Khandha · Pāli: khandha; Skt: skandha

Khandha means a heap or an aggregate. Access to Insight glosses it as “Heap; group; aggregate. Physical and mental components of the personality and of sensory experience in general”, and the Buddha uses five of them to account for a whole person: form, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness. The Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta (SN 22.59) takes each in turn and finds no self in any of them. “Form, monks, is not self. If form were the self, this form would not lend itself to dis-ease”, and “it is not possible [to say] with regard to form, ‘Let this form be thus.’” The point is not that nothing exists, but that nothing here is owned or commanded by a fixed me. Seeing that, a disciple “grows disenchanted with form, disenchanted with feeling, disenchanted with perception, disenchanted with fabrications, disenchanted with consciousness”, and comes to know that “Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done.” This analysis is the anatomy behind not-self.

The aggregates also carry the first noble truth. The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (SN 56.11) closes its account of what is stressful with a summary: “In short, the five clinging-aggregates are stressful.” Suffering and the aggregates are one teaching seen from two sides, which is why the four noble truths keep returning to them.

The framework is not a Theravada speciality. Sanskrit sources give the same five as “material form or body (rūpa)”, “sensations (vedanā)”, “apperception (saṃjña)”, “volitions or dispositional formations (saṃskāra)” and “consciousness (vijñāna)”, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy observes that “this aggregated view of persons informs all aspects of Buddhist thought and is indispensable to any account of cognition”.