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audiodharma:
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  - date: '2023-08-19'
    mp3_url: https://audiodharma.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/talks/18728/20230819-Bhante_Pasanna-sati-the_five_khandhas_and_an_inventory_of_reality.mp3
    speakers:
    - speaker_name: Bhante Pasanna
      speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/460
    talk_start_time_seconds: 0
    title: The Five Khandhas and An Inventory of Reality
    url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/18728
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location_city: Redwood City, CA
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  title: The Five Khandhas and An Inventory of Reality with Bhante Pasanna
  upload_date: '2023-08-20'
  uploader_str: The Sati Center
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# The Five Khandhas and An Inventory of Reality - [Bhante Pasanna](https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/460)

*This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.*


## [The Five Khandhas and An Inventory of Reality](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/18728)

I'm happy that we share the same interest, not only in the Dhamma in general, but also particularly in this topic: the five khandhas[^1], the five aggregates, as you might be familiar with translating it. Together we will explore the meaning of this very important inventory of our experience. So what are they, these five khandhas? I hope you will bear with me when I, out of my own habit, leave some of the Pali terms untranslated after explaining them, like the term khandha. I personally did not yet come up with a perfect one-word translation that fits it perfectly, so let's leave it for now.

There are five facets of our experience, or we could call them building blocks of our whole existence. These five categories of somatic and mental factors encompass any possible experience we humans can have in this world. Each of these khandhas has its own function in the whole machinery that we are used to calling "our experience," and each of them has another contribution to make to our experience. As a vipassana[^2] topic, it's a bit less popular than, let's say, working with the six senses. Mainly, I think, because it takes a little bit more effort to develop these five khandhas as objects of awareness. When we work with the six senses, immediately everyone knows "this is seeing," "this is hearing"; there's not much of an explanation or investigation necessary. Here, it takes a bit of patience and time, but I promise it's worth the extra effort. In this method, this way of categorizing our experience via the five khandhas, we discover a thorough inventory of ourselves. Not as a cut-off version, as we usually work when we do the six senses—sometimes we're even instructed by meditation teachers to cut off and leave it at the bare minimum of sense impingement, leaving out good parts of what makes the completeness of our experience. Needless to say, that's extremely important for the full comprehension of all the aspects of our experience.

I may also add that developing insight into the five khandhas is a frequently mentioned topic in the suttas. Especially when the Buddha discusses insight, wisdom, and liberation—these really fundamental things close to the core of the Dhamma—again and again, this topic of the five khandhas comes up. That's another reason why we should be curious and interested in not only understanding the five khandhas on a theoretical level but also finding a practical approach of how to make them part of meditation.

To get to know these khandhas better, it's important to get to know their functions and characteristics. Which part of our experience is described by the khandha of sensations or perceptions, for example? To recognize them basically in our experience, it's important to learn to see their causes in order to see their dependent nature. We understand that there's an underlying cause that causes this phenomenon, this particular khandha. That's an important point to convince ourselves about the unworthiness of getting attached to this particular khandha. So, the function, characteristics, the cause underlying it, and also very importantly, their behavior in real time. What I mean by that is to witness directly, with mindfulness and clear corporeal comprehension, their impermanent nature—their nature of just changing from moment to moment—and the implication of non-self that underlies the impermanence.

I prepared a few sutta passages for you to look at because I myself found them extremely useful on my journey to get a better understanding of this khandha topic. There are some nice illustrations and metaphors, similes that might make it a bit more accessible or digestible for us. In general, I'm a big fan of similes in the suttas. For one, they are efficient tools for our investigation. They can spark our interest and curiosity to get a deeper grasp of this or that concept. They are usually historically quite reliable because, as we all know, the Sutta Pitaka is handed down to us over many, many generations and many hundreds and thousands of years. We have to assume that this or that word might be slightly altered in transmission, but the whole simile still makes sense; it's still working and intact for us. It's like a time capsule of authenticity, so we can have a good feeling about the originality of the similes. They are easy to remember. As many of you might be aware, the ability to remember something is a big part of our whole mindfulness practice. A good simile that helps us remember a certain aspect or quality is also very useful to guide and protect our direct application when it comes to mindfulness in meditation.

I should mention that the sutta passages we will be working with today stem from the SuttaCentral translations of Venerable Sujato[^3]. I made only minor adjustments for my own references, but the bulk of the work with this translation and the merits accrued should all go to Venerable Sujato.

We will be reading from the Samyutta Nikaya 22:95, the Sutta of the Foam Lump Simile. Here we get a whole array of five very interesting metaphors for each of the five khandhas. We will start right away with the first khandha, rūpa[^4], which I prefer to translate as "corporeality." More about that later, but let's first hear what the Buddha came up with as a simile here.

> "Now, bhikkhus, suppose this Ganga River was carrying along a big lump of foam, and a person with clear eyes would see it and contemplate it, examining it thoroughly. It would appear to them as completely void, hollow, and without essence, for what essence could there be in a lump of foam? In the same way, for example, a bhikkhu (of course, any practitioner can be meant here) sees and contemplates any kind of corporeality at all: past, future, or present; internal or external; coarse or fine; inferior or superior; near or far, examining it thoroughly. And it appears to them as completely void, hollow, and without essence, for what essence could there be in corporeality?"

We will try to gather a few pieces of information about corporeality, mainly from this sutta, but also any bits and pieces of information we can get from other suttas. We'll put them together so we get a good impression of what rūpa, what corporeality, could possibly mean. We heard first about the foamy and non-solid nature that's only discernible at keen observation. We heard about "essencelessness." Gleaning from other suttas, like another famous sutta about the khandhas—the Full Moon Sutta, connected discourses Samyutta Nikaya 22:82—we learn about the underlying cause of each of these five khandhas. The underlying cause for corporeality is the four elements: earth, water, wind, and fire. Corporeality is connected to them or caused by those four elements.

Putting all this together, we can conclude that rūpa, this corporeality, equals the experience of having a body. The body, as we experience it, is not a solid thing as we might be used to perceiving it. Especially when we rely on our visual sense and the perception stemming from our visual sense, we easily might get the impression that the body is a solid thing. When I look at other people's bodies, they appear to me as solid things, so I might have the impression that my own body is a solid thing. Just as a side note, there are many instances when we contemplate about the body in the Dhamma, but here specifically, when we talk about rūpa, corporeality, we don't contemplate about the body as a thing. We rather want to learn something about the body as an experience. That's why I chose to use this unfamiliar word: corporeality. I hope it's a word that makes sense to you.

It's not at all this bulky solid thing, but rather a foamy, floating, tingling, streaming feeling of our body. When we sit in meditation, close our eyes, and we wish to directly experience our body, that's how it feels. That's the first instance where we can get a nice impression of how the similes the Buddha gives us work. When we sit in meditation and try to observe corporeality, it might actually feel quite similar to this instance the Buddha describes here: a man sitting at the bank of a river. We can imagine usually just seeing something floating by, and at first you might think, "Oh, that's something solid, that's some real object floating by." But when we very keenly observe it, we see, "Oh, it's just a lump of foam, there's no substance." Like that, when we start in meditation—and I really look forward to trying out this khandha meditation with you afterwards—when you concentrate on it, basically, it's the friction of the internal and the external elements. Our body is made out of the four elements, including our sense organs. The external world is made out of four elements. Whenever they come together, there arises some friction, some exchange, some interactivity. That's something we can focus our attention on.

The tool to do that is yoniso manasikāra[^5], which is also alluded to in the text. The best translation for that might be "radical attention." My Dhamma teacher in Sri Lanka, the Venerable Katukurunde Nyanananda[^6]—I don't know whether any of you might have heard of him—preferred to translate it as radical attention. Especially because the word radical stems from radix in Latin, and that means the root. Radical basically means going to the root, or the origin of something. That's what you do here with yoniso manasikāra; we penetrate the surface, the facade, so to say. We transcend the thought that "I very well know what the body is, and this is the body, and this is me, and there's no doubt about it." We try to look deeper. In a real observation in the present moment, we see, "Oh, wow, there's this tingling, streaming, floating feeling, but there's no solid object to be found."

We see there's a difference between the perception of a person with just ordinary awareness and the perception of a person with radical or thorough awareness that really penetrates this layer of illusion. Let's have a look at the next simile. It's about vedanā[^7], which I chose to translate as "sensation." Many of you might know it as "feeling," and I purposefully try to avoid the translation "feeling" because it might give us the idea that this is about our feelings and emotions. Vedanā means something slightly different, but we'll come to that. Let's see about this vedanā metaphor:

> "Suppose it was the time of autumn when the rain was falling heavily, and a bubble on the water forms and pops right away. A person with clear eyes would see it and contemplate it, examining it carefully. And it would appear to them as completely void, hollow, and insubstantial. What substance could there be in a water bubble?"

That's the picture given for vedanā, which basically means interpreting sense data as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. This bubble described here, which seems to form in a puddle that the raindrops fall into, only appears to be more than water, but basically it's just water. It's caused by something, by a raindrop, just the same way as our sensations are caused again and again by sense contact and share the same impermanent nature with this sense contact.

We should note—and I'm collecting these facts from other suttas now—that vedanā is a mental factor. It's not about the bodily experienced feeling; it's a mental factor, to be more precise, part of nāma-rūpa[^8], of conceptuality. For us, it's possible to observe this, to watch this, rather than just being sucked into it. Usually, when we experience a sensation—a pleasant sensation or an unpleasant sensation—we might experience it as "today I feel good" or "this particular thing is awful," and then, of course, immediately comes liking and disliking. In our meditation, we try to get to a point where we can observe and understand these sensations rather than feeling they are part of us, or they are expressions of how I really feel right now.

Just as a bubble, vedanā is also a fleeting and essenceless phenomenon. One more interesting detail: maybe if you ever watch bubbles on a puddle on a rainy day, you might have noticed that it's not only small bubbles forming, but sometimes these small bubbles—I don't know due to which physical laws—get attracted to each other and form kind of bubble clusters. Like that, we also might experience in our life these vedanā clusters, or an accumulation of vedanās, or a broad variety of different objects or different stories the vedanās are connected to. I hope it makes a little bit of sense. We can have a vedanā about something right now in this moment, let's say about our seating or the temperature in the room. Or we might have a sensation about how we feel today, or how we feel this week, or how in general this year is going. Past and present ideas and thoughts also start to influence how we feel in this moment. That is how these bubbles can behave in funny ways. It's not just one bubble at a time, all very simplistic to watch. Just as a side note to show that, although this practice is very rewarding, by no means is it a simple exercise because we are so used to believing this voice of vedanā. There's just interpreting sense contact as pleasant and unpleasant, and we're just so convinced that "that's how I feel now." 

That's another little side note before I continue with the khandhas, we always have to get support from samādhi[^9]. It's a very important tool for calming the mind and preparing the mind for insights. Especially in the context of sensations and also of perception, which will be the next khandha we discuss, I'd like to make a small note here—a small rule of thumb that I personally find helpful. When we think about the essence of samādhi, the essence of a calm or collected mind, it's basically two qualities: upekkhā[^10] and ekaggatā[^11]. On the one hand, we have equanimity, and on the other, one-pointedness. I personally found it interesting that these two have a certain correlation to sensation and perception.

Without sufficient equanimity, it's very hard for us to stay put and stay in the observing mode when it comes to sensations that are pleasant and unpleasant. Because by their sheer pleasantness and unpleasantness, they continuously lure us into reactivity. Upekkhā is a wonderful and necessary antidote to keep our distance from the sheer suction of these sensations. If you want to observe and watch sensations, and again and again we get the feeling it doesn't really work because I get so attached or repelled by these pleasant and unpleasant experiences, we might do well at increasing our ability to observe with equanimity.

On the other hand, one-pointedness, the other important factor that we gain by practicing samādhi, is a very important tool to successfully observe perception. Ekaggatā is the quality that helps us to stay really sharply in the present moment. As I mentioned with vedanā already, it's even more relevant with saññā[^12], with perceptions, that they have this ability to stretch over time. Let me give you one example: you might have a perception of a Dhamma meeting now. Just by this one perception, "this is a Dhamma meeting now," we stretch out the perception over maybe one or two hours. At the same time, we have micro-perceptions from moment to moment. This spreading out of perceptions often creates the feeling of permanence. We might argue—and in a certain way, it would be true to say—that this Dhamma meeting might be impermanent at a certain point, but right now it's going on, so it appears to be permanent. That's the reason for permanence, for the feeling of permanence in our life: that we believe these stretched-out perceptions. One-pointedness can be a very useful tool to counteract this stretched-out-ness, if I may call it that, because we really get to see what happens from moment to moment. That leaves less and less room for belief in certain phenomena existing unchangingly over time. That's the big trick of perceptions—that they create these meanings that seemingly last certain periods of time.

Coming back to the khandhas and to perception already, which is our next khandha:

> "Suppose in the last month of summer at noon, a shimmering mirage appears. A person with clear eyes would see it and contemplate it, examining it carefully. And it would appear to them as completely void, hollow, and insubstantial, for what substance could there be in a mirage?"

I've said a few things already about perception. Saññā, we translate it as perception. What it really means, in my understanding, is this habit of the mind to inject meaning into sense contacts. That's exactly the meaning of this simile of the mirage. It creates an illusion, the illusion of permanence, and the illusion of compactness, if you want to call it that. It's a perception that's similar to sensation. It's also caused by contact, by phassa[^13], and it's a mental interpretation of that contact. Let's say there's a sense contact through the sense door of the eye. This sense contact is then processed by the mind to give it a certain meaning, to give it a certain name, and thereby objectifying or reifying it. Without proper radical attention, we might easily get convinced that the meaning our mind just so slyly created is sort of emitted by the object we are watching.

We usually reflect, "I just perceive it as a chair or as a clock," but we just get convinced this is a clock, this is a chair. Even more convincingly, the perceptions about ourselves, about our inner life. We easily get convinced that, "Oh, I am a person like this and that," without understanding that it's just a mental interpretation of a sense contact. It's that voice, that mental voice within us that's seemingly recognizing things or naming things and their meaning. Funnily enough, it's a naming of things, but at the same time, those things only became things by us naming them. Does that make a little bit of sense to you? We perceive it to be a thing and then fill it with meaning and memories and whatever we like to perceive it as, and then forget that it was us who started this whole objectification of a sense contact.

Alright, picking up a bit of a speedier pace because there's still a lot to talk about. Sankhāras[^14]: this is the next khandha we'd like to understand. Here's the simile. It goes like this:

> "Suppose there was a person in need of hardwood. Searching, wandering in search of hardwood, they take a sharp ax and enter the forest. There they see a big banana tree standing straight and young and grown free of defects. They would cut it down at the base, cut off the top, and unroll the coiled sheets, but they wouldn't even find sapwood, much less hardwood. And a person with clear eyes would see it and contemplate it, examining it carefully. And it would appear to them as completely void, hollow, and insubstantial. Of what substance could there be in a banana tree?"

Sankhāras, which I'd like to render as "activity impulses," are also caused by contact. Just a small side note again, because the word sankhāra appears in different contexts in the suttas, and people might get confused by that. It's simply a term that does not always mean the same thing. We also have to think about the context before we attempt a translation of the term. In this khandha context, I find it to be an apt translation to call these sankhāras activity impulses, because that's exactly what they are. They are this mental voice within us that recommends doing this and doing that. Interestingly, it's also caused by contact and not by the meaningfulness of these quests that come into our head.

The simile gives us a nice feel of how unsuccessful and how futile these attempts usually are. At least for the mind still under the influence of ignorance and under this drive of identification, each of these little activity impulses seems like a project to make our permanent self happy in some way or other. Since there is no permanent self in these five khandhas, this is an attempt that can only fail. Like this poor man searching for hardwood and just uncoiling a completely woodless banana trunk. I don't know whether some of you might have seen such a banana trunk in Asia, or whether they grow in America even; it's really just one foil or sheath after the other. Although these are really solid, massive trunks from the outside, there's no wood to find in them at all. It's quite a funny picture, this person trying to find hardwood to construct something meaningful in his world and just being left with these completely useless banana trunk pieces. However fruitless our attempts to follow these activity impulses might be, there's always a next one waiting in line for us to pick up and to take seriously again.

Here, too, with proper preparation and concentration of the mind, it might be rather uncomplicated or something many meditators are already used to. These activity impulses have a lot in common with our random thought constructs, thought stories about what we're going to do tomorrow and what we're going to buy when we go shopping after meditation. This has a lot to do with activity impulses. We might already be used to this mental challenge of not falling into the narrative of such a sankhāra, but rather stepping out and just observing it, and then getting to learn important things about it. Stepping out is always very important, getting into the position of the witness rather than the victim or the person emotionally involved in the whole thing.

Last but not least, we have viññāṇa[^15], which you all might be familiar with translating as "consciousness." I personally sometimes prefer to translate it very unromantically as "sense experience," because in my own meditative experience, but also with other meditators I have the honor to guide sometimes, this term consciousness usually inspires some kind of mysterious awe in us. Whereas in the world of the Buddha, there's no place for any glorification of this term. It's simply the very fact that experience happens again and again, caused by the impingement of sense data on our sense organs. It's a very interesting metaphor we find here about viññāṇa:

> "Suppose a magician, or their apprentice, was to perform a magic trick at the crossroads, and a person with clear eyes would see it and contemplate it, examining it carefully. And it would appear to them as completely void, hollow, and insubstantial. What substance could there be in a magic trick?"

This magic trick gave me a lot to think about back in my forest hermitage in Sri Lanka, and I came up with an interesting explanation that works for me in my own meditation, and I'd like to share it with you now.

As I mentioned, viññāṇa is again and again caused by sense organs and sense stimuli, so that's the easiest way to access what consciousness means. Actually, there's not just the term consciousness itself. It's always eye consciousness, ear consciousness, nose consciousness, tongue consciousness, body consciousness, or mind consciousness. The illusionary nature of it is that it appears to be one compact consciousness. At this point, I'm not sure whether my knowledge of the English language will suffice, but there's a difference between "the same" and "the very same." Is that understandable? Two people can have the same T-shirt, meaning they both have a similar T-shirt. But the very same T-shirt is only this one unique piece. Just as this is confusing in our day-to-day language, it's also confusing concerning consciousness, because each consciousness which separately arises and passes away always feels the same to us. It feels like "that's me being aware of something." By not very carefully observing this phenomenon, we easily come to the ill-informed conclusion that it's the very same consciousness all the time. It's not only the same phenomenon of consciousness arising again and again; it's the very same consciousness that's not changing, that's not impermanent, and that's sort of the core of my experience.

That's the magic trick of consciousness. Many magic tricks work with this "the same" versus "the very same" misunderstanding. Let's say a magician has two handkerchiefs looking exactly the same and is prepared to put one in his sleeve here. Then he produces a magic effect that makes us all think he puts the very same handkerchief here, and then it appears somewhere else. At the same time, it was not one and the same handkerchief; they were two similar handkerchiefs. Like that, there is similar consciousness arising and passing away again and again. To be really precise, this is teamwork, sort of, of consciousness and perception. The repetition of the same perception creates this magic of seemingly having a permanent consciousness. It's just the perception we have about consciousness itself, which is usually, "Ah, this is me, this is my consciousness. This is me cognizing." This gives wonderful camouflage to the impermanent arising and passing away of consciousness in the background.

To make it a little bit more approachable, here's an illustration or mode of explanation about these khandhas. I think it originally comes from Venerable Ñāṇavīra Thera[^16], an old monk who long passed away who lived in Sri Lanka. He had this mode of explaining the five khandhas in one sentence, and I found it's usually helpful for understanding. I slightly modified it for my purposes. Let's say I'm sitting somewhere under a nice pleasant shady tree on a hot summer day. If someone asked me, "Now please describe your experience to me," my answer would sound something like: "There's a cool, pleasant, shady tree for sitting under, felt by me." In this sentence, we have progression through all these five khandhas. The fact that it feels cool, that's part of corporeality. The four elements are connected in a way that there's coolness. Pleasant is the sensation part. Shady tree is the perception part. For sitting under, would be the activity impulse. And felt by me is consciousness—in this instance, body consciousness. So we have: a cool (rūpa), pleasant (vedanā), shady tree (saññā) for sitting under (sankhāra), felt by me (viññāṇa). A nice illustration of how these five khandhas are interrelated all the time, woven into this structure we call our moment-to-moment experience. I had much more prepared, but I see time is passing way too quickly, so I have to skip a few things.

At the end, let's just bring it down to a practical approach of how to work with this information. There's another very interesting sutta, the Anicca Saññā Sutta, Linked Discourses 22:102. Here we get a very practical instruction in how to meditate on these five khandhas. We may experience the benefits of the elimination of our sensual desires, the elimination of our desire for corporeality, the elimination of all desire for being, the elimination of ignorance, and the eradication of all conceit "I am." That's the preamble here. Then the Buddha gives a few nice similes, highlighting that insight into these five khandhas is a universal key to freeing our mind from suffering, regardless of the specific details we usually put into our suffering and make such long stories about why I'm suffering because people are not nice to me and life is not fair and this and that. It has a thousand different faces, but we can reduce it to an unskilled handling of these five khandhas, a handling of the five khandhas that's not in line with reality.

Bringing our mind back to reality by practicing vipassana, practicing anicca saññā[^17]—the perception of impermanence regarding the five khandhas—we can bring our mind to a place where we have a universal key to any episode of suffering that might occur in our life. These similes give a nice sense of this all-encompassing universal freedom from suffering. It's like one of my favorites here with the bunch of mangoes: when the stalk of a bunch of mangoes is cut, all the mangoes attached to the stalk will follow along. We don't have to pluck each mango separately; if we cut it at the stem, at the stalk of it, then all the mangoes come along with it. In the same way, if we cut suffering at its root, at the ignorance we have about these five khandhas, then all the different manifestations of this suffering—this life situation is not pleasant and that life situation is suffering to me—all these dukkha[^18] mangoes follow along with it.

How is this perception of impermanence developed and cultivated so that we may reap these benefits? We are introduced to a three-step method: "Such is corporeality, such is the arising of corporeality, and such is the disappearing of corporeality." And the same for the other four khandhas. You always have this three-step plan. Firstly, identifying the sense of recognizing in our own experience the particular khandha. Understanding, "Ah, this is not just some fancy theory I can learn by heart; this rūpa khandha or this vedanā khandha means something, this addresses something in my direct personal experience." We develop the skill to really transplant the theory into our own personal space. Realizing, "Ah, now, when there's a tingling sensation on my sense organs, that's corporeality. And when the mind weighs in and says, 'Oh, this is unpleasant,' or 'Oh, this is pleasant,' that's sensation!" That's the first step to clear the field, to get our target in focus.

Once we have our target in focus, we can start to observe its behavior. We might realize that this corporeality, for example, is a process of continuous arising and arising and arising. Whether we wish for it or not, it arises anyway, because the cause for its arising is not us wishing it to arise; the cause for its arising is sense contact. Just seeing how we get overwhelmed and attacked by corporeality and sensation and the other khandhas, that alone can give us enough reason to get disenchanted with these five khandhas, to get the ammunition for the mind to turn away our interest from getting involved in these khandhas in our search for some permanent happiness, which we might then claim to be us and ourselves.

That was just a very quick explanation of the practice. Recognizing it, starting to watch its behavior. Part one of behavior: its continuous arising, which may include our understanding of the causes that are necessary for it to arise. For corporeality, the four elements. For perception, sensation, and activity impulses, it's always sense contact. And for consciousness, to make it a bit more easily approachable, the working of the senses.

The other side of the coin of watching the behavior of these khandhas is witnessing not their continuous arising, but them continuously vanishing and disappearing. Each tiny episode of corporeality or of sensation is in a continuous process of vanishing out of our hands, of being dragged out of our focus of experience. That's something with a little effort, with a little patience, we can start to directly witness and observe in our meditation.

That's the plan for us, to try and do that after a short break. I hope there were some interesting bits and pieces. I'm very sorry now that I could not finish all my prepared Dhamma bits and pieces because there's so much more to say about this topic. But it may suffice as a first introduction into this practice, maybe an inspiration to get hold of this approach to vipassana. I think we plan to take a five-minute break. After that five minutes, we will together attempt to make a guided meditation on these five khandhas, and after that, we'll have the opportunity to discuss anything concerning this topic. Thanks a lot for your attention, and I will see you for our meditation in about five minutes.

## Guided Meditation

We'll meditate for about half an hour, and simply due to time limitations, it will be a rather quick transition from one khandha to the next. Nevertheless, maybe you will get a first impression of this technique, which of course you can time more carefully at home. Many of my students and co-meditators practice daily one of those five khandhas, or even weekly, to get a really deep sense of where to find those khandhas and get a good impression of their impermanent behavior so as to eradicate all this identification and suffering. But for now, we'll do them one after the other to give you a first glimpse.

For starters, please bring your attention to the in-breathing and out-breathing of the body, allowing your attention to settle quite naturally in the present moment in the body. Remember, in samādhi the mind is there to create equanimity, one-pointedness, a readiness to observe, to learn, and to comprehend. Let each mindfully experienced breath create a frame of awareness around our body. This framework of presence we use to observe ourselves.

Take an inventory of our experience, starting with corporeality. Friction—the four elements displaying themselves as tingling and streaming, the bodily experience. We may try to adjust the focus point of our awareness until we have the feeling, "Well, this is corporeality. It's corporeality that I'm looking at right now." Observe the behavior of this corporeality. Continuous arising, again and again arising out of the sheer presence of the elements, whether we like it or not. The arising of corporeality.

Watching the same phenomenon just from a slightly different angle: witness the continuous vanishing and disappearance of corporeality. The little tingle, elemental friction lost from us from moment to moment. That is the vanishing of corporeality.

Switch to another part of experience: sensation. Is it pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral? Feeling is a very personal, very important part of our experience. Try, with all the equanimity we may muster, to observe sensation. Recognizing, "Ah, this is sensation." Witness the arising sensation bubble by bubble; it just continues to stream in, whether we wish for it or not. The arising of sensation. At the same time, none of them can stay pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Sensation is removed from us moment by moment... the vanishing of sensation.

Next, try to find the thing-maker, the name-giver in our mind: saññā, perception, that which bestows meaning to every sense contact. This is perception. We find a point of focus that we can really see for ourselves: "This is perception." Try to witness the arising of perception. There's no way we can influence or avoid the arising of perception; it's caused by the mere presence of sense contacts. It's involuntary in itself, an indicator against the self-nature of perception. It's just the arising perception. Each of these sense perception mirages has to vanish again—small ones concerning the direct present, maybe you catch a few bigger ones concerning perceptions about you, your situation, the past, and the future. None of those can stay or become part of a permanent self. Try to comprehend what this means, this vanishing of perception.

Strongly connected to sensations and perceptions are activity impulses. The agenda of the mind rearranges itself from moment to moment, always finding something to do with the perceived and sensed so-called objects. The gentle voice that gives us things to do, this is the activity impulse. Try not to believe in them, to obey them; simply observe them. Soft and continuous unasked-for arising of activity impulses. At the same time, release activity impulses; they vanish again and again. We don't buy into the urgency of the agendas; they just slip by, vanish.

Finally, consciousness arising and passing away. Try to follow the prioritized sense consciousness: ear consciousness to body consciousness to mind consciousness back to body consciousness—jumping from one place to the next. Funnily enough, we can observe and watch this. This is consciousness. The arising of consciousness, too, is involuntary. We can't stop it or push it away because its causes are not within our will, our wishing. We are exposed to the continuous arising of consciousness. We can challenge the perception that consciousness is ourselves by pointing the focus of our awareness not on the surface, on the facade of this self-like feeling, but delving deeper into its continuous vanishing—one consciousness after the other.

Then we rest for a few moments. Try to absorb whatever we learned in this meditation. Try to understand what this really means. It means insight into the impermanence of all facets of our experience. It could mean our painful struggle for a permanent self can peacefully be relinquished if we accept the true nature of this inventory of our experience.

Thanks for joining me in meditation. Sorry for the speed run, but I hope you've got a first glimpse of what it can mean to practice insight with the five khandhas. And now, there would be some time left for a discussion or any questions or comments from your side. I'm happy to answer or comment.

## Q&A

**Questioner:** Hey, thank you very much. Bhante, I wanted to ask you, this being my first time that I do this meditation. I find that it is, in a sense, much easier to penetrate the illusion of sensation, particularly physical sensations, and of activity impulses, than the visual appearance of things. Because, you know, if I see my hand or my foot, it looks very solid and continuous. It feels a little artificial to tell myself, "Well, it's just a visual illusion, you know, like a film, it goes very fast, and it looks continuous." So I don't know, how do you work with the visual form?

**Bhante Pasanna:** Well, I think that's a very common thing, because as humans, we are simply so visually inclined. One very simple thing most of us do when we meditate is we close our eyes to get a little advance on this problem. I'll just recommend getting used to doing it where it is the easiest, and then starting to work in areas where it feels not so obvious.

**Questioner:** Okay. Thank you. Hi Bhante, thank you for your teaching today. I was wondering if you could say a little bit about one of the first passages that you read that discussed there not being any essence to ourselves and our experience. I wonder if you could say a little bit about the relation between essence and nature? If there is any connection?

**Bhante Pasanna:** I don't fully get the question, between essence and nature, because those are all nature similes?

**Questioner:** I guess I was thinking more in the sense that, like, we're looking at things as not having an essence. But can we look at things as having a nature? Like, do we have a nature that's separate from an essence, if that makes sense?

**Bhante Pasanna:** Well, the essencelessness is the nature of things, I would reply. I might note that interestingly, in the Theravada suttas, the term "essencelessness" is not very often mentioned. The sutta we discussed today is one place where it is mentioned, but usually, the Buddha prefers the term anattā[^19]—non-self. I think it gives us a clearer implication of what the Buddha is wanting to convey. When we talk about essencelessness, immediately, as you ask rightly, the question arises, "Well, what is meant by essence?" We have to understand the Buddha here is just paraphrasing, using another term for non-self here when he talks about essencelessness. But the nature of things is a bit difficult to think of, especially when we start to realize that the thing-ness of things is itself construed by our mind. We can talk about certain behaviors all of our experiences display—those are the three lakkhanas[^20], the characteristics of everything we experience. So maybe you find an equivalent to the term "the nature of things" in being concerned with how they behave through time, rather than trying to find a certain nature or quality they inherently possess. Does it make sense to you?

**Questioner:** That does. Thank you. That's helpful. Thank you, Bhante. I had a question about... like, during the meditation, it felt pretty intuitive to see the arising and passing away of some of the khandhas but not others. So saññā in particular, and the sankhāras also felt—because you had talked about how they sort of stretch in time—it felt difficult to see the passing. Like it just felt like they came and then stayed. Yeah. Like, the sort of more ephemeral, impermanent nature was more obvious with the other khandhas. Any suggestions about how to see the passing away particularly?

**Bhante Pasanna:** Yeah, especially with saññā. As I mentioned in the talk, that's this kind of permanency-creating machine. When we are enticed by saññā, we tend to focus on the attributes we project onto a certain object. That does not necessarily change in the sense that we perceive another quality in the object, right? So as I mentioned, a crucial tool for tackling this stubborn saññā is a strongly focused mind that can really keep its focus very straight at the narrow point in the present moment. Then we can let those saññā clouds, the saññā brackets—I like to think of it as brackets, like in a sentence, when you put something in brackets—then we can see how there still is a transition, or a movement taking place, even while this bracket is intact. 

Another trick to break it down might be to watch out for smaller saññās that together build this bigger saññā. For example, if I have the perception, "this is our Dhamma meeting now," this is a quite widely stretched saññā bracket. But I could pay more attention to the smaller ones, like "this is my smartphone device that I use for this session," or "this is my meditation block here," and "these are the different people I see on my screen." I break it up into smaller bits that are not so intriguing. 

Another thing you might notice is that a saññā is all the harder to tackle the more intense the vedanā is that accompanies it. If we have a perception that is accompanied by a strong pleasant or unpleasant sensation, automatically it gets more weight in our mind, and automatically we are made more afraid of it if it's an unpleasant sensation, or more interested in it if it's a pleasant one. Then again we are disabled from seeing the impermanence behind the facade.

**Questioner:** That was very helpful. Thank you so much Bhante.

**Bhante Pasanna:** Thank you for the question.

**Questioner:** Okay, thank you. I heard you say that sankhāras mean different things in different contexts. And I was wondering if you could give an example of a different meaning outside of the khandhas. What do you mean by that?

**Bhante Pasanna:** Yeah, there are so many different usages for this word sankhāra. That's in general, I think, an important way of dealing with these Pali terms. I don't know who came up with the idea that we have to find one consistent rendering for a word that's used so differently. We have the problem not only with sankhāra. Another very big one (which was, by the way, on my preparation list, but it didn't make it into the talk) is the term dukkha, which is also one of those terms that is simply used for different purposes. And if we confuse those different usages, we end up in quite a confusion. 

With sankhāra, here we have sankhāra as one of the five khandhas, and it has to be noted that there is the possibility of khandhas plus clinging and identification causing suffering, but there is also a set of five khandhas without identification, without ignorance. Let's just think about the Buddha or his enlightened disciples; they also still have a working set of these five khandhas, but they no longer cause suffering. That means here already, we can see that sankhāra has to be, in the khandha context, a term that can be used neutrally for awakened people, because they also have sankhāras on board still. That already shows us that this sankhāra here must be a different sankhāra from, for example, the sankhāra we find in the paticca-samuppāda[^21] list, in dependent co-arising, where we find the expression that sankhāras are directly produced or caused by ignorance. They can't be the same sankhāra. Even the Buddha, when he saw his alms bowl, got the sankhāra of "Maybe I should go on alms round." But there was certainly no ignorance involved. So here we have to distinguish already.

Another familiar occurrence of the term sankhāra is in the 16 steps of mindfulness of breathing. There again, for me in my practice, it's useful to reconsider what it means in this context when we breathe in and out in order to calm the bodily sankhāra. That also shouldn't mean that arahants can't do breathing meditation because they have no sankhāras left to calm. It has a different nuance than the sankhāra we got to know here in the context of the khandhas.

**Questioner:** Okay, thank you. That's very interesting.

**Bhante Pasanna:** Yeah, if you're interested in this topic, please start an investigation into the different meanings of the term dukkha. You'll be surprised how entangled our understanding of the Dhamma can get if we confuse those different dukkha interpretations.

**Questioner:** Okay. Thank you. I got a message in the chat from Vidana. He wanted to ask: "Can Bhante talk more about rūpa khandha in relation with vedanā? So often our feelings show on our bodies, like feeling goosebumps when scared. How can you see the gap that comes in between the two that can help us see them as two different khandhas and not just one single entity?"

**Bhante Pasanna:** Oh, that's a good question. A lot of these unclear borders between the two come from the use of our etymology. Whether we say sensation or feeling, none of our usual common usage words really hits the meaning of vedanā. Me not being a native English speaker, I tried to avoid feeling on purpose and came up with sensation as an alternative. The big difference between rūpa and vedanā is that rūpa belongs to the material side. It's connected with the four elements, and what the four elements contribute to our experience. Whereas vedanā is strictly a mental factor. It's listed under nāma-rūpa. The Venerable Sariputta[^22] explains the nāma factors of nāma-rūpa, and vedanā is one of those. So in the context of nāma versus rūpa, it's clearly not on the rūpa side, it's clearly not part of the material aspect of experience, but a mental one. 

So whether we say feeling or sensation, it doesn't really hit it. Because in my understanding, vedanā is that very part of our experience that just attributes a pleasant, unpleasant, or neutralness to every contact. If we have goosebumps, in certain situations we might feel the feeling as pleasant, and in other situations we might view it as unpleasant. It's just how the storage of our conditionings views the certain sense contact and attributes an according vedanā to it.

**Questioner:** So Bhante, that was my question. So can I ask the following question. During samādhi, when you're in deep absorption, then you feel some goosebumps, and your body is like, you know, feathers touching. So is it just to be ignored? Because it's a pleasant sensation, not to be feeling good about it, just to ignore and keep moving forward?

**Bhante Pasanna:** Well, in an instance where we practice insight meditation, that would be the way to go. But on the other hand, if you practice tranquility and pleasant, peaceful states, sometimes we use those experiences to develop the calm of the mind.

**Questioner:** Yes, because you get stuck at that. If you get stuck for a long time, that means that you're doing something not right, so you need to go into insight afterwards. Right?

**Bhante Pasanna:** Yeah, yeah, I mean, insight is the key. We can prepare a huge golden key, but never use it to open our prison doors, and that will not be very helpful. So as little samādhi as necessary and as much insight as possible. That's maybe my basic meditation outlook. But again, we could talk for a long time about what right sammā-samādhi is. To me personally, I view it to be much more important that our samādhi experiences are incorporated into a holistic development of the mind towards letting go, and not chasing more and more intense happiness experiences, because by themselves, they are not really helping us get to the aim that the Buddha wanted us to attain.

**Questioner:** Exactly, thank you so much. I have a question about consciousness. I have two places here. Could you please explain what you said, that there is no consciousness that is not linked to one of the khandhas? That's what I understand at least by what you said. There is no consciousness separated by itself. My question is because when you get to jhāna[^23], for instance, there is no body at a certain point. There is just consciousness... just pure...

**Bhante Pasanna:** I would disagree, to be honest. Pure consciousness is not something the Buddha will talk about. Consciousness is always dependently arisen. Maybe it got lost a bit in my explanation—dependently arisen on the six sense bases. That's what I was talking about today in this Dhamma talk. And there's no difference between samādhi and not samādhi, because the body does not vanish. I mean, that's obvious, otherwise your meditation cushion would become empty if someone passes by. So your body is there, alright? You might not experience it in the way you used to experience it, meaning the focus of your attention is somewhere else. Most probably, if you talk about the experience of some special kind of consciousness, that would mean that the focus of your attention is resting on a certain perception, the perception of pure consciousness, for example. But the mind consciousness holding this perception is still connected to the body. Because the mind is also connected to the body. Mind itself is nothing else but the software of our thinking organ. At least, that's how I understand it. Right?

**Questioner:** Yeah, no, that makes sense. Now, yeah. So we don't perceive the body, we don't have the sensation of the body. Of course, the consciousness is attached to the body. But since then, the consciousness would be linked, in this case, to the rūpa?

**Bhante Pasanna:** Well, I wouldn't say that consciousness is directly linked to rūpa. Consciousness is always interrelated with the other four khandhas. If we want to leave talking about the connectedness between consciousness and the sense bases and go into the interrelatedness between consciousness and the other khandhas, there's also an interrelatedness. Because consciousness, by definition, is being aware of something, being conscious of something, so we can't possibly imagine being conscious without being conscious of something; that would mean being completely unconscious, right? But there's one particular exception. It's not about a samādhi mind—which, as we clarified, there is a consciousness in samādhi that can find very subtle and unusual perceptions compared to our usual ways to go through the world. Our aim as meditators is rather to get consciousness to lose its interest in taking up and grasping the other khandhas.

That doesn't mean that this consciousness is then not caused by our sense bases or still interrelated with the other khandhas. What we try to attain is a non-grasping mind. In my own practice, I came up with a different rendering for this term "grasping," because grasping always suggests that there is someone or something that does the grasping. When I talk about the grasping of the five khandhas, we easily imagine a mysterious entity grasping the five khandhas, and then again, we end up with some sort of mysterious unexplainable entity. So I prefer to call it being glued or sticking together of the five khandhas. The grasping all happens within the context of the five khandhas: they intertwine. 

Like we discussed earlier about the difficulty of working with the impermanence of perceptions, and I said it's because sometimes it's so strongly attached to a certain vedanā. That's exactly what I mean: for the unawakened mind, these khandhas are so intrinsically interwoven, they seem to all justify each other. They build a structure. What we try to achieve is understanding that we can't ever really separate them, but we can make our focus rest on one of them. Like if you have a room with five lively children, you can't really separate them and say "you stay here" and "you stay there," they jump all over the place. But still, you could focus on one of them. Maybe you know this child is sick and needs a little extra care, so you could focus on that one child, even while they're jumping around. In the same way, we try to understand from each khandha how it really is: it's impermanent, it's conditionally arisen, and therefore it loses its stickiness that it usually would contribute to a nice compact feeling of a solid self. What you try to achieve is not a higher form of consciousness that has nothing to do with the other khandhas anymore, but a state where consciousness and the other khandhas are no longer driven into each other by this force of desire, which makes us long for some stability and some self.

**Questioner:** Thank you, it was a very confused understanding. Because, you know, reading about there's consciousness and there are all the other khandhas... Now I understand what you mean. It's very clear. Thank you.

**Questioner:** I got something from Prinana. Could you please request Bhante to talk more about exploring the arising and passing away of consciousness specifically, and how it is different compared to the other khandhas?

**Bhante Pasanna:** That's an interesting question. Basically, it's not different at all. But it needs a little bit more finesse from our side, because consciousness is so much the carrier of our self-illusion. I mentioned a little bit already in the talk that there's a strong connection, especially in this regard, between consciousness and perception. Because we have a perception about consciousness, and the perception we have about consciousness is that it is the core of our self, the awareness that always stays put whatever we do in our life. That's the thing we have to crack open. 

I would recommend anyone who is specifically interested in comprehending the impermanence of consciousness to steel your mind in training knowledge about insight into perception, because that's the key there. We have to understand the layer of perception that's clouding the impermanence of consciousness. We can also do some small tricks or experiments on intentionally binding consciousness to a certain perception. I used to use breathing for that; you can develop your own little method out of it. You could try to focus on body consciousness while you breathe in. At this time, you're allowed to really fully absorb how it feels to identify with this body consciousness that's connected to breathing in, which would usually feel like "Now I am the one who is breathing in, I'm the one who feels this in-breath." Try to internalize this feeling of "I am the in-breather." And then when we breathe out, we don't do the same again, but we rather observe that this one particular consciousness of "I am the one who experiences the in-breath" is no longer present when we breathe out. 

If that's too close, we can go further back into the past. Let's say, we could try to remember the consciousness we had when we started this Dhamma meeting. How did it feel? Or maybe something else happened today which left an impression in your mind, and try to remember how it felt to have that particular sense consciousness at that point of time. And where is it now? So we can see individual consciousness arises and passes away. But the fact that consciousness is part of our experience, that's a constant. We don't have to fight that and try to have a moment of being unconscious to prove that consciousness is impermanent. Consciousness is impermanent, and at the same time, it's permanently part of the whole set of experience. We have to aim at the right impermanence to crack it. Does that make any sense? 

**Questioner:** Yes, it does. Thank you so much, Bhante.

**Bhante Pasanna:** You're welcome.

**Questioner:** Sorry, viññānam anidassanam[^24]. I got it now. Is it experienced as an object of perception? Or does our consciousness become without surface when it loses interest in the khandhas?

**Bhante Pasanna:** Consciousness without surface... I would say it becomes uninterested in any meaning. If that's meant by surface, then alright. But it's really dancing along the edges of language here. In a certain way, you could say that viññānam anidassanam—usually it's translated "non-manifestative," but I find this a bit too cheesy; literally it would rather mean "non-depicting consciousness," which is the description for liberated consciousness. That simply means consciousness that has lost its interest in playing with the other khandhas, and thereby also losing its power to create something out of its union with the five khandhas. Usually, when the five khandhas get together and grasping is involved, we get a certain product out of this, and that's called bhava[^25], or being. This being is not just a neutral term; it's a charged term—charged with ignorance, because being is a state we create by identifying with these khandhas. When I have the feeling "I am someone" and I have certain attributes, and I use all the khandhas to create a certain image of self, that's when the viññāṇa is creating a picture. I'm using rūpa and vedanā and saññā and sankhāra to paint the picture. 

But once we understand that within these five khandhas there's nothing to gain, such a picture is not really of a lasting quality. They simply don't stick together as nicely, and the picture doesn't really appear any longer. That itself again can involve perception. But at the same time, perception is no longer of such a high interest that it creates the new feeling of a "me" in all that. Did that satisfy the question?

**Questioner:** Yes, we hope so. I am not sure if she has a response or not. Are you up for one more question? Why don't we take one more question and then we'll wrap it up there. Okay, this is from Kath. Could you please ask Bhante, how can one see the impermanence, non-self, and unsatisfactory state of an endeavor but needs to pursue it? E.g., searching for a new job, approaching it in a way that diminishes craving and suffering?

**Bhante Pasanna:** Yeah, that's a good question. It basically means how to move in the world with this knowledge, because it's basically a knowledge that finally will lead us out of this world. We could answer that on different levels. The most straightforward level would be to always prioritize the true nature of things and lead a meditative life. But of course, that's maybe not very helpful if you have to move around in our life. So I would suggest trying to incorporate the insight into impermanence and non-self into our worldly endeavors. 

Let's say you're applying for a new job. Usually, people do that with a lot of anticipation and anxiety and hopes, getting up and already imagining how wonderful it would be to have this stable job or whatever. Creating scenarios in the mind which sell them some fake permanency feelings or self-indulgences. We can move about our daily life and the world also more liberatedly if we bring a certain feeling of relaxedness or an uninvolvement to the table when it comes to such topics. And maybe if the job we apply for is completely contrary to this insight, then maybe it's better anyway we find another job that's more suitable, that maybe even appreciates a person in the workforce who's laid back and not easily excited, and who has a solid foundation in a certain self-awareness—even if that self-awareness means insight into non-self.

Alright, thank you very much for this invitation. Thanks for sharing your Dhamma space while letting me talk and explain a few of my Dhamma insights to you. It was a pleasure sharing them with you. I wish you all the best on your journey to ultimate liberation. Maybe one day our paths will cross again. Until that moment, I wish you all the best.

---
[^1]: **Khandha:** A Pali word often translated as "aggregate," referring to the five elements that constitute a sentient being's physical and mental existence.
[^2]: **Vipassana:** Insight meditation, a practice aiming at seeing things as they really are.
[^3]: **Venerable Sujato:** A contemporary Australian Theravada Buddhist monk known for his extensive English translations of the Pali Canon, available on SuttaCentral.
[^4]: **Rūpa:** A Pali word meaning form, matter, or corporeality.
[^5]: **Yoniso Manasikāra:** A Pali term meaning "radical attention," "wise reflection," or "proper consideration," getting to the root of a matter.
[^6]: **Venerable Katukurunde Nyanananda:** (1940–2018) A Sri Lankan Theravada Buddhist monk and renowned scholar who wrote extensively on the Dhamma.
[^7]: **Vedanā:** A Pali word referring to feeling or sensation (pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral).
[^8]: **Nāma-rūpa:** Name and form; the mental and physical components of a being.
[^9]: **Samādhi:** A state of deep mental concentration or meditative absorption.
[^10]: **Upekkhā:** A Pali term for equanimity, unshakeable balance of mind.
[^11]: **Ekaggatā:** A Pali term for one-pointedness of mind or mental unification.
[^12]: **Saññā:** A Pali word translated as perception, cognition, or the recognition of physical and mental objects.
[^13]: **Phassa:** A Pali word for "contact," referring to the coming together of a sense organ, a sense object, and consciousness.
[^14]: **Sankhāra:** A Pali word with multiple meanings; in the context of the aggregates, it refers to mental formations, volitions, or activity impulses.
[^15]: **Viññāṇa:** A Pali word translating to consciousness or sense experience.
[^16]: **Venerable Ñāṇavīra Thera:** (1920–1965) An English Theravada Buddhist monk who lived in Sri Lanka, known for his writings on the Dhamma. (Original transcript said "Viññāṇa Viada", corrected to "Venerable Ñāṇavīra Thera" based on context.)
[^17]: **Anicca Saññā:** The perception of impermanence. Anicca is the Buddhist concept of impermanence, the idea that all conditioned things are in a constant state of flux.
[^18]: **Dukkha:** A Pali word often translated as "suffering," "stress," or "unsatisfactoriness."
[^19]: **Anattā:** The Buddhist concept of non-self or the absence of a permanent soul or essence.
[^20]: **Lakkhanas:** The three marks of existence in Buddhism: impermanence (anicca), unsatisfactoriness/suffering (dukkha), and non-self (anattā).
[^21]: **Paticca-samuppāda:** Dependent origination or dependent co-arising, the core Buddhist teaching on the causality of suffering.
[^22]: **Venerable Sariputta:** One of the two chief male disciples of the Buddha, renowned for his profound wisdom and understanding of the Dhamma.
[^23]: **Jhāna:** A state of deep meditative absorption or trance.
[^24]: **Viññānam anidassanam:** A Pali term referring to a state of consciousness that is non-manifesting, non-depicting, or featureless.
[^25]: **Bhava:** A Pali term translated as "being," "becoming," or the continuity of existence.