Talk Notes:
Meeting the Heart Sutra 3: The Skandhas
Heart Sutra packet
So now we know the frame story from the longer version of the Heart Sutra which explains that the sutra happened as a usual Dharma gathering with the Buddha and many students on Vulture Peak. That the Buddha was in a deep meditation through the whole thing and that his deep samadhi supports Avalokiteshavara in her deep practice. And that the Buddha saw an opportunity to the community to learn something important so he empowered the monk Shariputra to ask Avalokiteshavara how we should practice prajna paramita - how do we enter a deep relationship with emptiness. The sutra is Avalokitesvhara's answer.
Just before Avalokiteshavara starts talking the sutra explains her central insight and why it matters: she "clearly saw that all five aggregates are empty and thus relieved all suffering."
So let's talk about the five aggregates. This is a translation of the Sanskrit term skhandas which means "heaps" or "categories." So we need to understand what those are and also find out what it might mean that they are empty and then we're relieved of all suffering. This is a breathtaking claim actually isn't it? But a lot hinges here on what we mean by "to understand".
What these five aggregates are is a different way of looking at the experiences we call "me."
That sentence is a good start for us. To start exploring the Buddhist idea that there's not a persistent separate something - a being - that we call me that's moving around through space having experiences. It seems like there is, but actually that's a kind of illusion. Albert Einstein of all people called our sense of separate self a "sort of delusion of consciousness." So no, self but yes there are experiences that we put in the self bucket. And as we grow up and learn language and differentiate form our parents and so on the bucket and what we keep in it can get kind of rigid.
What Buddha is suggestion with this teaching of the five aggregates is notice your experiences and see if they don't all fit into five categories. And, if they do, maybe we're a lot less sure about this single central concept of a me to whom it's all happening.
And remember is says that Avalokitshvara was deeply practicing when she understood this clearly, one translation we have here describes that she was "moving in the deep course of the Wisdom which has gone beyond" when she understood this. Another that she was "practicing deeply with the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore" so that seems important here. This is a kind of understanding that arises from deep practice over time, not just learning some new information and expecting our minds to suddenly reformat.
Let's look at p 7 of the packet. And this is one time where it actually can be helpful to learn the Sanskrit. Sanskrit is one lingua franca of Mahayana Buddhism and the easiest for us as mostly we'll pronounce the words close enough. The Chinese characters for things also useful across several different countries: they will pronounce the same chracters differently but they are the same characters. Online i added the Chinese for the five skandhas but I thought of that after I got this printed.
The first aggregate, I'll probably say skandha mostly as that's more familiar to me, is rupa, form. That's our experience of stuff. Of various levels of solidness. An experience of touching or physically feeling is an experience of rupa. Thich Nhat Hanh when he revised his translations went for "body" to help us know which aspect of form we're talking about. In these cultures rupa is also divided up into the classical elements like earth, water, air, and fire. Sometimes a 5th element of space or metal are added but earth, water, air, and fire are a good core list. So rupa is not just solid stuff but stuff that takes a physical form.
Let's do a little meditation on the experience of being in a body to explore different qualities of rupa.
[4 elements meditation - earth: solidity, weight; water: flow]
Sample script (Gemini)
Meditation Script: The Four Great Elements
I. Earth (Solidity and Extension)
"Bring your awareness to the points of contact between your body and the earth. Feel the pressure of your sit-bones, the heaviness of your thighs.
Drop the 'model' of the body as a shape and just feel the resistance. Notice the hardness of your teeth, the firmness of your jaw, the weight of your skull. This is the Earth element. It is the quality of solidity. Whether it is a mountain or a bone, it is the same property: extension in space. Let the body be heavy. Let the Earth hold the Earth."
II. Water (Cohesion and Fluidity)
"Within this solid form, notice the moisture. Feel the cool liquid on the tongue, the lubrication of the eyes as you blink.
Now, look for the quality of cohesion—the 'glue' that keeps the Earth from becoming dust. Feel the blood pulsing in your throat or your wrists. Notice the subtle 'slickness' in the joints. This is the Water element. It is the power of binding. You are not a dry object; you are a cohesive, flowing process. Feel the body as a vessel of fluid energy, streaming and holding together."
III. Fire (Temperature and Transformation)
"Shift your attention to the warmth of the body. Feel the heat radiating from your armpits, your palms, or the center of your chest.
Notice the contrast: the coolness of the air on your skin versus the internal heat of your metabolic fire. This is the Fire element. It is the energy of transformation. It is the ripening and the decaying of the cells. Feel the body not as a 'thing,' but as a thermal event—a constant state of combustion and temperature. Everything is cooking; everything is changing."
IV. Wind (Motion and Vibration)
"Finally, become aware of the movement within the stillness. Feel the expansion and contraction of the lungs—the pressure of air moving in and out.
Look closer: feel the subtle vibration in your fingertips, the tingling in your toes, the micro-adjustments of the muscles keeping your spine upright. This is the Wind element. It is the quality of motion and support. Nothing in the body is actually still. It is a dance of pressures and oscillations. From the great wind of the breath to the tiny wind of the nerves, the body is a field of pure motion."
We don't totally identify with these experiences of rupa as our self but we do see all of this as my body. Sometimes in Buddhist circles we drop the possessive pronoun just to loosen that impulse up a little bit - the arm instead of my arm.
The second skandha is Vedanā - in Sanskrit the a with the line over it is "aaah" and without is "uh" so Ved-uh nah. Starting with this skandha we're more likely to think of the experiences that are happening as my experiences that are happening to me and thus the "me" behind. Especially because the Skandha of Vedanā often leads to a cascade of thoughts and emotions and impulses it kind of seeds our habit of "self-ing."
Vedanā is hard to translate as there actually isn't an English word that means what it is. As you can see sometimes people use "feeling" or "sensation". But both of those have problems. Our feelings - like emotions - actually belong to the fourth Skandha of Saṃskāra and sensations we feel are part of rupā. My favorite English for this is actually "feeling-tone" which never really caught on for some reason.
What it's about is the way everything we experience has a positive or negative flavor in our minds. Or is neutral. The best way I can express this I think is with sound. Somethings are like "hmmm!" (rising, warm, desirable vibe) others are like "mmmmm" (not so sure vibe) or even "ugh". And plenty of experiences just slip right by in our minds and are more like "hm" (neutral tone).
We can also do a little meditation on bodily sensations and even include thoughts and emotions with this filter of pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. Let's try that. The trick here is to stay with the experiences and not spin up into thinking about them. Not: why's that happening? how do I get rid of it? how to get more of it? what's going on here? Rather just: unpleasant.... pleasant... pleasant.... Maybe you notice some of the neutral... experiences that tend to just slip by.
[guided meditation pleasant / unpleasant / neutral]
Bits of sample script (Gemini)
Physical If there is an itch, don't scratch it yet. Just feel the unpleasant tone. Notice how the mind wants to move away from it. If there is the pleasant sensation of the breath, notice how the mind wants to lean into it, to hold it. See if you can just name the tone: 'Pleasant... unpleasant... neutral.' Strip away the 'itch' or the 'breath' and just feel the tone."
Thoughts "Now, turn your awareness to the stream of thoughts. Like clouds passing through the Wind element, thoughts arise and vanish.
As a thought appears—perhaps a memory or a 'to-do' item—notice its tone. A memory of a friend might feel pleasant. A worry about work might feel unpleasant. A random, fleeting thought might feel neutral.
Don't follow the story of the thought. Just catch the 'tint' it leaves on your mind. Is the mind pulling toward the thought, pushing it away, or ignoring it? Label it: 'Pleasant tone... neutral tone...' and let it go."
Emotions "Finally, notice any emotional weather present right now. Perhaps there is a subtle tint of anxiety, a soft glow of peace, or a flat sense of boredom.
Emotions are complex, but their root is Vedanā. Feel the vibration of the emotion in the center of your chest or your throat. Is the core of this emotion pleasant or unpleasant?
Watch how the 'Model of the Universe' tries to build a huge tower out of a simple unpleasant tone. An unpleasant tone arises, and the mind builds 'I am failing' or 'This is wrong.' Go back to the root. It is just a tone. It is just a frequency."
Neutral "Spend a few moments with the neutral. Most of our life is neutral—the feeling of the air on your earlobes, the back of your head, the tip of your nose. We usually ignore these because they don't 'scream' at us.
Rest in the peace of the neutral. It is neither a 'yes' nor a 'no.' It is just the universe being exactly as it is, without your model needing to judge it.
Conclusion "We think our suffering comes from our circumstances. But these Buddhist teachings suggest that we see that suffering comes from our reaction to Vedanā. We crave the pleasant, we hate the unpleasant, and we are bored by the neutral. Meditation is the practice of feeling the tone without being a slave to it."
And this can be really valuable to see if we can stop at the point of experiencing feeling-tone. Not adding all kinds of opinions and gripes and complaints as that magnifies the power of vedanā - moves it from pleasant to "gotta have it" or from unpleasant to "this is awful, it's unfair, I hate it".
And I think it's worth noting the kind of creative dance here between acceptance and self-care. The idea isn't to get good at repressing your needs, we have to take care of ourselves. But do we end up being run by this quality of mind especially as it gets empowered by our opinions and beliefs about how things should or shouldn't be. There's the possibility of powerful release when we can just see a difficult moment as "unpleasant." That's true. And sometimes we should also do something in response so we watch carefully to our own joy or suffering and to the well being of those around us to try to discern what a wise response it. My experience so far is more often than not less reaction and less response is often better. And I have to watch out at the same time for falling into being passive or avoidant. An interesting dance for sure.
But either way helpful to start zooming down in to this leaning of the mind that happens BEFORE all of the thinking kicks in to make it more real and more urgent or more depressing or more whatever. At the root everything - ev-ery-thing - starts with a moment of experiencing.
And you can see how paying more attention to vedanā can lead to a reduction in self-ing. Maybe I think that "I love chocolate" or "I detest peanut butter" but at the level of vedanā is more obvious that it's just pleasant sensation, unpleasant sensation. Not a lot of me in there. Actually says traditional Buddhism: zero me in any of this so we're looking for doorways into that reality.
The third Skanda is Saṃjñā - perception. Buddhist conceptions of perception are not inherently different from Western ones. There's some stimuli - the sense-object - that meets one of our senses - the sense-organ - and activates the mind - the sense-consciousness and those processes lead to having a sensory perception.
And where Western science and Buddhism agree here is that perceptions is the direct taking in of an external reality we think it is. Our eyes "see" an object but what are they seeing? Photons that reveal what we call shapes and colors from the ways the particles vibrate and organize themselves but that only happens when our mind processes it all. The eyes seem to us like little windows into the world around us but they are actually light sensors that send electrical impulses to the brain and the brain based on our history and language and many other factors pops up an image in your consciousness. You are not seeing me right now, you are seeing a mind image of me and each of your mind images will be different - will be unique to you. Will the real Nomon please stand up right?!
And that "seeing" isn't even happening exactly right now, it just seems like it is. It turns out that to save energy the brain is happy to show you a stock image of me and it can even show you that stock image before your eyes exactly focus on me. Why do all that processing of the colors and shapes of my face if you already did that a few minutes ago. Waste of energy. It's all pretty seamless most of the time and we experiene each other as if we were looking out of the little eye windows.
Sometimes you misperceive in all kinds of ways. Here's a scary story from a book we studies about the brain a few years ago. The neuroscientist author, Lisa Feldman Barrett, shared this story:
A FEW YEARS AGO, I received an e-mail from a man who served in the Rhodesian army in southern Africa in the 1970s, before the end of apartheid. He’d been drafted against his will, handed a uniform and a rifle, and ordered to hunt down guerrilla fighters. To make matters worse, before the draft, he’d been an advocate for the same guerrillas that he was now required to treat as the enemy. He was deep in the forest one morning, conducting practice exercises with his small squad of soldiers, when he detected movement ahead of him. With a pounding heart, he saw a long line of guerrilla fighters dressed in camouflage and carrying machine guns. Instinctively, he raised his rifle, flipped off the safety catch, squinted down the barrel, and aimed at the leader, who was carrying an AK-47 assault rifle. Suddenly, he felt a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t shoot,” whispered his buddy behind him. “It’s just a boy.” He slowly lowered his rifle, looked again at the scene, and was astonished by what he now saw: a boy, perhaps ten years old, leading a long line of cows. And the dreaded AK-47? It was a simple herding stick.
So the brain is trying to figure out as efficiently as it can what it's seeing. In the dim jungle stressed out during a frightening conflict his brain showed him guerrilla fighters with guns. And you can see how context affects the mind's prediction system here. He expected to see soldier and he saw soldiers.
We say, "I saw it with my own eyes" which means it's accurate and correct, but is it?
And if what's being perceived is part of a complex karmic process beyond what "I" can understand is it really "me" doing the seeing? There's a long passage in the Shurangama Sutra that riffs on this. If there's seeing is there a see-er necessarily? Poor Ananda gets really tangled up about that question and the Buddha has to work hard to clear it up with him.
We can experience something of how the it's the mind doing the seeing. Let's try another exercise.
[blind spots exercise]
If the sensory data isn't available to the eyes the mind just goes ahead and fills it in with it's prediction of what should be there. Even though apparently it's not!
The fourth skandha is Saṃskāra which is probably best translated as "mental formations" but the fact that it's sometimes translated as "impulses" or "volitional impulses" tells us something. The stuff that appears in our minds is powerful and get do all kinds of stuff as a result. The Sanskrit word literally means something like "together makers". This is the experiences that are the mind putting stuff together and making meaning and thus triggering all kinds of responses in us.
Now we're into stuff we very readily identify with and see as "me" - right. Our thoughts and emotions and ideas. In Buddhist psychology they didn't have the clear separation between what we call emotional mental experiences and cognitive mental experiences. Some systems tried to organize the possible kinds of mental formations in lists - they came up with 50 or so different types of mind experiences.
Here meditation is our balm. We sit in zazen and we notice consciousness being caught by this stuff and we release form it. And the point of that release isn't just because that's what we're supposed to do in meditation - it's a powerfully healing release from grasping those mental objects as part of our separate self. We start to see that's worry, that's planning, that's memory. It seems like it's all about me but is it really? And we practice doing the same with emotions. Noting that anger is arising is a whole different ball of wax from "I'm pissed off at her."
So we aren't our thoughts is the short summary of the fourth skandha. To see the mind objects clearly and see that they are not me, they are just mind objects. Powerful, confusing, sometimes brilliant, sometimes useful, often times not useful. We use bricks and 2x4s to make a house but we don't think we are the bricks and 2x4s. We use thoughts and ideas to create all kind of other things but can we learn to release from the idea that we are those thoughts and ideas.
And finally the fifth skandha is Vijñāna - mind or consciousness. That the experience of experiencing all of this. It's the most subtle Skandha but also the one that we totally default to seeing as "me" - I mean who else is experiencing all of these experiences?
The answer Buddhism suggests is there actually doesn't need to be a someone experiencing. It's just experiencing that's happening. There's a book by the Buddhist psychology Epstein called Thoughts without a Thinker which I haven't read yet but reading a review just now it seems like he also has some interesting ways of helping us be less lose in identifying with our thinking and feeling minds.
One helpful tool that gets use a lot is the word "just" - Just thinking. Just feeling. Just a moment. Just this. I love the way "just" has this kind of full-stop-we're-done-here quality to it. A kind exit ramp off the highway towards explaining and analyzing and strategizing and worrying and bothering every experience we have. Why am I thinking that? What's wrong with me? The practice there being "just thinking" and no "me" that's right or wrong.
So back to our sutra finally, Avalokitesvara was deeply practicing wisdom and she saw that not only are the five skandhas not "me" even in themselves they are empty. They are an idea of categories of experience that may be helpful but these categories themselves aren't real in the way we think they are either.
Being empty means they aren't separate or solid or static. It means that they too include everything else and they too arise and pass away. That they to are both more and less that any idea we might have about them.
I think for tonight we can say that so see that the Skandhas are empty is to understand the Skandhas so deeply that not only does the sense of a separate self fall away and self-liberate the skandhas that we thought were tools and categories each one different from the other, each one with it's own kind of sensibleness and clarity is really just conditional and good enough for now - it too falls away and merges into the "all."
We'll talk more next time about this tricky term "emptiness." Last time I wanted us to explore more about who Avalokitesvara is who realized this for us and this time I wanted to explore that these Skandas are that she realized so deeply are empty. I'm trying to take a deep dive together into each of these elements that come together to form this amazing and baffling text we call the Heart Sutra.
