Chapter 11. Perception, Symbol, Myth of Ven. Sujato's White Bones Red Rot Black Snakes (
http://self.gutenberg.org/eBooks/WPLBN0 ... Lotus%2019) has an insightful discussion about the five aggregates:
The five aggregates are ‘form’ (rūpa, ‘matter’, also ‘appearance’), ‘feeling’ (vedanā), ‘perception’ (saññā), ‘volitional activities’ (saṅkhārā), and
‘awareness’ (viññāṇa, often rendered as ‘consciousness’).
Form, in the simplest sense, is the physical realm in general. But its
root meaning of ‘appearance’ suggests an ‘inside-out’ orientation. Form is
not objectively conceived stuff in the world, but our lived experience of
the physical, the objects of the five external (i.e. physical) senses. It also
extends to physical qualities imagined or remembered in the mind, such
as mental imagery.
Feeling is a very simply-treated category, just the pleasant, painful, or
neutral tone of experience. It relates closely to the most primal of gut instincts and desires. Vedanā is characteristic of the animal realm, with
its intense suffering and instant gratification.
Perception is more subtle, filtering and making sense of experience.
While this—like all the aggregates—is also shared with animals, humans
develop this faculty much further through the use of symbols and signs,
setting up tokens for recognition. These ‘signs’ are the basis of language
and human culture in general. Even today, a sense of identity is evoked
through recognition of a common sign: religious icon, flag, football club
colors.
Saṅkhāra is, narrowly, volition, and relates to our sense of ourselves as
independent agents exercising our free will. It manifests as thought, concepts, plans, and is future oriented, whereas saññā looks to the past. But
the most critical aspect of saṅkhāra is that it is ethical: one chooses to do
good or bad. The three previous aggregates are pre-ethical; there is no
notion of good or bad suggested in their definitions. Later theorists of the
Abhidhamma decided to use saṅkhāra as a catch-all category, including a
long list of any and all miscellaneous mental factors that didn’t fit into
the other aggregates. But this lumps all kinds of primitive and sophisticated mental qualities in together, entirely obscuring the developmental
structure of the five aggregates.
Viññāṇa stands in apposition to all of these things; it isthe knowing, they
are the known.
When the stuff of experience is set to one side, viññāṇa
remains. In everyday experience it is the ‘awareness of’ the six kinds of
sense objects, and is reckoned as sixfold. Refined and cultivated it is the
radiant awareness of ‘infinite consciousness’. Historically, this is where the
pre-Buddhist Upaniṣadic yogis such as Yajñavālkya found the Self,3
and
today it forms the ultimate reach of countless popular spiritual writers.
Viññāṇa is normally translated as ‘consciousness’, but this is meant in the
sense of simple awareness, as opposed to its use in psychological discourse,
where consciousness is used in a more complex sense as the totality of
thoughts and feelings, or even as self-reflective awareness.
The discussion continues in the book. I find the five aggregates to be a very profound teaching that permeate all of the dhamma.
He has also written earlier on the topic in A Swift Pair of Messengers (
https://holybooks-lichtenbergpress.netd ... engers.pdf)
Here is a quote from a discussion on perception (page 104):
One of the key factors in meditation is perception (såñña). Perception is a relatively shallow mode of
knowing which recognizes the surface features of phenomena, interpreting them in terms of past experience. It
marks off one section of sense data so that it can be treated as a unit. For example, it is perception that
generalizes and summarizes the data in a visual image, recognizing that ‘This is blue, this is yellow, this is red.’
It filters, simplifies, and abstracts the sheer bewildering quantity of sense data, processing it in terms of
manageable information, symbols, and labels. Perception forms the basis of concepts. While perception
recognizes common features of phenomena, concepts combine a group or class of features into a mental image
or idea. In order to construct something as ephemeral as a concept, the mind must be actively diverted from the
clamor of sense experience and applied inwards. The formation of a concept can be analyzed in two stages.
Firstly, there is the initial conception of a verbal idea, a thought (vitakka). Secondly, a sustained series of these
thoughts is linked up to form a coherent consideration (vicåra). At this stage, this thinking and considering is
still preoccupied with perceptions of sense experience; but the mind is able for the first time to be aware of a
mental object distinct from that experience, and hence by reflection to infer the existence of a ‘mind’ as
experiencer. This development, though crucial for both psychology and philosophy, introduces a subtle
distortion in experience. By representing the world as more coherent and meaningful than it really is, it invites
an insidious obsession with the fantasy realm of concepts, the fairy castles of the imagination, divorced from the
uncertainties of reality.