Five Aggregates

Review We were talking about how "mind" in Buddhism refers to an activity that goes on with no break, with no beginning and with no end. It is the mental activity of experiencing things and it is an individual, subjective experiencing of things. We are not talking here about...

Far-Reaching Discriminating Awareness Yesterday we began our discussion of the Heart Sutra, and we saw that this sutra is presenting, in a very condensed form, the teachings on far-reaching discriminating awareness. Discriminating awareness, usually translated as “wisdom,” is...

The Five Aggregates So, now the Mahayana practice of the four close placements of mindfulness. The way that I’ll present this is the way that His Holiness the Dalai Lama explains it, based on various Tibetan commentaries to the Indian Prajnaparamita literature, which is where...

Questions First, a few more questions. On a daily basis when can you think about meditation on voidness, how should it be done?  How it should be done is that we try to recognize how things appear in this deceiving way, and almost like a mantra, we could say, “Garbage! This is...

The Aggregates Only Include Nonstatic Phenomena As mentioned, the five aggregates are a convenient scheme to help us organize and understand our experience. Each aggregate is a collection of various similar factors that make up each moment of our experience, and they include...

Review of the Five Aggregates of Experience We have been going through the text of the Heart Sutra, which is presenting in a condensed fashion the teachings on Prajnaparamita, the “far-reaching discriminating awareness of voidness.” Inspired by the Buddha, who is sitting in...

The Meaning of Feelings in the Context of the Five Aggregates The second aggregate is the aggregate of feelings. In this context, it means feeling a level of happiness or unhappiness. This aggregate is not referring to emotional feelings; instead, it deals with the single...

Incorrect Consideration of the Self We’ve been talking about incorrect consideration and, in the standard presentation, there are four types of incorrect consideration. They are to consider what is nonstatic and impermanent as being static and eternal, to consider what is...

Review Thus far, we have discussed two of the aggregates that make up our experience: forms of physical phenomena and the feelings of some level of happiness. Each of these aggregates of changing phenomena is made up of many items, and we experience an assortment of them...

The Need for Having a Strong Foundation for Studying This Text After listening to teachings, in the end, don’t just make a mandala offering and go off and practice, not having understood anything. That is not the procedure. Whatever you haven’t understood, you should think...