phung po

phung po

Five collections of similar dharmas, under which all compounded dharmas may be included; form, feeling, notions, factors, and consciousness.

Five collections or "heaps" of impersonal mental and physical elements (dharma).

Literally, "heaps," or "aggregates." These are the five aggregates of forms, sensations, identifications, mental activities, and consciousnesses.

See "aggregates."

See "five psycho-physical aggregates."
aggregate

The constituents that make up a being's existence: form, sensations, identifications, mental activities, and consciousnesses.

The constituents that make up a being's existence: forms, sensations, identifications, mental activities, and consciousnesses. Often translated "aggregate," commonly in the context of the five aggregates. Along with dhātu and āyatana, one of the three major categories in the taxonomy of phenomena in the sūtra literature.

The psycho-physical components of personal experience. The five aggregates: form, feeling, perception, formative predispositions, and consciousness.

This translation of skandha is fairly well established, although some prefer the monosyllabic "group." It is important to bear in mind that the original skandha has the sense of "pile," or "heap," which has the connotation of utter lack of internal structure, of a randomly collocated pile of things; thus "group" may convey a false connotation of structure and ordered arrangement. The five "compulsive" (upādāna) aggregates are of great importance as a schema for introspective meditation in the Abhidharma, wherein each is defined with the greatest subtlety and precision. In fact, the five terms rūpa, vedanā, samjñā, saṃskāra, and vijñāna have such a particular technical sense that many translators have preferred to leave them untranslated. Nevertheless, in the sūtra context, where the five are meant rather more simply to represent the relative living being (in the realm of desire), it seems preferable to give a translation—in spite of the drawbacks of each possible term—in order to convey the same sense of a total categorization of the psychophysical complex. Thus, for rūpa, "matter" is preferred to "form" because it more concretely connotes the physical and gross; for vedanā, "sensation" is adopted, as limited to the aesthetic; for samjñā, "intellect" is useful in conveying the sense of verbal, conceptual intelligence. For samskāra, which covers a number of mental functions as well as inanimate forces, "motivation" gives a general idea. And "consciousness" is so well established for vijñāna (although what we normally think of as consciousness is more like samjñā, i.e., conceptual and notional, and vijñāna is rather the "pure awareness" prior to concepts) as to be left unchallenged.

{{#arraymap:phung po

|; |@@@ | | }}