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Dharmette: The Bundles (1 of 5) Appearances

So hello and welcome to this first talk of the week, where the topic of the week is what is usually called the five aggregates^[1].

The word "aggregates" seems a bit maybe even off-putting, kind of dry, kind of cement-like. Kind of not clear what it actually refers to. I call them the five bundles. It's a little bit more of an image of five bundles that are like gathering firewood into a bundle, spare sticks, and wrapping them up with string so they're all tied together nicely. Five bundles. But usually in English they're called the five aggregates.

These are extremely important teachings in Buddhism and kind of sit at the center of the Buddha's teachings in many ways. And in Zen^[2] as well, when I practiced Zen it's very important there because almost every day, we chanted the Heart Sutra^[3], a short scripture that begins with a statement that all five aggregates are empty, and then it goes on to say each of these aggregates is empty and emptiness is the aggregates.

I didn't understand what was being talked about when I chanted these in Zen for most of the time. But I took in this idea naively, that if all five aggregates are empty, then I didn't have to know what they are. They're kind of like they don't exist or they're not that important. So I never really bothered to understand them. They were more just something that we're supposed to deny.

And the repetition of "no form, form is emptiness, emptiness is form"—same is true of sensations, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. And then it goes on to say "no eyes, no ears, no tongues." So all this negative negation language, and chanting that day after day, the effect of that was to kind of let go, let go, let go. Not have any of these ideas. And chanting it in a kind of vigorous Zen chanting mode was quite a wonderful thing.

I found that when I chanted this in Zen, I memorized it, and those chants would come wafting through the mind periodically through the day, and they were kind of freeing in a certain way. It was wonderful to do, but I never really learned what they were.

And then when I came to Thailand to practice in Theravāda^[4], they actually talked about the aggregates a lot. I started to realize they were something to study and learn what they were, try to figure out what they were. And I spent a lot of time trying to understand them. It wasn't so obvious to really understand what they are.

These five, they're usually called form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. It's usually described as something like, the Buddha said there's no self^[5], but what he said is that these five aggregates make up what we normally would call the self. So there's no essential self, but there are these processes that go on, and that's what we are.

Five aggregates, like aggregates of stone that come together or something that comes to be combined into something.

As I've studied these texts, I've come to understand them differently, at least in the earliest Buddhist tradition. And they're better called bundles. And they're bundles of clinging^[6]. They're things we cling to, and we collect these clings and we gather a lot of them. And the five bundles are not meant to describe what we are as a human being. They're meant to describe the five major collections of things that we cling to when we cling and suffer.

And what's fascinating about this in the early tradition is that these five bundles are not really things that exist in the natural world in an ordinary way, but are something we kind of build or create in the mind. We create ideas of things, stories about things.

And maybe it's going to be understood with the first one, which is usually translated into English as form, F-O-R-M. And form kind of means like a shape. And what it meant in the early tradition was the shape of something that the eyes could see as a distinct thing. A sight object was called a form. But by application, it came to mean anything the senses picked up in the world. And so I like to call it appearances.

It's not things, it's not objects. It's not the body when we're looking at ourselves, but rather it's the form or the appearance through which we see the body, understand the body. And when we use the word appearance rather than form, things appear selectively. Things appear partly. We're not innocent observers of the body. We have particular things we look for as the appearances that are important.

We can say that someone's very interested in their appearances and we think that they maybe spend a lot of time on their hair, a lot of careful time on their clothes, maybe their complexion, maybe getting tans, all these things. It means it's only skin deep, kind of the surface that's really important here. It's not what's going on deep inside. So the heart beating could be called an appearance, but it's also called just a raw sensation, without the overlay of ideas and selectivity about what's important, what should happen, what shouldn't happen with a simple beating heart. We can add a lot on top of it, especially if we have a heart condition. But we can also add all kinds of unusual ideas, like the heart should have a better beat. It shouldn't just beat kind of that boring old way it always does. I wish it had a more lively beat and a roll sometimes. And so we're looking for certain things in our heart. We're adding all these ideas on the poor heart that should be different.

Appearances are not innocent. We add things. And so the appearances of other people that we apply to them... We look at certain people and we are oriented towards certain appearances that jump out. We might look at skin color and that jumps out, with all kinds of associations, because we think skin color is what defines a person or identifies a person in a big way. And we limit people by their skin color, by their hair. Maybe we're interested in the shape of their nose, maybe certain other shapes of other parts of their body. Maybe their size. We jump to conclusions based on whether someone is short or someone is really tall. We see the appearance but we add something to the appearance: value, judgments, expectations, associations. We're not innocent observers.

And some of this what we do with appearances is very painful for ourselves, very painful for others. Some people can look at their hand and maybe their fingers are too long, too short, too stubby, too fat, too wrinkled, too much arthritis, all kinds of things we can see, knobby. But those are all the appearances that we look at.

What's hard to understand is that the hand has its own life independent of the appearances we're focused on. The hand with long fingers might just be relaxed, at ease. It just kind of tingles and vibrates and feels warm and cold and feels sensations by itself just fine. Leave it alone. Don't impose the mind's hegemony on top of it. The mind's judgments.

And so what we learn in mindfulness practice is that appearances have an emptiness to them. The appearances are kind of insubstantial, kind of projections of ideas on top of it about what's important, where we orient, what we focus on in order to interpret that this is what something is.

From the inside out, with the eyes closed, the hand is almost not a hand. It's just sensations that are humming and vibrating.

So physical appearances are partly a product of the mind, and sometimes they're big products. There's huge stories that go around it. The mind makes up stories of how it should be, shouldn't be, what it means.

And a lot of suffering occurs around appearances. There are huge, billion-dollar industries in the world making lots of money in trying to define how you should look and what you should do to make yourself look a certain way. And if you don't, then you're somehow an inferior person. We have all these stories and ideas that we inherit, that we make up ourselves, and there's a lot of suffering.

And it isn't just we have one or two of these. We collect bundles of attachments to appearances, negative attachments, positive attachments.

And what mindfulness can do is help us to relax, settle all these stories we make, all these attachments we have to appearances. We start seeing that there's a world of difference between seeing our body through the attachments, the expectations, the stories we have, the meanings we have, versus just feeling sensations coming and going by themselves, leaving them alone.

And so part of mindfulness is to see this distinction between what the mind creates around sensations, experiences of the body, and what the experience is in and of itself.

And in this regard, it might be easier to understand that appearances are empty. Appearances are empty of real substantiality. They're just a figment of the imagination to a big degree. Sometimes there's a direct correlation between how we understand the body and what the body is. But the stories that we add on top of it, that's what the word appearance—the Pali word is rūpa^[7]—that's what's implied. It's all the attachments. The aggregates are not the appearance in and of itself, but rather it's the attachments, the stories that we add on top of it, and those are what's empty, insubstantial, and they're figments of the imagination.

But we gather bundles of these, bundles and bundles. Some people carry suitcases full, warehouses full of attachments, stories, ideas related to their body, and they can cause a tremendous amount of suffering, and we create a lot of suffering for others, and we project our expectations and ideas onto others as well.

So I hope in this way you begin understanding why we're talking about something very central in Buddhism, because it's freedom from these bundles of clinging that opens the door to very profound freedom.

And so the idea is to understand where the source of the suffering comes from, and this is one of the primary sources. The tradition talks about... to call them aggregates misses it. It's confusing for people. To call them bundles, we begin appreciating that they're bundles of clinging^[6:1]. And the word clinging is often in the very title or name for them, the five bundles of clinging.

And so, we're not seeing the thing in and of itself. We're seeing how it fits into this wider field of attachments that we're so caught in. And we can relax. To see we're doing it gives a possibility to drop below that level of attachments, to untie the bundles and to be able to give our body the freedom to just be itself, to breathe itself. It's a remarkable gift.

So this week I'll go through the other four bundles, and hopefully you'll understand why this is an important topic in Buddhism, and maybe it can be useful, important for you as a different perspective of how to understand your suffering.

Thank you.