The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha - Bhikkhu Nanamoli [8]
The pivotal notion around which the truths revolve is that of dukkha, translated here as “suffering.” The Pali word originally meant simply pain and suffering, a meaning it retains in the texts when it is used as a quality of feeling: in these cases it has been rendered as “pain” or “painful.” As the first noble truth, however, dukkha has a far wider significance, reflective of a comprehensive philosophical vision. While it draws its affective colouring from its connection with pain and suffering, and certainly includes these, it points beyond such restrictive meanings to the inherent unsatisfactoriness of everything conditioned. This unsatisfactoriness of the conditioned is due to its impermanence, its vulnerability to pain, and its inability to provide complete and lasting satisfaction.
The notion of impermanence (aniccatā) forms the bedrock for the Buddha’s teaching, having been the initial insight that impelled the Bodhisatta to leave the palace in search of a path to enlightenment. Impermanence, in the Buddhist view, comprises the totality of conditioned existence, ranging in scale from the cosmic to the microscopic. At the far end of the spectrum the Buddha’s vision reveals a universe of immense dimensions evolving and disintegrating in repetitive cycles throughout beginningless time—“many aeons of world-contraction, many aeons of world-expansion, many aeons of world-contraction and expansion” (MN 4.27). In the middle range the mark of impermanence comes to manifestation in our inescapable mortality, our condition of being bound to ageing, sickness, and death (MN 26.5), of possessing a body that is subject “to being worn and rubbed away, to dissolution and disintegration” (MN 74.9). And at the close end of the spectrum, the Buddha’s teaching discloses the radical impermanence uncovered only by sustained attention to experience in its living immediacy: the fact that all the constituents of our being, bodily and mental, are in constant process, arising and passing away in rapid succession from moment to moment without any persistent underlying substance. In the very act of observation they are undergoing “destruction, vanishing, fading away, and ceasing” (MN 74.11).
This characteristic of impermanence that marks everything conditioned leads directly to the recognition of the universality of dukkha or suffering. The Buddha underscores this all-pervasive aspect of dukkha when, in his explanation of the first noble truth, he says, “In short, the five aggregates affected by clinging are suffering.” The five aggregates affected by clinging (pañc’upādānakkhandhā) are a classificatory scheme that the Buddha had devised for demonstrating the composite nature of personality. The scheme comprises every possible type of conditioned state, which it distributes into five categories—material form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. The aggregate of material form (rūpa) includes the physical body with its sense faculties as well as external material objects. The aggregate of feeling (vedanā) is the affective element in experience, either pleasant, painful, or neutral. Perception (saññā), the third aggregate, is the factor responsible for noting the qualities of things and also accounts for recognition and memory. The formations aggregate (sankhārā) is an umbrella term that includes all volitional, emotive, and intellective aspects of mental life. And consciousness (viññāṇa), the fifth aggregate, is the basic awareness of an object indispensable