..續本文上一頁upon which insight works is precisely the sphere where ignorance is concealed, our own psychophysical experience. Its method is the application of mindfulness or discerning awareness to this sphere without interruption and in all activities.

　　In the discourse the Buddha states that what must be known and seen as they are is the five aggregates -- their nature, their arising, and their passing away. The five aggregates -- material form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness -- are the basic categories structuring the Buddha”s analysis of experience. Each experiential occasion, from the Buddhist perspective, is a complex process involving a number of factors functioning in unison. To normal, non-analytical consciousness this unified complex appears as a uniform mass, a false appearance which, when accepted at face value, leads to the assumption of a simple solid self as the permanent subject of cognition. The assumption of permanent selfhood Buddhism holds to be the basic conceptual error dominating our mental horizon. It is the outermost shell of egoistic projection shielding the pre-conceptual ignorance, and thus the first of the ten fetters to be broken along the path to liberation.

　　To dispel the illusion of independent selfhood the experiential process must be submitted to searching scrutiny, which rectifies the false perceptions contributing to its formation. The first phase in this examination is the dissection of the cognitive fabric into the distinct threads entering into its make-up. These "threads" or components are the five aggregates. The aggregate of material form covers the physical side of experience, comprising both external material objects and the body together with its sense faculties. The other four aggregates constitute the mental side of experience. Feeling is the affective quality of pleasure or pain, or the neutral tone of neither pleasure nor pain, present on any occasion of mental activity. Perception is the selective faculty, which singles out the object”s distinctive marks as a basis for recognition. The formations aggregate is a comprehensive category incorporating all mental factors other than feeling and perception; its most conspicuous member is volition. And consciousness is the faculty of cognition itself, which sustains and coordinates all the other factors in the task of apprehending the object. These five aggregates function in complete autonomy, entirely through their reciprocal support, without need for a self-subsistent unifying principle to be identified as a self or subject.

　　In order to develop the knowledge and vision of things as they really are with respect to the aggregates, the yogin must first emerge from his state of deep concentration, for the analytical faculty -- silenced in the folds of serenity -- has to be brought into play to effect the required dissection. With his mind made clear and pliant as a result of concentration, the yogin attends to the perse phenomena coming into range of his awareness. The phenomena are attended to as they become manifest to determine their salient characteristics; then, on this basis, they are assigned to their appropriate place among the aggregates. Whatever is physical belongs to the aggregate of material form; whatever registers affective tone is feeling; whatever notices the object”s marks is perception; whatever wills is a mental formation; and whatever cognizes is consciousness. The aggregates may further be grouped into a simpler scheme by placing material form on one side and the four mental aggregates on the other, the two being coupled as mentality-materiality (nama rupa). They are then correlated with their causes and conditions to expose their dependently arisen nature. The analytic procedure generates the realizat…

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