The Five Skandhas

Yesterday I mentioned the 12th century Chan Master Hongzhi whose writings on Silent Illumination have survived and been translated into English. He was based at the Tiantong monastery in South East China, about an hour or so drive from the city of Ningbo. I’ve visited there three times. It’s quite a large interesting monastery, with a very active practice still going on. Nowadays many of the monasteries in China are more like tourist sites, and Tiantong Si is also a large tourist site attracting thousands of tourists per day. However it also, tucked away in the Chan hall, has monks who are practising very seriously so it is still an important practice monastery nowadays. 

Back in the day it was important then too. There’s another important famous teacher associated with this monastery, about 80 years later than Hongzhi but the same monastery and almost certainly doing the same practice of Silent Illumination. This is the 13th century Japanese master Dogen. Those of you who have studied Japanese Zen have probably heard of Dogen – he was the founder of the Soto tradition in Japan. The story of Dogen is that he wasn’t very impressed with the teachers he found in Japan. They wanted to pass him too easily and he didn’t want to be fooled and tricked by this. This is a good attitude. If a teacher is praising you too much it might be that they are just trying to collect acolytes, and Dogen was having none of it. Every time someone approved of his understanding he said, “well you’re no good because I know I don’t know”. 

Dogen took the rather dangerous and arduous journey across the seas to China to find a good teacher. He rejected quite a few teachers in China too, but eventually in Tiantong monastery, when he met the teacher there, Master Rujing, he thought “ah, this one I can train with”. He stayed there training and one day had an enlightenment experience.  And again the master confirmed him. Dogen said “don’t confirm me too easily”. The master said, “No, I’m not confirming you too easily. You have seen”. And so this time, yes, he was satisfied, he had been taken seriously and had found a teacher that he trusted. 

It is important not to believe the teacher just because they have the title of teacher… check out the teacher, check out their understanding. You may not be in a very good position to check out their understanding but at least you can have a sense of, “does this feel right for me, am I being accepted or praised too easily, or is this teacher a little bit off the mark in some way”. This was a good attitude of Dogen’s. In this way he received the confirmation of this teacher and received the transmission and returned to Japan where he founded the Soto tradition. This was an important step in the transmission of the teachings to Japan and Dogen is very widely recognised as an important and significant teacher. 

The Soto practice of Shikantaza is very close, pretty well the same as, the practice of Silent Illumination. It probably is the same practice but the presentation is a little bit different. Dogen presented it a little bit differently in the culture of Japan and no doubt I am presenting it a little bit differently in the culture of the UK. There’s a need for cultural adaptation to convey the teaching that’s behind the words, not just parroting the same words. 

Many of Dogen’s teachings are available to us as his writings have survived. They are often obscure to study but there are some quite well known quotations from which we can take something very directly. The one I’m going to quote to you now is, I think, pinned up to a wall somewhere upstairs. I’ll give you the first line of it. It goes, “To study Buddhism is to study the self ”. 

If you want to study Buddhism the way forward is to study the self. That might not be what you would first think. You might think “Well if I want to study Buddhism then I’d better get the books out and get reading and try and understand all the Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan and Chinese words. No. Dogen said that if you want to study Buddhism then the starting point (and ending point) is to study the self. Let’s reflect on that a bit. Is he saying something rather strange and unusual here or is he saying something very obvious? 

Think back to the story of the Buddha – how did he make his breakthrough? He made his breakthrough by studying the workings of his own mind. ‘Study’ in the sense of a silent or experiential investigation. It’s not a conceptual study of self. It’s not that instead of getting out the Buddhism textbooks you get out the psychology textbooks and then you’re on the right track. That’s not what it means. No, it’s in first person experience of this person that the way forward is found. 

Why? Because, as the Buddha pointed out, the trouble lies in what this first person is up to, creating these various stories and knots and traps for ourselves. The Buddha spotted himself creating his own suffering through craving and aversion. Mostly we don’t catch ourselves doing it, we only find ourselves in the aftermath of having done it and having suffered it. But by ‘investigating’ our own mind, by silent introspection, there is the possibility that we recognise ourselves doing it. And that is the true study of what the Buddha was teaching us. 

We could formulate it in words and philosophies, and there are many, many books written with these words and philosophies, and that certainly has its uses. But ultimately you must test the philosophy against your own experience, otherwise it’s just a conceptual theory. It might be an internally consistent elegant conceptual theory but if it doesn’t actually fit with your own experience of your own being then it’s not much use to you. So why not start with your own experience? Look into your own experience and see what’s going on. It’s perfectly possible that you’ll make the same discovery as the Buddha. With the same result – liberation, freedom. 

Still, the various difficulties of life appear. Legs get broken, we get ill, we get older and we die. The Buddha wasn’t denying that. But he was saying that along the course of our life we don’t have to ‘suffer’ these various events of life – we can experience them without suffering. It’s a big important difference. And the difference, he pointed out, is in the way we react to these events, our habit of moving towards or away from them. Moving towards something we want with the fear of not being able to get it, or having got it then fearing losing it. Or moving away from something we don’t want, with the fear that it may catch us, or perhaps if we’ve got it we fear that we can’t make it go away. Sounds almost too simple, but it is that simple. It’s also very difficult because we are so entrenched in our habits of being this way. In part we are entrenched in these habits due to our biology and the survival instinct. We do need a certain amount of survival instinct, a certain amount of moving towards and away, but we overdo it. In relation to virtually every single little minor phenomenon we form a view about it and react to it. That’s overdoing it. 

If you look inside your own mind you’ll find yourself fussing about things that don’t need fussing about. It doesn’t actually matter if they go the way you don’t want them to go, there’s no harm done. This process of investigating the mind, of studying the self, is absolutely key.  This is why the Buddha pointed us that way. He pointed us towards enquiry into the nature of mind, into the phenomenon of mind. Dogen reminded us to ‘study the self ’, to use the words of this translation. Again this is not intellectual study, rather direct first person experience of your own self. It’s not a matter of me investigating your self. It really is a first person investigation. 

With these discoveries of how the mind works we find that it’s possible that the way the mind works can change. If we’ve seen through the mind doing unnecessary stuff then we can release that stuff. But it’s not always easy because we’ve developed quite strong habits of being. 

This is where it gets quite interesting, as the Buddhist teachings are very close to modern Western psychology teachings. They even use some of the same words like conditioning or conditioned responses. We’ve learned ways of being which have arisen from our experience of life e.g. coping strategies – something happened, we did something, it seemed to more or less work so we just store that one away, “I’ll keep that one in mind for the future, do it again when it happens again”. Especially if it happens more than once and it sort of works twice, we’re hooked then aren’t we? It’s the same basic phenomena with conditioning in western psychology. If we are looking into the mind we can see this going on. 

There is a Buddhist model for it. It is just a model, an analogy – it’s not trying to represent any neurophysiology or anything like that. When we’ve ingrained a response in this way we store a ‘seed’ of the action and the seed is ready to sprout at a moment’s notice when a similar situation arrives in the future. It’s sort of an autopilot. If you recognise how quickly you respond to events, this is a pretty fast germinating seed! Like a millisecond-response seed. But the action appears in response to an event. An expression on someone’s face “Oh, I’ve upset them… what shall I do?” You do whatever you do. You mollify them or you defend your viewpoint or whatever it is. You trot out something automatically. You’ve built up a library, a seed bank of responses, and we trot them out very, very quickly and readily. 

I’m pointing to here to the fourth of the five skandhas which are mentioned in the Heart Sutra. The Heart Sutra really requires you to know other teachings because it is referring to other teachings. The five skandhas is a well-established teaching and this comes in here. The fourth of the five skandhas is translated in the text we are using as ‘volition’, sometimes as ‘impulse’. The sanskrit word is samskara and I’m told that the literal translation is ‘habit-seed’ so you can see the connection there.

For those of you who don’t know let’s just look briefly at the five skandhas. These are a system, a categorisation if you like, of the various aspects of human existence. It’s rather like the sheep pen exercise… many of the phenomena you experience in being ‘you’ could be categorised as fitting into one of five sheep pens or five ‘heaps’. That’s what the word skandha means - it’s not five sheep pens, it’s five heaps but you see the similarity. Five collections. 

There are the bits to do with ‘form’, physicality, the body. That’s the first skandha. 

Second, there is ‘sensation’. Here ‘sensation’, the word ‘sensation’, has a rather narrow technical meaning. Some of the words here have a rather jargon usage, you have to be a little bit careful about what is meant. It’s a little bit different than our everyday usage of the word. Here ‘sensation’ refers to experience of contact. Contact of the form with the environment, contact between the body and environment, that particular experience of contact. So… touch, light, warmth, something like that. That’s ‘sensation’. 

Thirdly, ‘perception’ is what we make of that sensation. That ‘sensation’ of warm contact with the environment might be interpreted as a sunbeam on my cheek or “I’m sitting too close to the fire”. Or “my dog is up on the back of my shoulder again breathing on me”. We interpret the sensations and thereby create perceptions. A sound is heard and we have a go at guessing what it is. I’m putting it that way, ‘guessing’, because we get it wrong from time to time. Some sounds we just recognise and register the perception as, “there’s a bird singing”. Maybe the first couple of times you heard the logs crackling on the fire you didn’t know what they were. But now you are familiar, you jump straight to a perception of “log crackling” if you bother to register it at all. 

We can make mistakes in this process of perception. This illustrates the fallibility of the mind and there are similes for this in the sutras. A well-known one is the example of the coil of rope on the ground in the gloom. Or is it? Is it a snake preparing to pounce? There is a perception of light and shadow, of shape, of a spiral. There is a ‘sensation’ shall we say of light and shadow. What’s our ‘perception’ of it? Well we could perceive a coiled rope left lying carelessly on the ground, or we could perceive a coiled snake. These require rather different responses. Perhaps we tend to err on the safe side and say it could be a snake – I’ll walk around it. Or maybe we don’t err on the safe side and one day we get caught out. That’s how natural selection works – those who don’t err on the safe side… there are fewer of them around! The ones who err on the safe side, the cautious ones, they’ll be around a bit longer. 

Our caution comes at a price – we may experience anxiety about every little shape that might be a slight spiral. You see how we can overdo it. Where does it end? This is the difficulty. We are living in an uncertain world. There isn’t enough light at dusk to say whether it’s a snake or a rope. But it’s literally a matter of life and death to know whether it’s a snake or a rope. We can get anxious. We can get ourselves in knots, we can get avoidant behaviours. 

Here is another fun example of the difficulty of perception which some of you have heard previously. The retreat centre that I teach at in upstate New York, the Dharma Drum Retreat Center, is quite a large property, about 130 acres of mostly woodland and they also have a 5- acre lake there. It’s quite nice to go and stand by the lake and walk by the lake. I was there one lunchtime – it was probably during a work period because there was no-one else there. I was standing near the edge of the lake, where the stream enters the lake. I hadn’t quite reached the water’s edge, I was standing maybe 10 or 15 yards back. And I could hear this sound of… well… a rustling sound or crunching sound, on the other side but further upstream. I could hear this sound approaching. What is it? A twig breaking? Is it a cat stepping on it? Or is it a tiger? And are you going to hang around to find out? 

I heard this sound, and I’d seen previously that some of the neighbours walk their dogs across this property, so naturally my interpretation, my perception, was of a dog walking along. But it was a very loud sound, and the panting was quite loud too. “That’s a big dog” I thought. And then just between the trees I saw… “There’s the dog”, I thought, “that black shape”. “It’s a very big dog…”. “It’s a bear! It’s a black bear!” Which they hardly ever see there. Oooh. 

I’m not used to seeing black bears so I thought “what do I do about this? Do I run away? Do I stand still?” I did know that you mustn’t go up a tree because they are better climbers than we are. So I thought “Oh well it’ll probably just go past”. And it knew where it was going. It came across in front of me and did a sharp left turn where there was a tree that was fallen down like a bridge down the bank to the lake. So it came down the bridge and into the tall grasses. And these were just the other side of the stream about 20 yards from me. I could see the grasses waving around… but where is the bear? All of a sudden the bear appeared at the water’s edge to get his drink of water. 

I didn’t know whether I was supposed to stand still or run away… or what am I supposed to do? I picked up my camera and took a photo anyway! Maybe it was the click of the shutter, or maybe it was the big black snout of my DSLR camera, but the bear didn’t seem to like it and s/he turned and went away so it all worked out. S/he just did a U-turn and went back up the log. Half way up the log s/he turned back and looked at me, then carried on their way. I found out later that what you’re advised to do with black bears is just make lots of noise and fuss so they see you before they get close, because they don’t like being startled when they are surprised by first seeing you close up. If you make a lot of noise and fuss before they get too close then they go away. 

The point of the story is to demonstrate how perception can be imprecise and may deceive us (am I labelling the sound of an approaching bear as just a dog out for a walk…) Perception may deceive us fatally, or at least negatively. Therefore we tend to err on the cautious side - we are over cautious and we over fuss. We create a lot of trouble for ourselves by our unnecessary anxieties, the over fussing. But we can’t totally dismiss it as we can’t deny, as the story illustrates, that a certain amount of fussing and caution is useful – I am now more aware of black bears at that retreat centre and what to do if one appears close up. They’ve only ever seen 3 or 4 there the whole time they’ve been there 20 years or more, so it’s not very common. I was told that the first person who saw a bear there was one of the Taiwanese monks, who of course knew nothing about black bears. The baby bear went up the tree and he thought this was cute so he went up the tree to have a look at it which wasn’t very wise. But anyway it worked out. 

Based on our perceptions we produce a response. We tend to take the shortcut of going for our learned responses. They are conveniently available, they are rehearsed, they generally work out, we know what to do, we don’t have to start working out from first principles how to deal with a situation, we’ve already got a strategy. When a situation looks a lot like one of ‘those’ situations, when it’s pretty similar, on autopilot we yank our seed out of the seedbank and germinate it, all in a fraction of a second, and the response is generated. This word volition, the fourth of the five skandhas, refers to our impulses or habitual responses, our tendency to react from our past learnings and conditioning. We do also come across situations that we have no idea about how to react to, something new to us and we are rather flummoxed, and then and we flounder around a bit trying to work out what to do. We may not like that and can feel rather uncomfortable. But having made it work somehow or another, we store that away for the next similar time. We build up a repertoire of responses in this way. They are not always the most skilful responses – but they are the ones that we have learned – and we tend to repeat them. 

The fifth skandha is consciousness. It sort of integrates the experience of the first four, it’s what holds the awareness of this happening, and it is what receives the sensations and perceptions and impulses and directs the actions and experiences the actions. You can call it a sort of integration, an overarching awareness, a presence, an experiencing, which integrates these individual fractions. 

If you were to look into your own experience this morning you may well find that you could use these five sheep pens or heaps and it would work. The body is present experiencing sensations, put it in the heap labelled ‘form’. Or you might just have a sense of light or sound, undifferentiated, unnamed. That would go in the heap labelled ‘sensation’. You might find yourself, you will find yourself, having perceptions. That bird tweeting out there, that sound of the stream. You might have a slight moment’s hesitation “is that the sound of the wind or sound of the stream that I’m hearing?” You might even deliberate for a moment, then conclude, “it’s the stream”. That’s perception. And then there is ‘volition’ or impulse or habit. How do I respond, and this may be very different depending on the circumstances and the person. Some might respond to a bird by trying to identify the bird. John Crook could identify most British birds just by their song, he didn’t need to see the bird. Most of us might just hear birdsong and not even think about whether it’s just one bird or several birds – “yes there is birdsong heard” – and we stop at that point. But some will start naming the birds and wonder whether it’s male or female bird or a young one, or wondering, “Can I see it? I’m supposed to be meditating facing the wall but if I lean my head back far enough I can see out of that window…”. An impulse arises to respond to that perception which is based on that sensation. 

You might notice your habit of trying to name the birds, of trying to identify them. And then there’s that one that you can’t identify – if you know all of them except that one then that could be a bit annoying couldn’t it? You find yourself getting irritated. This is a response to not knowing. You could imagine yourself as an expert on birds, but there’s a bird you’ve seen or heard and you don’t know what it is. There is a sort of gap in the mind and there is an irritation or annoyance. You’ve let yourself down, that’s what you’re saying. 

All of this is just arising out of the way our minds work, the way we operate. This applies to each one of us. I can investigate it in myself but you must investigate it in yourself. I can talk about it, I can give some pointers, but you need to see if it’s true for yourself. It probably is, as we are based on very similar biology. We have some different genes and so on but the similarities are very great. There will be differences in the details – some might get caught by certain things more than others, or may respond in different ways. But these basic components seem to be present in all of us, though the conditioning that we’ve individually experienced is very wildly different. The life experiences, the different circumstances we’ve encountered, the different traumas and opportunities, are very different for each one of us. Correspondingly our individual repertoire of behaviours and responses is quite different. Therefore you need to investigate your own mind and your own responses. 

There are similarities and we can broadly classify types of responses. Like the aggressive type of response – ‘attack is the best form of defence’ type of response that some people habituate. And then there is ‘retreat is the best form of defence’. Hiding, avoiding being noticed, some people go for that strategy. Both strategies have their successes so each of these could get reinforced and internalised as the way that I respond. “It works for me… I’ve tried it out many times and the score is quite positive… I’m going to keep doing it.” But typically it’s not thought through in that way, it just happens.

Even in response to very similar situations two people might adopt different responses. Two siblings in the same family, in response to the same family dynamics, can adopt very different strategies with varying degrees of success and dysfunction. But as long as there is some degree of success and survival the responses tend to get fixed and internalised, and they continue even if overall they’re rather dysfunctional. You can witness these processes happening now, in your own responses throughout the day, and this is part of the importance of maintaining practice throughout all activity.