..续本文上一页ing down into manageable pieces. For most of us, suffering is an enormous issue, much larger and more pressing than the abstract question of who or what we are. When suffering comes, it overwhelms us. We can”t stand up under its weight. In fact that”s one of the traditional definitions of suffering: that which is hard to bear. And it”s hard to bear because we feel overwhelmed. When it hits hard, it seems like an enormous mountain filling our awareness. We can”t get a handle on it. The purpose of piding it into these five heaps is to break the mountain down into gravel, and the gravel down into dust. This helps us realize that no matter what the type of suffering—whether it”s the suffering of aging, illness, death, the suffering of separation, the suffering of not getting what we want—it can all be analyzed into just five sorts of things. That”s all it is. And furthermore we can look at these five sorts of things and see that there”s nothing there worth suffering over. We build enormous narratives around our pains, but what are those narratives

　　 They”re just perceptions combined with the thought-fabrications built out of them. If we cling to those narratives they”re going to make us suffer. But if we take them apart, we see that there”s nothing much there.

　　So the Buddha has us focus, not so much on the story line, but on the building blocks we use to put the story line together. If you get down to the building blocks, you begin to see how artificial this whole process is—because these aggregates are not things. They”re actually activities, things we do. We suffer because we cling to certain activities, certain movements of the mind. So to cut through this clinging, you have to keep breaking your suffering down and analyzing it: What”s going on here

　　 Suppose there”s a pain in your leg and you”re suffering from it. What”s going on there

　　 There”s the form of the body, and then there are the actual feelings of pain. And then there are the perceptions, the labels you put on the feeling; the thought-fabrications, the stories you build around the feeling; and then the consciousness, the repeated acts of being conscious of all these things.

　　So instead of building up the stories around the feeling—getting angry about the feeling, getting upset about it, worrying about it—if the mind is calm enough you can start taking the suffering surrounding the feeling apart. What”s going on

　　 What”s actually there

　　 There”s the form of the body, which is actually separate from the feeling, although we often glom the two together. If there”s a pain in our knee, it feels like our whole knee is nothing but pain. But if you look at it carefully, there”s the form of your body, and then there are the feelings flickering around the form. They”re not a single, solid thing. Many times we perceive the feeling to be a solid thing, but now we”re taking that perception apart. Actually there”s not just one perception. There are many repeated perceptions, just as there are many moments of feeling. This is why these things are called khandhas, or heaps. Like heaps of gravel or heaps of sand, they”re made out of small inpidual events, small inpidual motions, either physical motions or mental motions. So you break them down, break them down. And once they”re broken down, they”re not too big to handle. You can change them. For example, those perceptions you applied to the feelings: What happens if you change them from perceptions of “pain” to simply perceptions of “sensation”

　　Or you can try to analyze the sensation into its physical aspects: the sensation of warmth or heat, or maybe a sense of blockage that feels solid. If you actually take those solid feelings apart, though, you begin to see they”re not so solid after all.

　　Then there are the stories you build up aroun…

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