Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Opening with Chögyam Trungpa’s image of meditation as “making friends with ourselves” rather than a pursuit of perfection, Ven Jampa Gendun bridges accessible psychology with rigorous Buddhist analysis in this 45-minute session. After a brief mindfulness sit and the refuge prayer, the talk turns to its central subject: the five aggregates — form, feeling, perception, mental construction, and consciousness — as the step-by-step mechanism by which ego constructs experience. Each aggregate is explained in sequence, from the initial sensory bifurcation into self and world, through bare emotional reaction, concept formation, and narrative-building. Śāntideva’s verse on self-grasping as the root of all suffering anchors the doctrinal stakes. Suited to practitioners already familiar with basic Buddhist concepts and ongoing study of selflessness.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 3 PA 1989 08 18.mp3
UUID: 47f039d0-eb02-40e5-a016-98f2902606e2
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principal Aspects of the Path 1988-1990 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1989-08-18
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.4 minutes
Words: ~4,899
We have little bit about meditation. This is by Chögyam Trungpa, talking about meditation. I think a fundamental problem that we all have is that we are very critical of ourselves to the point where we are even our own enemies. Meditation is a way of making up that quarrel, of accepting ourselves, of making friends with ourselves. So meditation is a way of making up that quarrel of accepting ourselves and making friends with ourselves.
We may find that we are not as bad as we have been told we are. We also find that meditation practice is not something exotic and high and out of reach so that we cannot grasp it. Meditation practice is something that takes place on a personal level and involves an intimate relationship with ourselves. Great intimacy is involved. It has nothing to do with achieving perfection, achieving some absolute state or other.
It is purely getting into what we are, really examining our actual psychological process without being ashamed of it. It is getting into what we are properly and thoroughly. It is just friendship with ourselves. Unless we are able to make friends with ourselves, there is no hope at all. If we abandon ourselves as hopeless, as villains, then there is no stepping stone.
If we take that attitude, then we must constantly be looking for something much better than ourselves. And that attempt to outrace ourselves on the spot can continue perpetually on and on and on. And in fact, that is just what we do. Meditation is coming in contact with the actual situation of ourselves, the raw and rugged, painful, irritating, disgusting things going on within our state of being. But even if our state of being is disgusting, we should look into it.
It is beautiful to see. To discover that such things exist in the natural situation is very beautiful. It is another dimension of natural beauty. People talk about appreciating natural beauty, climbing mountains, seeing giraffes and tigers in Africa, and all sorts of things. But nobody seems to appreciate this kind of natural beauty of ourselves.
This is actually far more beautiful than flora and fauna, far more fantastic, far more painful and colorful and delightful and all the rest. As I think I’ve said ad infinitum about Buddhism, Buddhism is simply getting to know ourselves, learning about ourselves and all the various facets of ourselves. In meditation it gives us a chance to become intimately, as Trungpa Rinpoche points out, intimately aware of facets of ourselves that we are constantly seeking to avoid, exclude from our conscious awareness. And as we are going to look at in terms of the five aggregates when we analyze the nature of the self, there reaches a point in the evolution of ego where we consciously exclude those types of characteristics, personality traits, self images which do not fit in with our fixed idea of who we are. And so we exclude consciously, from our conscious awareness, a vast potential which exists within us.
To the degree that we can become accepting in our meditation of all the garbage, we can also become accepting of all the beauty. And we have to take both sides of the coin at the same time. If we can develop a sense of accepting an equanimity of all the different types of personality traits that we have within us, all these various potentials within our psyche, this is a reflection about how we can begin to deal with others in the external world. As I’ve mentioned quite a number of times, and I think I repeat myself many times, but these themes seem important to me. And perhaps they have meaning for you, but I repeat them anyway.
The way we relate with others in the outside world is simply the way we respect or disrespect, the way we care or ignore for others is very much a deep seated reflection about how we see, reflect and care for ourselves, respect and care for ourselves. If we can begin to become accepting of even the negative aspects of ourselves, the parts that we don’t like, we can become accepting of the negative aspects of others, the parts that we don’t like. And we can develop some equanimity, some accepting quality. We can begin to acknowledge these and appreciate them. And it says within Zen Buddhism there’s a parable of the farmer who sees the weeds in his garden not as an obstacle but as a source of growth.
He doesn’t throw them away. He bends them over and turns them under the soil because they nourish the flower, they nourish the crops that which he’s trying to beautify, that which he’s trying to develop. And so maybe if we can appreciate our struggle, it seems like that is a very necessary part of being alive. Because we’re going to have conflict, we’re going to have disillusionment, we’re going to have the constant synthesis between the type of person we want to be and the type of person we see ourselves as now. And if we can simply appreciate that and gain some perspective on it, then it seems like even our pain can be something beautiful.
Even the ugliness that we see within ourselves, we can begin to appreciate it. If we never allow ourselves to get to know it, we’re never going to be able to begin to appreciate the beauty which also exists there. Because these qualities that so much disgust us that we don’t want to see only exist in a relative fashion. They aren’t absolute. If there’s something very ugly within us, there must also be that counterpart of something very beautiful.
And if we find that our lives are becoming somewhat shallow and hollow, Maybe it’s because we’re not willing to get in touch with the ugliness, get in touch with the things that we don’t see, and therefore we have to exclude those beautiful things, those positive things that are also there. Ignoring one, we have to ignore the other. This repressive mechanism of allowing ourselves to get to know who in fact we are. So simply sitting down, watching the breath, acknowledging all the various things that will arise. It’s not that we’re trying to become perfect breathers, that we’re trying to gain single pointed concentration on the breath.
The main emphasis is that we’re using this as a laboratory to learn about ourselves, to create the space, the time, where we’re doing nothing but getting to infinitely become aware of our dimly lit inner world. And with that kind of attitude, the chance to be in a world in which we’re constantly trying to become something other than we are now, is our constant drive, ambition, and speed, never giving our bodies and minds a chance to rest and really get to know and become aware of ourselves. With this type of attitude, I think we can begin to relax. We don’t have to get anywhere, even in our meditation. And then maybe something good will come out of that.
So we’ll just sit for a few moments in practicing mindfulness and breathing. Adjust our motivation. We’re going for refuge. Let me read a short quotation. It’s by I’ve heard all that you have had to say to me on your problems.
You ask me what to do about them. It is my view that your real problem is that you’re a member of the human race. Face that one first. As I’ve mentioned, there are various types, various levels of problems. There’s the levels on the psychological and then the existential, the universal level, all the various problems that we have to deal with.
The purpose of the spiritual practice is to solve those on the very basic most level by what it means to be an ego based sentient being. It’s not necessary to make use of spiritual practices in order to eliminate a particular type of difficulty. You break up with your girlfriend or you break up with your boyfriend, and that’s painful, that’s suffering. You have two alternative methods to alleviate that pain which you naturally want to get rid of. It’s quite right that you seek to get rid of it.
You’re lonely and it hurts. So you can get rid of that loneliness, that hurt, by simply latching onto a new partner, filling up that void. And the pain seems to go away, but perhaps we really haven’t dealt with that difficulty, with that situation properly, Because there’s going to be an underlying anxiety, a fear that this same pain is going to occur again, the same problem is going to arise again, that this person, one way or another, this relationship is not permanent. There’s going to have to be a party in their ways one way or another, by choice or by chance. So in this fear, in this anxiety, runs our life.
It influences everything that we do in relationship to this person. We have to hold on to them in some way because we’re afraid of the recurrence of that pain that we felt previously. So actually, we’ve only dealt with the problem superficially. We haven’t looked at the problem in a very deep manner and dealt with it on a deeper level. And this is the purpose of spiritual practice, to look at the deeper levels of our problems and to deal with them in a very profound manner.
To go beyond, for example, in this situation attachment altogether, and therefore all the fear attended with that and all the anxiety. So when we use spiritual methods simply to alleviate our superficial difficulties, this becomes spiritual materialism. It’s not the proper product of spiritual practice. Going for refuge on a deeper level, the underlying problems of what it means to be an ego based sentient being and seeking protection, the solution to that problem. This is the purpose of spiritual practice.
Otherwise, become involved in simply maintaining, supporting and extending our problems, our ego, which is the source of our own problems. To the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened. Through the merit I create by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all beings. To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened. Through the merit I create by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all being.
To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened. Through the merit I create by practicing giving and the other perfections. May I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all being. We’re discussing selflessness at the Hearer’s level, the Hearer’s level. What you discover in mindfulness meditation is that a stream of thoughts, feelings and perceptions keep coming into awareness and pass away moment by moment.
The mind tries to grasp them, hold on to them, identify with them. But this never really works. You can’t hold on to anything. You keep trying to come to some conclusion about things, but every position the mind takes is succeeded by a different one a few minutes later. This provides a very direct experience of impermanence and lack of solidity of self.
So talking about thoughts, feelings, perceptions, Thoughts, feelings and perceptions. These are three of the five aggregates, and that’s what we’re going to talk about tonight. Aggregates, what do we mean by aggregates? The five aggregates: aggregate of forms, aggregate of feelings, aggregate of perceptions, aggregate of mental constructions. Here they use the term thoughts.
You can say thoughts or formation, thought formations, mental construction. And the fifth aggregate, the aggregate of consciousnesses. These are the five aggregates. They are bundles of tendency. The way in which the body mind complex, this body mind combination, this complex of body mind is experienced.
We’re trying to move away from the idea of solidity and beginning to analyze, break down, begin to see things as events occurring in space and time. There’s a tendency to grasp at these events. Now this table is an event. Takes a little bit of mind bending to begin to think of a table as an event. We think of like a football game as an event.
That’s also an event. But this is an event. It’s a conjunction of many factors coming together. Just for a moment, just like many spectators coming together at a football game and an event occurred and then they disperse again. This table is an aggregation, a collection of many factors, causes, conditions, consciousness coming together as an event and then it disperses, just like the football crowd.
It’s an event. This book is an event. I am an event. The Buddha House is an event. There’s a tendency to grasp at these events in the case of the body and mind complex, the events which are occurring, physical and mental events.
As we’re talking about the hearer’s level, as a singular, unchanging, independent self. There’s just this constant flux flow stream of events, psycho physical events. There’s a tendency to grasp at these events as a singular, unitary, partless, unchanging, independent self as opposed to the actual situation of what? A constantly changing collection dependent upon causes and conditions, the body mind complex. When this grasping to these events in that manner, this is what we mean by ego grasping or self grasping.
The tendency of ignorance to obscure the actual nature of the self. The tendency of ignorance to obscure ignorance is the obscuring quality, ignoring quality of ignorance. The tendency of ignorance to obscure the actual nature of the self and to imbue it with qualities which it does not possess. All suffering is associated with ego grasping. All suffering is associated with ego grasping whatsoever.
This is the ego forming tendency of ignorance. Ignorance tends to grasp at these events as being singular, unchanging, independent. That’s its tendency, that’s its movement, that’s its predisposition. And it’s like a ball has a tendency to roll down a hill. That’s almost its nature in situation.
Ignorance has this tendency that’s always playing out this position to grasp at the psychophysical events in this particular manner, to create a type of self. in dependence upon this grasping all suffering arises. Śāntideva says in a text called Engaging in the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, Whatever troubles there are in the world, however much fear and suffering there is. If all of these arise from self grasping, what use is this great demon to me? The root of all our suffering is self grasping, this forming tendency of ignorance, the root of all our suffering.
And the only way to eliminate it, and therefore to eliminate all suffering, is to develop wisdom, understanding selflessness. This is like adding hot water to cold water. As one’s wisdom begins to increase, one’s ignorance likewise begins to decrease. It depends on a balance beam. As one innerizes, the other lowers.
We have to develop the wisdom to understand selflessness if we’re ever going to eliminate the root of our problems, ego grasping. So the technique that we’re using at the hearer’s level is the four essentials. The first being the essential of ascertaining the object of negation, we’ve talked about that. The second, the essential of ascertaining the pervasion, we’ve talked about that. And we’re talking about the third, the essential of ascertaining the lack of oneness, the oneness of the ego with the mind and body complex.
Last week we talked about the mind body complex in a very rough manner. We can begin to break down our analysis of the mind body complex. We have two components, but we can begin to break it down further into more detail in order to make a more refined analysis, but also to begin to gain an appreciation of the evolution of ego. Somehow we have this feeling, this sense of I. We take it for granted.
We think it’s normal. This sense of I can’t stand you. I’m the most beautiful person in Adelaide. This sense of I. We never question its nature.
When we begin to question it we begin to get a sense of unsubstantiality about it, and we begin to see how it actually evolves, that it’s being created every moment from moment to moment, then it becomes even more and more transparent. So we’re discussing this third essential, ascertaining the lack of oneness, identity, sameness. Examining whether the identified self so we identify the self at the first essential within our meditation. We’ve got a feeling, a sense of when I experience an emotional situation, where there’s something standing behind that experience. And experience requires both an object and a subject.
There’s no experience. There’s never a moment of experience without both. I can’t stand you. There’s something standing behind that experience of anger. There’s something which is anger, angry, angerer.
We have a feeling that there’s a subject behind that which is the agent of the anger. And we begin to get a feeling for what this person who is angry, this I, this self, which is angry. What does it feel like? What is its nature? What color is it?
What shape is it? Building up an image of it. We identify the object of negation, and we’re looking to see with the body mind complex. We’re going to look at the five aggregates. So a phenomena that just means all things, phenomena can be categorized in many different ways according to whatever aids our understanding.
One way of understanding, in order to gain an understanding of impermanence and selflessness of categories and phenomena, the most common and fundamental way is to organize all phenomena into the five aggregates. All phenomena are included within the five aggregates, five skandhas. That’s the Sanskrit term, skandhas. These are five groups, five heaps, five piles forms, feelings, perceptions, mental constructions, consciousnesses, the five aggregates. So they’re called aggregates.
Aggregate is something collected together, a pile, a bunch. If we look at them dispassionately, all our experiences arise moment by moment as isolated impersonal events. The human personality as well as the world of objects are constructed moment by moment by our perception. And they’re all found to be simply a conglomeration, a piling together of events. It’s continuously changing, moment by moment.
And after they’ve arisen, it seems so soon that it’s simultaneous. We become emotionally involved and we create a whole scenario of self and others, self in the world. So we’re constructing a world then we become involved in it and create an emotional scenario, that world and myself. We’re going to begin to look at how the ego evolves, the way in which we actually go about constructing our world. From the initial basic split, the aggregate of forms.
The aggregate of forms is the body and the environment. It includes all of that. If we become more specific, it includes the five senses, the five senses or the five sense faculty. Eye sense, ear, nose, tongue, body sense. That’s the five senses.
It includes the objects of those five senses. Object of the eye sense is what? Color and shape. Ear, sound. Nose, smell, odor.
Tongue, taste. Body, objects of touch. And then there’s eleventh category of forms, which is called non manifest forms. It’s like visions, hallucinations, imaginations, the pictures which form in our mind. They don’t have any sensory manifestations.
They’re not objects of the physical senses, but they have shape and color, imaginaries. It’s only the aggregate of forms that correspond to an external physical world, the material world. The other four aggregates correspond to the other side, to the mental side of the body mind complex. As we’re going to see, the aggregate of forms represents the initial sensory input. This is our first what we call bifurcation into subject object.
Self and not self. Before that, self and not self didn’t exist. We have a feeling that we’ve been put here and that we aren’t participating in the creation of what is present, our situation. That somehow we’re extraneous. This is outside of ourselves.
But this has already gone one step beyond what the actual evolution of the world that we’re creating. That we arise, the sense of this world arises simultaneous with the rise of the sense of self. Inside and outside arise together relative to one another. Prior to this there’s no sense of self other. There’s no sense of inside outside.
There’s only a spacious, open quality, which is the natural state of the mind prior to this, before the evolution has begun, before the first moment of ignorance, the influence of ignorance to bifurcate, to ignore this spacious quality and begin to restrict, to organize. So the forms is this initial bifurcation, the initial sensory input. It’s not as if the world is impinging itself upon us. This is the feeling that we usually sense. This is the feeling that we naturally have, as if the world is casting itself at me, and I’m a passive observer.
But in fact, we are actively participating in creating what we see in all the forms, all the smells, all the taste, that they don’t objectively exist. It’s just like what they’re coming to understand in particle physics, that in the very measuring process of all these different experiments that they run, that they’re interacting with their results. They cannot divide off the interaction of the measuring machines from the results they get. That they exist in a field, that there’s interaction, a participation between the observer and the object being observed. But there’s no such thing as simply getting objective data. That the way you look at that data is going to determine what data you find.
What you see is determined by your predispositions, what you’re looking for, how you look for it, the machinery that you look for it with. There’s no objective reality standing apart from our mind, from our observation, that we’re creating the type of reality that we experience moment by moment. The first aggregate, the aggregate of form. So the idea is to begin to move away from the feelings of solid object things out there impinging upon passive me. That in fact there’s a field that’s being set up, that I’m participating in the creation of whatever is out there, depending upon my own mind, my dispositions.
It is also determining me, the two way street. It’s also conditioning me, what type of mind is going to arise. It’s a play between these two. It’s an experience, it’s an event. And the second aggregate, the aggregate of feelings.
The aggregate of feelings. It is the automatic affective response to form before any higher conceptual processes come in. So what is it? Feeling is we’ve created a form, all of these various forms. We have this input, a type of form, and now we’re going to react to it.
We’ll go into this again. We’ll go through this evolutionary process. We have a form. And now the first initial primitive reaction to this pattern that we’ve created, a visual pattern, a tactile pattern, smell, taste, visual. Now we set up a reactive pattern to it.
We’re going to respond to that pattern, this visual pattern, this tactile pattern. This is what we mean by feeling, this initial reaction. It’s the bare reaction of either pleasant, this reaction takes the form of pleasant, what we would like to grasp at and seem somehow to confirm our existence, Unpleasant, that which we wish to reject. This is the way we respond. A pattern arises in our field.
We react to it. If we wish to reject it, if we react to it with rejection we call that unpleasant. That object is unpleasant. If that pattern is we wish to grasp at it, it somehow confirms our existence, that is a pleasant object. And then are there neutral objects?
What has no bearing on our personal continuation. So feelings are the initial reaction to form. We’re creating form. Then we react to the form, through feelings, unpleasant feelings, pleasant feelings, neutral feelings. We’re getting the sense of evolution of the five aggregates.
We’ll go through this again. The third aggregate, the aggregate of perceptions. Sometimes is difficult. Sometimes it’s translated as discrimination, recognition, discernment, different possible translations. I use the term perception.
It seems to be becoming most popular to create less confusion, but these others might be useful in understanding what we mean. Perception, the aggregate perception. It is the first perception or discrimination, the first recognition that there is a specific object. Up to this point we aren’t relating to this pattern as a specific object, only that there is an object, a sensory input, and that it’s either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Now we’re going to begin to discriminate it as to what the object actually is.
So we’re getting more complex. We’re beginning to develop concept formation, concepts about what the world is. Up to this point we haven’t really conceived it. We’ve only reacted to it. So it forms the concept of oneself as the self.
First recognition of the self comes in the aggregate of perception, that there is a self that’s relating to a particular object out there. Because we’ve determined that this particular object is pleasant, this particular object is unpleasant, this is neutral, certain objects will now begin to occupy our attention. We’re not going to pay any attention to neutral objects. They’re not interested. They don’t play any part in our lives.
We’re going to begin to focus on unpleasant and pleasant objects, mostly pleasant objects. So we’re beginning to determine how the self is going to relate with this object, what types of objects the self is going to attend to, what is going to preoccupy it. So we’re beginning to differentiate into a personality. Our personality profile is beginning to form a concept of who we are. I like this, I don’t like that.
This is pleasant, this is unpleasant, therefore I like that. I don’t like that. This I don’t care about. And we’re evolving a personality. At the perception it abstracts, it pulls out the characteristics of interest to that self.
This enables us to name it. This is a bit in the naming process. Especially We’re going through four levels of understanding of selflessness, of seeing deeply into nature of reality. Here we’re at the hearer’s level. When we get up to the highest most level, the Prāsaṇgika Madhyamaka school, naming becomes a very important subject.
The process of naming, how we create the world in which we live through, process of naming, how important it is. By naming we gain control. We’re able to hold it in our field of attention by naming something. It’s at this point that we begin to abstract the characteristics of that object and to give it a name. Because one can name it, one can also grasp onto it and hold onto it in one’s field of attention.
One knows what one wants to look at. So this is the first discernment of the object itself. It’s at this point. And the fourth aggregate, the aggregate of mental construction, sometimes called aggregate of compositional factors, formations, different names. Maybe mental constructions I think is nice.
Formations, mental formations, formations. Things built up, constructed, formed. It’s comprised of mental contents other than feeling and perception and consciousness. So that all of the mental content, aside from feelings, perceptions, and consciousness itself, is all kind of lumped together in this fourth aggregate of mental construction. All are emotions.
There is a listing of, in one tradition of knowledge, fifty one secondary mental factors. Two of them are perception and feeling. The other forty nine are contained in this fourth aggregate. Things like faith, love, spite, jealousy, all of these negative and positive, neutral secondary emotions are all contained. Also it comprises beliefs, all our systems of belief, all our principles, ideas.
This is a very large grouping of mental constructions. It’s all the conceptual content of our experience that we’re going to overlay onto our experience. All the positive, negative, and indifferent emotions, neutral emotions, whether they’re simple or complex. All these thought patterns, systems of thoughts, beliefs, attitudes that we have. So it represents the formation of emotions and thought complexes.
This is why it’s called formation, the the coming together, the construction of emotions and thought complexes. We’ll discuss that again. The fifth aggregate, the aggregate of consciousness. So there are five sense consciousnesses which we just mentioned eye, ear, nose, tongue, body — five sense consciousnesses that contact physical objects. And then there’s one mental consciousness, which has as its object thoughts, images, dharmas.
So this represents the conceptual proliferation. This is our whole life story. This is our narrative. This is our scenario that we’re constantly writing. This is the whole context in which we lay our experiences upon in order to fit it into some coherent story pattern.
The five aggregates together comprise all of the psychophysical