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Skandha is a Sanskrit word that means heap, collection, cluster or aggregate.
The Buddha taught about the five Skandhas to his disciples to make it easier for them to understand the heaps that make up the "self". A self that is not really there but sure feels very real. It has a body, a collection of feelings, perceptions, mental activity and discernment.
I imagine sitting under the tree with Buddha, really keen to understand why it is that we all suffer so much on a daily basis. Keen to narrow it down to something that I can apply to my daily actions....
Part of Buddha's teachings is that we suffer because we attach to the collections of things that we think make up our self. We look at the collections of parts that make up ourself; our body, our feelings, our thought, our conceptualisation of the world, the name we carry, the cults of religion, family, community, job, nation, sport team etc. that we are part of. We look at it and associate ourself fully with it and come to believe that this is what we are.
Why does this happen?
It is the first job of the ego:
"The egos first job is to get the personality together. To survive the avalanche of sensory experiences that is not categorised or conceptualised yet." Buddha Maitreya
Also, it is just easier than constantly questioning who we are. It is easier if you have to get dressed in the morning and go to work. We become defined by the way we dress, wear our hair and make up, carry our job-title and street address in a very specific way. This also helps us to place other people into categories, it somehow makes things safe. The ego also needs this to make sense of the world.
On a daily basis, unless you retreat into a monastery or a hermits life (which I know some of us would like to do:)) it is just easier dressing a certain way and being a certain way so that you can get the activities of the day done.
The point here is not that you have to be something that you are not; or test run different personalities everyday. The practise lies in observing how much you attach to the collections of things that you are.
Are you just your body? How much does your body define you? When you have pain are you just your pain or is there another part that is happily observing without getting involved in the suffering? When you are walking or running is the body the only thing that is there with you? How aware are you that you have a body when you are in a state of deep flow or sleeping? etc.
Are you your feelings? When you are sad is it possible to know that you are happy as well on some level or do you get swallowed by a feeling? Can you have a feeling arise, observe, transform and let it go or do you spend days lost if the same feeling? Do you sacrifice activities, relationships to your feelings? etc.
Are you your thoughts? How many thoughts do you have a day of the past, the future, planning, obsessing? How many of these thoughts are real and true and have an effect on you? Are you ever able to predict the future or remember the past exactly as it happened? Can your thoughts make someone do what you want them to? etc.
All of these questions and many more can show us how the supposed realness of these Skandhas can be relative. It shakes us loose from the mechanics we need to keep being someone or something.
Our attachment to the way we think and feel we should be; and how things should be for us, causes suffering in so many ways. Just think about what you argue about with yourself, with others, with the world. Just think about how much time you spend doing things a certain way because family or culture predicates it so. How much of your energy it consumes...
When we start the practise of observing the skandhas; we bring spaciousness into how we feel, think and act or how we think we should feel, think and act:)
Some of the things you can expect when you start this practise
...there are loads more and I leave this for your discovery. Comment in the chat or DM if you have a discovery to share.
Number one on my list is that we get to stress less, relax and breathe for a bit. Normally we just jump straight into the mental and emotional suffering that comes with so much of a life that is defined by the skandhas.
We can choose what we spend our energy on so we have more energy.
It gives us more freedom of choice. We are not stuck in one way of thinking, feeling or acting. We can choose a different way of being in a situation, we can choose when we participate and how we participate.
My favourite side effect is that it deepens our meditation practise. Often when we sit for meditation we have a range of thoughts, feelings, aches and pains that arise. It makes it hard to sit there and follow the breath, even harder to relax.
If we can just sit there and not attach to everything that comes up, if we can identify that maybe it is not me, maybe I am grasping into the past, into the future, grasping at feelings and making them more. Maybe I am grasping at thoughts that seem to be amazing and real and inventions of all kinds. Maybe all of that is temporary, maybe tomorrow if I sit down it will happen again, maybe it won't.
If we can watch these thought and feelings rise, instead of grasping and attaching to them because they make up the heaps of us, there is a very real possibility that they can float away like clouds before the sun.
If I sit down everyday and persist at meditation practise, those same thoughts and feelings will become the background noise and something else can arise. In time we get to discover that maybe just maybe there is a True Self, and I with a capital I, an I with a boundless nature. A nature that is not defined by heaps and clusters of stuff, but by the dance of infinity and the song of creation.
"Ultimately we need to work back to that state where
all time personalities of the "i" is gone" Buddha Maitreya
I invite you to try this practise of observation. To discern what in your life is a Skandha. Who knows what you can discover if you try! I keep on discovering heaps, sometimes it is easy, sometimes it is hard, uncomfortable and vulnerable. It is a bit like clearing out our garage, there are cobwebs and attachments to throwing away things. It is hard going but in the end everything is lighter and there is more space.
Here are the five Skandhas for your reference, it takes time to work with them. The concepts are not as important as what you can discern in practise by meditation and mindfulness in your daily activities.
They are also related to the five Dhyani Buddhis ( see one of my previous articles). If you are working with the Buddhis already, they each have a Skandha that you can work with at the same time.
The 5 Skandhas:
matter or body (rūpa), the manifest form of the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water
sensations or feelings (vedanā)
perceptions of sense objects (saṃjñā)
mental formations (saṃskāras/sankhāras)
awareness or consciousness (viññāṇa)
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