Five Aggregates

Understanding the Five Aggregates in Order to Understand Our Experience The first question that might come up when we begin this topic is why would we want to study and learn about the five aggregates – forms of physical phenomena, feelings of some level of happiness,...

Introduction: Deconstructing the Self and the Aggregates According to the Buddhist analysis, the self is imputed on the individual continuity of the five aggregates. The aggregates are made up of all non-static phenomena – everything that changes from moment to moment – and...

Introduction  When we look at the concept of the self in Buddhism, we need to analyze it from the points of view of the four schools of the Indian tenet systems. We’re going to refine our understanding further and further as we work our way through these schools. When we speak...

Introduction This weekend I want to speak about the types of appearances that the mind gives rise to: accurate and inaccurate, pure and impure, tainted and untainted, samsaric and nirvanic. That’s an awful lot of variables, isn’t it? As I was preparing this, when one thinks...

Review In the first session, we started our discussion of the five types of deep awareness. These refer to Buddha-nature factors, which we all have that enable us to achieve the state of a Buddha – the various Buddha Bodies. We discussed how we can work with these on a basis,...

We were speaking about voidness (emptiness) and we saw that voidness is a negatingly known phenomenon, it’s a negation. We know it by negating something. If we put the word voidness into different terms, then we could say that it is an absence of something. There are many...

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 is a mental factor and it is based on the factor which is called...

We looked at the unawareness of behavioral cause and effect and how that underlies our experience of unhappiness. Now we need to look at the second type of unawareness, a much deeper type of unawareness, which is unawareness of reality: how we exist, how others exist and how...

Review: The Context for Meditating on the False "Me" Yesterday we began our discussion of how to meditate on the voidness of the false “me” experiencing the four noble truths. We looked at the general context within which this is studied and meditated upon. We saw that this...

The Motivation for Working with the Five Aggregates We began our discussion by exploring why we want to learn about the five aggregates that make up each moment of our experience. What is their importance?  It’s a very standard approach in Buddhism to first examine the...