What are the Five Skandhas: "Get Out of Your Head", article by Sean Murphy

When we project the conditioning of our past onto the present, we turn a benign moment into something else. Understanding the "five conditions" can help us return to reality.

Like many others, I have always found the traditional Buddhist formulations of the five "aggregates" (Skt., skandhas) difficult to put into practice in my everyday life. For me, these teachings, which identify the five strata of existence that make up human experience, have always sat in the category of "philosophically interesting" but hard to apply in practice. This changed when I met the late American Zen master Bernie Glassman (1939–2018).

In the early 1990s, while I was studying for a master's degree in writing at Naropa Institute, a liberal arts university in Boulder, Colorado, founded by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa, I often drove Bernie, who sat on Naropa's board of directors and flew in frequently from New York to attend meetings. At that time I was still a junior Zen practitioner, and Bernie, as one of the first Americans to be officially recognised as a Zen master (having received transmission of the Zen lineage from Taizan Maezumi Roshi in 1976), seemed to me more than human, rather intimidating. He told me to call him Bernie, which helped calm my nerves. As I came to know him as his assistant and practised alongside him on retreats, he remained "Bernie".

I suspect Bernie eventually moved past, and even forgot, the particular presentation of the five skandhas he gave during an informal seminar with Zen practitioners at Naropa. Nevertheless, his view of the five skandhas offered a clarification that I found immediately useful, to the point that today I still use a version of it with the students of my university meditation courses, many of whom had never been exposed to Buddhist principles.

Although the translations and interpretations of the skandha system have varied, what they all share is a representation in five basic factors of human experience. Taken together, these factors account for everything we consider reality and, by extension, the subject. A traditional presentation might go something like this:

1. Form (Pali, rupa)—the physical world.
2. Sensation or feeling (vedana): these are not "sensations" or "feelings" as understood in ordinary English usage, but our simplest responses to experience: pleasure, displeasure or indifference.
3. Perception (sanna)—again, not "perception" in the ordinary English sense, but the recognition or interpretation of sensory objects, followed by a mental process in which they are labelled.
4. Mental formations (sankharas)—volitional mental actions, triggered by some object, which produce karma.
5. Consciousness (vinnana): awareness, including thoughts, which this system regards as objects perceived through the "sense door" of the mind.

A central point of this system is that all the factors that make up our experience are always changing, are subject to conditions, are ungraspable and impermanent, and therefore give rise to suffering. And no "self" can be found in any of them.

In general, this presentation, which I first learnt during my Zen training, is quite clear and useful, but once one starts to probe the individual terms, the teaching becomes much more confusing. On the one hand, several translated terms differ from their common meaning in English. And according to the traditional view of the fourth skandha, "mental formations" includes factors ranging from emotions such as envy to mental states and intentional actions, such as right livelihood, and others that seem involuntary, such as sluggishness. Perhaps this helps explain why I, for example, have always found the technical terms of the system interesting to reflect on, but difficult to understand, let alone put into practice. However, I do not mean to criticise the original system by saying this. Rather, we might speculate that these concerns about accessibility are what led Bernie to reformulate the teaching of the five skandhas into a version more useful for Western students.

Bernie's version departed from the original in several respects, but what was most useful to me was the clear distinction he drew between direct experiences, moment by moment, and the mental projections we add to those experiences, confusion between the two being one of the main causes of suffering. Of course, what he presented was a reformulation of the traditional system, but for an unusual reason. Beginner meditation students may not be prepared for the deeper teachings on non-self that form part of traditional presentations of the aggregates, but the distinction between moment-by-moment experience and the mental fabrications we add to it is something even novice students can grasp quickly. At times, this understanding can be transformative in itself.

Although he may have slightly altered some terms over the years, Bernie's version of the five skandhas, presented as a chain of progression from one to the next, was basically as follows:

1. Sensation: direct experience, through the senses, of the physical world. Similar to the traditional version of "form", although perhaps this version makes clearer the point that even what we think of as objective physical reality is already mediated by our senses.

2. Feeling: our most basic inner response to any sensation: pleasure, displeasure or indifference. This skandha is the same as in the traditional system.

3. Reaction: the feeling of pleasure, displeasure or neutrality triggers a reaction that ranges from jumping to one's feet at a loud sound to a subtle tightening or relaxing of the body. These reactions can also include complex emotional responses such as anger, fear or envy, and therefore include aspects of the traditional fourth skandha, mental formations.

4. Recognition/Interpretation: the mind takes in an experience and attaches a label to it. In the example above, we have heard a sound (sensation), we have disliked it (feeling) and we have got to our feet (reaction) before realising that it is a car on fire. This is essentially the same as the traditional third skandha.

5. Consciousness: as Bernie explained, this is ordinary human consciousness as experienced by ordinary people. The key point for our purposes is that this is where we unload the store of past experiences and concepts and, in doing so, obscure the direct experience of the first skandha (sensation), often creating confusion and suffering in the process.

To keep things simple, with new students I usually present the fifth skandha as "the story". In the example above, this is where our mind clings to the loud sound and runs off to think about our neighbour's noisy car: how he has probably disconnected the emissions control system and is pumping out harmful chemicals, damaging the health of the planet; how we became so dependent on fossil fuels in the first place; and how, if we do nothing to intervene, the human race is probably doomed, and so on. Our minds have turned a simple sound into the end of the world.

Presenting the fifth aggregate as "the story" does not include everything that the traditional formulation implies; however, it allows students to grasp quickly the fundamental point: that there is a great difference between what happens to us and what we contribute to that experience. Herein lies the key to relieving suffering and creating a more satisfying life for ourselves and those around us.

For example, we may all have days when nothing bad happens, but how many days go by without our finding some excuse to suffer? In this case, our suffering comes from confusing reality with concepts and judgements based largely on past experiences -in other words, our conditioning-, which brings fear and other painful emotions to a moment that would otherwise be neutral or even benign. For this reason, I now call the five skandhas the "five conditions", a term taken from a common version of the Heart Sutra, a central text of Mahayana Buddhism.

I tell my students that, by applying mindful attention to the unfolding of the five conditions, we can catch ourselves reacting according to our conditioning -perhaps at first only at the level of the story- and instead notice: I am getting upset because I am telling myself a story; in reality, nothing has happened that justifies this level of upset. The result? Perhaps we can let go, return to direct experience and spare ourselves unnecessary suffering.

Stories, of course, are made up of thoughts, those mental sounds that intrude on direct experience and that we let go of in meditation. The more we learn to let go of thoughts, the better we become at abandoning our negative stories. As we continue practising, we may begin to catch ourselves earlier in the chain, perhaps even noticing displeasure at the level of feeling and choosing a conscious response rather than an automatic reaction.

This practice may seem simple, but it has enormous ramifications. How many relationships have been ruined by mental projections, fabrications, and stories of past grievances and rejections? How many wars have started over ideas that had little to do with reality?

Meditation is the tool we use to let go of coarse thoughts, and we can put it into practice in our daily lives by being mindful of the five conditions. And so, like many of the other skilful means he devised to adapt the Dharma to the United States, Bernie's approach to the skandhas continues to help students in ways he may never have anticipated.

Article translated from Tricycle, "Get out of your Head". Original link HERE.