rāsi). The five aggregates are so called because they each unite under one label a multiplicity of phenomena that share the same defining characteristic. Thus whatever form there is, “past, future, or present, internal or external, gross or subtle, inferior or superior, far or near,” is incorporated into the form aggregate; whatever feeling there is, “past, future, or present, internal or external, gross or subtle, inferior or superior, far or near,” is incorporated into the feeling aggregate; and so for each of the other aggregates. Text IX,4(1)(a) enumerates in simple terms the constituents of each aggregate and shows that each aggregate arises and ceases in correlation with its own specific condition; the Noble Eightfold Path is the way to bring each aggregate to an end. Here we find the “four-truth pattern” applied to the five aggregates, an application that follows quite logically from the role that the five aggregates play in representing the first noble truth.
This sutta makes a distinction between trainees and arahants similar to that made by the Discourse on Right View. Trainees have directly known the five aggregates by way of the four-truth pattern and are practicing for their fading away and cessation; they have thereby “gained a foothold (gādhanti) in this Dhamma and Discipline.” Arahants too have directly known the five aggregates by way of the four-truth pattern, but they have gone further than the trainees. They have extirpated all attachment to the