Day 8 of 365: Form

Sometimes the skandhas seem abstract and incomplete.  I picked up Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness today to read another description of the skandhas to develop more of a certainty that they do indeed capture everything that I experience in mind and matter.  This text has quite a good and down to earth presentation of them and I recommend it.  Khenpo presents form first as body and the environment.  In a very straightforward way, we take the world to be out there with us in here.  We can look for truly existent things in this skandha (ie, singular, lasting, and independent).  What is really the strongest thing we're convinced of?  Ourselves.  In looking for what we call "me", you can look at your body.  How do we identify ourselves with our body?  Where in the body is the self?  Is it in our head, our toe, our brain?  Where exactly is it?  If you were to remove that part of the body would "you" still exist?  We can examine the external world similarly and rest in any non-finding.

Many people suspect that all the negation in these teachings may lead them to nihilism or at least a sense of indifference about the world.  Somehow the phenomenal world just won't be ignored.  I recently have started training with Olympic weightlifting (snatch, clean and jerk).  Working on front squats the other day, the coach loaded up the bar with kilo weights.  Being slow on conversion, I didn't know exactly how much I was lifting and the coach didn't give me a chance to process it.  After being commanded to lift, I did--and in fact it was a personal best.  So, loosening our concepts of things can bring possibilities into a situation.  The phenomenal world snapped back rather rapidly though as I clocked myself in the nose while I was practicing the snatch.  At that moment, the skandha of form was the only thing on my mind.