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Dharmette: The Bundles (3 of 5) Recognition

Hello everyone, and welcome as I continue the series on the five bundles, the five khandhas^[1], usually called the five aggregates.

For those of us who read the teachings of the Buddha, these teachings about the five bundles are pervasive in his earliest teaching. Now we come to the third bundle of clinging. The third bundle is the bundle created from recognitions—the simple ideas by which we see the world and recognize what's happening around us. Those recognitions can be very simple, and they can be very complicated.

We can see not just a thing, but we can see the meaning of the thing. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that; it actually adds to the richness of life. Something handed down to us, given to us by a dear friend or family member, might be a very ordinary object. But because it was given by someone important to us, or it was passed down through the generations, there are associated meanings that add to the richness of our life. That's nice. Not a problem.

However, we can also have recognitions that are complicated because they carry delusion. They carry bias. They carry ways in which we see people in very limited ways. We recognize people only because of their role, only because of how they've hurt us, only because of their politics, only because of something specific. We kind of limit who they are in our eyes. Or we only see them for what they did in the past, or we only see them for what they can do for us in the future.

So the act of recognition is not necessarily an innocent act. A lot can go into it, and some of that has to do with the stories, the values, the wider picture of things, our preferences, and our dreams. We can pile a lot of things on top of the most simple recognition of what something is.

That's where attachments begin. That's where desires can be so strong that we suffer, that we cling, that we resist, that we hold on tight, and that we grieve when we lose in some deep way—grieving the pain of the attachment being challenged. That's where we can get angry, hostile, and even violent sometimes, due to the complicated ways that recognition is built on layers and layers of stories and desires.

Part of what we're doing in mindfulness practice is coming back to the simplest possible way in the present moment of recognizing what's happening. In some Vipassana^[2] traditions, that act of recognition is called a mental note. A simple field note: warm, cold, tightness, tension, softness, calm, agitation. It can be that simple.

Rather than: "I'm agitated, and I'm agitated because of what happened at work yesterday. I'm always wronged by my boss, and I need to write a letter to right the wrong and protest, and I'm going to get back at my boss. I'm going to put salt in their sugar container so when they drink their coffee..." It goes on and on, and the recognition is no longer simple. It's layers and layers of stories, interpretations, meanings, and ideas.

But if it's just, "Oh, simple agitated mind," without the whole story, things will open up. There's space. There's quiet. There's a stillness around our experience that holds it with some kind of kindness, in a meaningful way that allows a freeing of the discursive mind and a freeing of our reactivity so that we can experience ourselves in a deeper and deeper way.

One of the very important places we get caught is with recognition. Recognition by itself is not a bundle; recognition itself is not necessarily a problem. But it's what we add on top of the recognition where there's clinging, grabbing, and attachment—that is where there is a gathering, a bundling of recognition, a bundling of meaning.

I might see someone wearing a nice pair of shoes, and I see them as shoes. I see them as beautiful shoes. I see them as shoes that I want to have. I see that I have enough shoes at home, but I probably deserve them because I've had a hard time lately. So, I probably deserve to buy a new pair of shoes because that will make me feel better and happier, and I'll feel more comfortable being in public. I think it's a good idea to get new shoes. And if I don't get the new shoes, I probably won't make my way in the world very well, people won't like me, and I won't get a promotion. There are layers and layers of these ideas on top of the idea of simply a shoe, simply wanting shoes, or appreciating the shoes.

The five bundles—the bundles of these recognitions that we're holding onto, bundles of recognition that stick to us and stick to our eyes—are, in a sense, the filters through which we see the world. It's these bundles that the Buddha says we need to overcome. It's not recognition itself. It's how we've gathered all these bundles together that have a lot to do with the story-making mind, the meaning-making mind, and the desiring mind that adds layers and layers of meaning and purpose to the simple recognitions we can have.

The mind is definitely involved in creating the inner ideas that we get attached to, that we cling to. In fact, mostly what we cling to is not things of the world, but the ideas we have about those things. The stories we make and all this other stuff. Simple recognition is often not that simple.

It's the bundles that the Buddha wants us to untie. It's the bundles that the Buddha would like us to shed, to drop. Often in English, for the five aggregates, any simple act of recognition is translated as "perception." The word is saññā^[3] in Pali. It is usually translated into English as perception, but perception can be seen as being something very innocent that has more to do with just what we're seeing. Recognition, however, honors how this word saññā is a way in which we participate, we create. We see something again based on previous ideas, associations, and memories; it's recognizing something based on previous experience.

The mind and what the mind carries has a role. We build stories and universes on this simple way of seeing the world, and we don't see it simply anymore. Sometimes, in fact, when we see things in the world, we don't see it for what it is. We see it through the filter of our delusion, our assumptions, our predictions, and our built-up ideas.

These are a big problem for us. There's a lot of suffering that we cause ourselves and the world around us. The brilliance of the Buddha was to point to this: that our ordinary human capacity to recognize is connected to histories and ideas in the mind, and those can be the recipe for where we get caught, where we get stuck.

If we want to be unstuck, if we want to stop clinging, if we want to stop suffering, we need to let go of the bundle. We need to untie the bundle and let all the sticks that are being held together fall down and disappear so that we can see freely.

These five bundles are so important that in some places, they are the Buddha's definition of suffering. What suffering actually is, is the collected mass of these five bundles. If we want to overcome suffering, we have to somehow put down the bundles. Sometimes the bundles are called burdens or a heavy load that we're carrying.

The idea is to be able to put down the bundles, to put down the heavy load of ideas, associations, stories, and meaning to which we are attached or clinging. It's possible to have associations, stories, and meanings that enrich our life, but for which there is no attachment, no clinging, and no holding on tight. Then we are much more fluid, resilient, and adaptable as we go through the world, able to respond kindly, generously, and compassionately as is needed—in a way that we can't if we're tied up in our bundles.

Because it isn't just that we make bundles, we tie ourselves to the bundles. And that limits us dramatically.

So, the five aggregates, bundles, khandhas: I call them appearances, sensations, recognition, mental constructs, and then cognition. Mental constructs—which will be the topic of tomorrow—that whole world that constructs all kinds of these stories and ideas, is said to be what constructs the other bundles. The constructing mind, the builder mind that makes things up and builds things up, has a central role in making the bundles. So that will be very important to look at next: mental constructs, tomorrow.

Thank you.