It goes almost without saying that the Five Aggregates throughout the Pali canon are deprecated, that is, they are treated as spiritually inferior to the self. Of course, this is too much for the modern Buddhists to bear or understand despite the ironclad fact that the aggregates are equated with impermanence, suffering and even Mara the evil one.
Rather than face an uphill battle by contending that the Buddha, instead, deprecated and denied the self, modern Buddhists find it much easier to revise Buddhism putting forth the theory that the Buddha taught against Brahmanism’s Atman which, by the way, is an amazing piece of revisionism. As evidence for this, in his book, Zen Keys, Thich Nhat Hanh writes:
“From the intellectual standpoint, it [Buddhism] rigorously rejected the concept of I (Atma), which is the very heart of Brahmanism” (p. 33). (Brackets are mine.)
First, let me say that there is no discourse in the Pali canon where we find the Buddha debating with a Brahmin over the theory of Atman, rejecting it. Actually, what the Buddha consistently and rigorously rejected was adherence to the belief that our self is one of the Five Aggregates. Switching gears, I would go so far as to say that no meditational rewards are possible if the Buddhist adept does not make a clear distinction between the aggregate (skandha) and self (atma)—they are spiritually separate and distinct as night and day.
So what is the Buddha’s reason for teaching that our self is not aggregated such that we should reject the Five Aggregates? To put it in gnostic terms, the Five Aggregates are matter and we are spirit—one is finite the other is not. However, if we blindly adhere to matter, becoming entangled with it, we shall only come to experience great suffering with no end in sight. This is samsara. Not even death provides a way out as we might wish, but it is simply a change of state from one aggregate formation to another.
The Buddha in his great wisdom realized that the Five Aggregates are suffering, and we, as spirit (sattva) suffer because we willfully attach to these suffering, discordant aggregates. If we did not attach to them finding, instead, that which is aggregate-free, this would put an end to our suffering including our rebirth into still more states of suffering. This perhaps explains why the Buddha cautioned us not to regard an aggregate as our self—it would cause us to suffer.
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