Five aggregates (Buddhism)

The five aggregates are those of: materiality (corporeality of form); feeling; perception; mental formations; consciousness. Although all except that of materiality can in some sense be free from cankers and not subject to them, and also not subject to clinging, all five have a sense in which they are subject to cankers, etc. Thus any kind of matter, whether past, present or future, internal or external, subjective or objective, gross or refined, superior or inferior, far or near, and which is subject to cankers and liable to clinging is referred to as the materiality aggregate of clinging. The same is true of feeling, perception, mental-formations and consciousness. They can give rise to the view "this is mine, it is I, it is myself". They have been described as: the hospital or sick room (materiality, where the "sick man" dwells); the disease (feeling, which is painful); that which provokes the disease (perception, giving rise to feelings); the root-cause of the disease (mental-formations, the store of unprofitable karma having caused birth in the first place); the sick man himself (consciousness, never free from the sickness of feeling). It is the five skandhas which constitute the psychological and physical elements of any sentient being – namarupa.

The five clinging aggregates are thus the enemy on the road to freedom from birth and death, but they can be overcome. Seeing personal materiality as foul, no longer seeing beauty in the foul, no longer bound by desires of the senses, frees from clinging to sense-desires. Seeing feeling as painful (never free from suffering), no longer seeing pleasure in the painful, brings freedom from the canker of becoming and from attachment to rites and rituals. Seeing perception and mental-formations as other than the self and uncontrollable, no longer seeing the self in not-self, crossing the flood of wrong-views, cuts the conviction that "this" is the truth and is not attached to the theory of self. Seeing consciousness as lacking in permanence, always rising and falling, no longer seeing permanence in the impermanent, brings freedom from the bond of ignorance.

The five aggregates are said, in the Path of Purification, to be part of the soil in which understanding grows. In order to perfect understanding one should learn and question these things.

Conscious existence thus depends on the five groups of interacting physical and mental phenomena. Their interaction gives rise to the illusion of personality, individuality or ego, which has no existence of its own.

In Southern Buddhist Pali texts the khandhas are listed in the series of dhammas, which are all the phenomena in existence. The phenomena are also called sankhara: dhammas = "things"; sankhara = "formations". The corresponding Sanskrit terms are skandhas and dharmas; and samskara, which is comparable to maya or lila. Nibbana (nirvana) is the state in which the "individual's" khandhas cease to "exist", stopping the process of karmic reincarnation and rebirth. "Nibbana" means "extinction".