Illuminating the Five Aggregates with Prajna
In Part 1 of the Heart Sutra, I first examined the fact that language is not fixed. Words arise, acquire or lose meanings as they are used, and sometimes change into something quite different. I also discussed what the title Mahaprajnaparamita Heart Sutra means, how people understood prajna when the expression prajnaparamita was formed, and how Avalokitesvara entered Buddhism as the embodiment of people’s wishes in a particular age.
This time we move to the next passage: when practicing the profound prajnaparamita, one illuminates the five aggregates as empty and crosses beyond all suffering and calamity. There is no need to attach excessive mystery to the phrase “practicing the profound prajnaparamita.” We can understand it as knowing that intrinsic nature is empty—that nothing in the world can be called an independent and eternal “this”—and looking from that standpoint of wisdom. The character jo in jogyeon means illumination. Just as we shine light into a dark place to see it closely, we examine the five aggregates by the light of prajna.
Illuminated by prajna, the intrinsic nature of the five aggregates was empty. When we escape that mistaken conception, we also escape the suffering it creates.
I will address the details of “crossing beyond all suffering” in the next installment. What we must grasp first is the connection: suffering created by a mistaken conception disappears when we are freed from that conception. It may sound as simple as saying that liberation brings peace of mind, but before that conclusion stands the enormously important question of how we understand the five aggregates and emptiness.
Not Merely “All Five Aggregates Are Empty,” but Their Intrinsic Nature Is Empty
The Chinese Heart Sutra is commonly read as “seeing that all five aggregates are empty,” but Sanskrit-related texts and other short versions show that the point is that the aggregates’ intrinsic nature is empty. If only “all are empty” remains, emptiness can easily be turned into an unknowable metaphysical substance. People have made the Heart Sutra difficult by mystifying emptiness and piling up obscure expressions. Yet emptiness first means being empty. It means not being filled with a hard, self-contained something.
What is empty? Intrinsic nature is empty. Intrinsic nature means a thing’s own character, supposedly existing by itself without relation to anything else. To say that it is empty means that no matter how hard we search, we cannot find an independent, unchanging essence called “this.” Nothing arises alone without being affected by other things and then remains eternally identical.
Emptiness is not a declaration that nothing exists. It means that a fixed character existing by itself, unrelated to anything else, is absent.
If we imagine a being that exists by itself without cause or condition, we approach the idea of a god. Ancient images such as a sky god or a “father in heaven” place a first being beyond dependence on anything else. Human beings, however, require a mother and father to be born. We must breathe, eat, digest, and excrete to live. From beginning to end, we are beings within relations.
Rice and the Self Reveal Dependent Arising, Impermanence, and Not-Self
Consider a bowl of rice. It is rice on the table now, but before that it was grain, and earlier still it was the fruit of a rice plant formed through soil, water, air, sunlight, and photosynthesis. After becoming cooked rice, it continues changing under the influence of temperature, air, and microorganisms. Leave it alone and it dries, rots, grows mold, or fills with insects. Because its relations never stop, it never remains exactly the same rice for even one instant.
The self is no different. If my mother and father had not met, or if one condition that night had been different, I would not exist as I do. Not only my parents but innumerable past lives, natural events, the earth and moon, and even ancient supernova explosions participated in producing me now. I differ from yesterday to today and change at this very moment. What we call “I” is a name attached to one cross-section cut from this immense change.
Being quick-tempered appears only in comparison with someone relaxed, and being short appears only in comparison with someone tall. Even clear skin is identified in comparison with other skin. A characteristic emerges only within relations. We cannot find a “nature of me” that has no comparison and receives no influence.
Dependent arising means arising and changing in relations; impermanence means that nothing always remains the same; not-self means there is no fixed self that can be called “this.” They are different faces of one phenomenon.
Things arise from conditions and cease through conditions. Yet arising and ceasing are also names we attach to sections of change. We call the moment a baby leaves the womb a birth, and when an egg breaks and becomes a chick we say the egg disappeared, but relational change simply continued. Birth and death are also human ways of dividing the flow of transformation.
The Five Aggregates Are Five Components Used to Explain a Human Being
The original expression is panca skandha. Panca means five, while skandha refers to a heap, branch, component, or part that constitutes something. Just as a tree takes shape through its trunk and branches, and a body is said to consist of a head, torso, arms, and legs, the five aggregates refer to five components said to constitute a human being: form, feeling, perception, formation, and consciousness.
The word panca shares a distant root with Greek pente and English five. The United States Department of Defense building is called the Pentagon because it has five sides. This comparison shows that the “five” in the five aggregates is not a mystical number but literally means five. Skandha can likewise be understood as a branch, mass, or division making up a larger whole, like the branches of a tree. Panca skandha is therefore an explanation of a person in terms of five branches or heaps.
We may describe a human as matter, but we also think, feel, remember, and judge. Mental activity was an important problem for ancient people trying to understand a human being. They therefore tried to describe us through one material aspect and four kinds of mental activity. The purpose was not to discover a soul or atman, but to show that even when we examine a person we find no independent, eternal true self.
The five aggregates do not mean that five fixed substances exist inside a person. They are a method of explanation that divides a human being into a material aspect and four kinds of mental activity.
We cannot establish whether the Buddha himself first stated this classification, whether it existed earlier, or whether later schools organized it. The five aggregates nevertheless became a very old Buddhist explanatory scheme. If its purpose is to reveal not-self, it leads to the conclusion that no atman exists apart from the body and mind as an eternal entity.
Language Is Not Reality but a Pattern Abstracted from Reality
To understand form, feeling, perception, formation, and consciousness, we must first understand the character of language. Language is abstract and approximate. We call objects of different sizes and shapes “trees” not because every tree looks identical, but because we extract common features, bind them into a pattern, and for convenience agree to call it a tree.
A person who has seen an elephant may say it has a long trunk, a huge body, and thick legs, but someone who has never seen one cannot fully know the actual elephant. One person may extract features and make a statue, while another who has seen only that statue makes a new elephant that gradually becomes a strange animal far removed from the original. Even when we see something directly, we do not remember every detail; we select striking features. Language is built upon such abstraction.
Language is not reality itself. It is a human tool made by extracting some features of reality into approximate patterns.
Language enabled humanity to share absent objects and highly abstract concepts and to accumulate knowledge. Yet because we process much thought through language, language can also harden thought. Korean speakers tend to think in Korean and English speakers in English. Reality changes and language changes, so concepts cannot be finished and fixed objects either.
Mushrooms offer the same lesson. We place a newly encountered mushroom with features resembling an edible one into the same broad category, but after meeting a poisonous mushroom we divide that category again into what can and cannot be eaten. Patterns are corrected and refined as experience grows. Language preserves traces of this living classification; it is not evidence that the world existed from the beginning with labels such as tree, mushroom, and human already attached.
Translation Is Not One-to-One Correspondence but an Unsteady Bridge
When regions and living conditions diverge, even languages with the same roots change in different directions. If people living in snow distinguish many states of snow with separate words, a language without those distinctions may have no exact equivalent. Translation then cannot carry over all the life, culture, and sensory experience contained in the original word.
The English word love and the Korean word translated as “to love” do not cover exactly the same uses. English speakers may use love broadly for coffee, a chair, or a moment, while the Korean expression historically had different usage. Repeated exposure to foreign expressions can change Korean usage, but at the first moment of translation the two words did not overlap perfectly. They intersect, yet parts remain outside the intersection.
No perfect translation exists. Translation is a bridge of estimation that carries as much meaning and tone as possible from one language into another.
That is why transliteration is used when no equivalent exists or the loss would be too great. Mahaprajnaparamita was written in Chinese characters according to sound, while “Heart Sutra” translated meaning. A more serious problem arises when translators choose a familiar character whose meaning cannot contain the broader range of the original term.
A reader easily mistakes a translated word for an object exactly identical to the original word. Yet the original carries the life, customs, senses, and uses in other sentences of the people who spoke it. Translation selects and carries over overlapping parts. If we treat a single Chinese character in a scripture as containing an absolute meaning, we fail to see the losses and changes that already occurred in translation.
Why Was Matter Translated as “Color”?
The original term for the first aggregate is rupa. In a narrow sense, rupa means visible shape, form, or color; in a wider sense, it means the material. The meaning expanded from visible form to matter in general, including air and water, which may not present a stable visible form but can still be sensed.
The problem is that rupa was translated with the Chinese character se, commonly understood as color. In the series “form, sound, smell, taste, touch, and mental object,” it can refer to color or a visual object. In the five aggregates, however, it refers to the material aspect of a human being. If the same character is used in both places and explained as color in one and matter in the other, a beginner’s confusion is inevitable.
Outside Buddhist terminology, it is almost impossible to find ordinary uses of this character meaning matter. It would have been better to transliterate rupa or at least choose a contextual translation that visibly conveyed the material sense. Preserving a settled translation as authority and merely ordering students to memorize that “Buddhism uses it this way” does not promote understanding.
Someone unfamiliar with Buddhism will understand the character as color or, through expressions about violating sensual discipline, as something sexual. A high-ranking monk even explained the realms of desire, form, and formlessness as a world of greed, a world made of color, and a world without light. I criticize this as the dreadful reality of Korean Buddhism: someone who does not understand even the first aggregate occupies the highest seat and speaks loudly of awakening.
In the five aggregates, “form” means the material aspect, not merely color. Without this basic point, neither the Heart Sutra nor the form and formless realms can be read properly.
How Feeling, Perception, Formation, and Consciousness Divide Mental Activity
Feeling: Experience Received Through the Senses
The original term is vedana. It refers to receiving and feeling what is outside through seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and bodily contact. Mental activity does not arise without experience. Thinking, judging, and remembering are based on experience received through the senses.
Perception: Bringing What Was Received to Mind as a Representation
The original term is samjna. When a sense organ and object meet and experience arises, we bring selected features to mind as an image, smell, sound, or concept. This is perception. We do not store every detail like a photograph; we retain important features as patterns. That is how we recognize a dog or cat from a different angle as the same kind.
Formation: Mental Operations Including Emotion, Intention, and Desire
The original term is samskara. It is close to moving and operating. Emotions such as depression, joy, and sorrow; desires to act; a sense of obligation; responsibility, inferiority, superiority, pride, and avoidance can be grouped as formations. Since operation also occurs in feeling and perception, these categories cannot truly be separated with a knife.
Consciousness: Cognition by Distinguishing
The original term is vijnana. The prefix vi carries the sense of dividing and distinguishing, so consciousness is knowing by distinction. Just as a self-driving car must identify whether what lies ahead is a person, car, animal, or wall before stopping or proceeding, humans distinguish cats from dogs, conifers from deciduous trees, and edible from poisonous mushrooms. Classification and discrimination became a foundation for accumulating knowledge.
Civilization accumulated because one generation distinguished edible things from dangerous ones, seasons and species, passed those distinctions on in words, and the next generation added new experience. If every generation had to discover everything again from the beginning, today’s knowledge could not exist. Consciousness is not merely attaching names inside the head; it is a basis for recognizing differences, accumulating knowledge, and choosing action.
Feeling receives; perception represents features of that experience; formation produces various operations of mind; and consciousness recognizes by dividing differences.
The Five Aggregates Do Not Exist Apart from One Another
These five are divided for explanation; they are not five independent lumps. Without a body, sensation cannot be received. Without sensation, representations cannot be formed. Without representations and experience, we cannot recognize or generate intention and emotion. Conversely, without cognition we cannot notice sensation and representation as anything. Form, feeling, perception, formation, and consciousness arise together in dependence upon one another.
The fact that four of the aggregates describe mental activity also reflects the conditions of ancient inquiry. People lacked neuroscience, MRI, and biological knowledge with which to analyze the body. What they could directly observe and think about were the mental processes of receiving sensation, forming representations, moving through emotion and intention, and distinguishing one thing from another. The classification reflects the range that could be observed in that age.
Memory also does not store an entire object like a photograph but extracts features and retains a pattern. This is a condition for efficient cognition and also for illusion. Seeing a dinosaur in a cloud or mistaking a pot lid for a turtle happens because we fit mental patterns onto actual objects. Perception is not reality itself but a representation abstracted from it.
We cannot cut form, feeling, perception, formation, and consciousness apart and declare, “Only this is consciousness; only this is formation.” In that very respect, the intrinsic nature of the five aggregates is empty.
Turning the Aggregates Back into Substances Contradicts the Heart Sutra
One important target criticized by Prajnaparamita literature was the Sarvastivada school. Its detailed analysis of persons and phenomena expanded into elaborate systems such as the five categories and seventy-five dharmas. When we endlessly classify what is good and bad, what must be abandoned and what cultivated, divisions created for human convenience can begin to look like unchanging realities.
Then a new absolutization and deification appears: eternal dharmas supposedly exist on their own, and we must obey them. Analysis originally used to deny soul and atman becomes a new attachment that treats each dharma as real. The Heart Sutra intervenes precisely here by saying that even the intrinsic nature of the five aggregates is empty.
The five aggregates are useful explanations, not absolute realities. If we become bound to explanatory divisions, we create another substance while speaking of emptiness.
We can explain form as matter, feeling as sensory reception, perception as representation, formation as mental operation, and consciousness as discriminatory cognition. Yet within a real human being none exists alone apart from the others. Language and concepts select features of reality and divide them for convenience. To apply all the way to the aggregates the fact that no fixed entity can be called “this,” and that everything changes within relations—this is the meaning of seeing that the intrinsic nature of the five aggregates is empty.
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