Philosophy and Religion

What are the five skandhas?

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Experience is analyzed into five aggregates ( skandhas ). The first, form ( rupa ), refers to material existence; the following four, sensations ( vedana ), perceptions ( samjna ), psychic constructs ( samskara ), and consciousness ( vijnana ), refer to psychological processes. The central Buddhist teaching of non-self ( anatman ) asserts that in the five aggregates no independently existent, immutable self, or soul, can be found. All phenomena arise in interrelation and in dependence on causes and conditions, and thus are subject to inevitable decay and cessation. The casual conditions are defined in a 12-membered chain called dependent origination ( pratityasamutpada ) whose links are: ignorance, predisposition, consciousness, name-form, the senses, contact, craving, grasping, becoming, birth, old age, and death, whence again ignorance.

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