The Five Aggregates: Conventional and Deepest Reasons for Their Structure – Session One: Identifying the Five Aggregates

The Five Aggregates: Conventional and Deepest Reasons for Their Structure – Session One: Identifying the Five Aggregates: "(unedited transcript)

This evening Ive been asked to speak about the five aggregates and the relation of them to the meditations on voidness a rather large topic.

The aggregates are a very important point in the Dharma teachings. When we look at the basic structure of what Buddha taught, namely the four noble truths or the four facts of life, I like to call them sometimes we find that they play a very prominent role there. The first fact is true suffering or true problems. The example that is given for the true suffering is the five aggregates: each of our own individual five aggregates, that is the true suffering. The true causes of them are karma and disturbing emotions and disturbing attitudes; or ignorance, if we go a little bit more deeply: unawareness, or confusion whatever we want to call it. When we speak about the aggregates, these are what is sometimes translated as the contaminated aggregates. This is a terrible translation since it gives a rather unwholesome connotation to it. The word actually means that it is together with confusion: that the aggregate factors are caused by confusion, or unawareness, and they are together with unawareness as part of them. And they also are the word I sometimes like to translate as obtaining they obtain (they will bring about) more suffering, more aggregates, more confusion.

So we have true sufferings and true causes the aggregates and the confusion that caused them. And the true stopping would be a true stopping of those aggregates and...

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