Thursday, May 10, 2012

Can we revisit the five skandhas?

They are the essence of the Heart Sutra: Form, sensation, volition, conception, and consciousness. Skandha is Sanskrit, meaning "aggregate."Sunyata = interdependent causation = "emptiness."

INQUIRY: can the idea of sunyata be elaborated upon, to give additional meaning to how it is that each skandha is actually interdependent. eg form does not appear/exist without senses to perceive it, without mind to conceive it, without volition to act upon it or cause movement of it or to/away from it?
How are they interdependent on consciousness? Is consciousness correctly stated to be nothing but a skhanda? Does this contradict with other uses of the term skandha?
INQUIRY: We commonly use a different set of words now in sharing Dharma in the west. Can these words be interrelated as a way of proposing a new set of "skandhas" (substitute a suitable term here).
I AM WORKING ON DEFINING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN:
Consciousness, awareness, mind, unity, duality, ego, heart. My understanding of Consciousness-awareness has some clarity, and naturally brings in Unity and duality as interdependent correlates. Mind and heart need work. Ego is easy - simple a sense of a separate self.
Added inquiry: do the 5 skandhas constitute a simple definition of mind?
BUDDHA IN THE LANKAVATARA SUTRA:
Further, Mahamati, I will explain what characterises the self-nature of the Skandhas. Mahamati, what are the five Skandhas? They are form, (
125) sensation, thought, conformation, and consciousness. Mahamati, four of these have no material forms—
sensation, thought, conformation, and consciousness. Form, Mahamati, belongs to what is made of the four primary elements, and these elements differ from one another in their individual signs. But the four Skandhas that are without form cannot be reckoned as four, they are like space. For instance, Mahamati, space cannot be numbered, and it is due to our discrimination that it is designated as such; in the same way, Mahamati, the Skandhas that are beyond calculability as they have no number-marks, are not to be predicated as existing and non-existing, and are beyond the four propositions; but to the ignorant they are described as subject to numeration, but not so to the wise. Again, Mahamati, by the wise the five Skandhas are regarded as thought-constructions, devoid of [dualisties such as] otherness and not-otherness; for they are like varieties of forms and objects in a vision, like images and persons in a dream. As they have no better substance
for their support, and as they obstruct the passage of noble wisdom, there is what is known as the Skandha-discrimination. This, Mahamati, is what characterises the self-nature of the Skandhas. This discrimination must be discarded by you, and having discarded this, you should declare the truth of solitude. Keeping back the views held by the philosophers, the
truth of solitude is to be announced in all the Buddha-assemblies, Mahamati, and thereby the teaching of the egolessness of things is purified and you will enter upon the stage of Far-going
duramgama).

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