Hello, I’m Cheng Qing. Welcome to Relief for Life: Forty Introductions to Buddhism.

Last time we described life’s eight sufferings. Now we ask why suffering is felt.

Buddhism summarizes the eight sufferings asthe suffering of the five aggregates in full blaze,also calledthe suffering of the five aggregates aflame.Every form of suffering ultimately belongs to agitated, constructing body and mind unable to rest.

The five groups are a technical term also translated asthe five aggregates.Aggregate means collection and also concealment. Life can be analyzed into five collections:form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness.The Heart Sutra famously says:‘Form is not different from emptiness; emptiness is not different from form. Form is emptiness and emptiness is form. The same is true of feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness.’This expresses the emptiness of all five aggregates.

Let us explain each in turn.

Form simply meanstangible phenomena,roughly comparable to philosophicalmatter.Form changes and obstructs: matter not only transforms but resists. The form aggregate is life’s material dimension.

To demonstrate Buddhist analytical thinking, we can divide it further into five faculties, five objects, and nonmanifest form.

First, thefive faculties.The familiar six faculties are eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind. The first five belong to form. They mean not merely visible organs but deeper sensory systemscapable of producing cognition.。

Next are thefive objects.These are the five classes of phenomena corresponding to the faculties:five classes of sensory objects,visible form, sound, smell, taste, and touch—external objects sensed by the five faculties.Eye sees form, ear hears sound, nose smells odor, tongue tastes flavor, and body feels touch. Each can be divided further into colors and shapes, material sounds and living voices, and so on.

The final category isnonmanifest form,aninvisible material phenomenonproduced by the basic functions of earth, water, fire, and wind. Some schools classify it as mental rather than material; Buddhist doctrine contains many such debates.