MURYOKO
'Infinite Light'
Journal of Shin Buddhism
Harold Stewart
The Five Aggregates
The panca-skandhah are the five evanescent ever-changing aggregates, or rather processes, that constitute the atma-bhava. This means one's illusory self-of-becoming, for Buddhism recognizes no fixed and permanent individual entity or atma, yet does not deny the empirical ego as a transitory process. These aggregates are:
1.Rapa-skandha (Japanese: shiki) is form in general, all physical bodies, including one's own, in the 'external' world; but more particularly, the human corporeal image as perceived by its own five sense-consciousnesses.
2.Vedana-skandha (ju) is perception, the sensations and feelings received through the five bodily senses in contact with environmental events and physiological processes.
3.Samjna-skandha (so) is conception, all kinds of mental functions and formations of images and ideas based on such perceptions.
4.Samskara-skandha (gyo) is volition, conscious acts of will moved by the pleasurable or painful nature of the mental activities, as well as latent impulses and habit-patterns resulting from previous actions, which await opportune occasions and conditions to remanifest as desires or aversions.
5.Vijnana-skandha (also shiki, but written with a different character from the first) is individual consciousness of the four previous factors, discriminating between them by attachment to pleasure and avoidance of pain. Together these five 'heaps' of processes incessantly change and interact; and yet manas, the mind, mistakes their illusory flux for its changeless and immortal self.
These five constituent aggregates of the illusory individuality incessantly change and interact, and it is their flux that we mis-identify as a fixed individuality. But only when the illusion of a permanent ego is at last discarded, can Insight be gained into the doctrine of non-self.