Dukkha - Relation To The Five Skandhas

Relation To The Five Skandhas

According to the Buddhist tradition, the dukkha of conditioned states (saṃkhāra-dukkha) is related to clinging to the skandhas. Oxford scholar Noa Ronkin discusses the relation between the skandhas (Sanskrit; Pali: khandhas) and dukkha:

Her conclusion is that the associating of the five skandhas as a whole with dukkha indicates that experience is a combination of a straightforward cognitive process together with the psychological orientation that colours it in terms of unsatisfactoriness. Experience is thus both cognitive and affective, and cannot be separated from perception. As one's perception changes, so one's experience is different: we each have our own particular cognitions, perceptions and volitional activities in our own particular way and degree, and our own way of responding to and interpreting our experience is our very experience. In harmony with this line of thought, Gethin observes that the skandhas are presented as five aspects of the nature of conditioned existence from the point of view of the experiencing subject; five aspects of one's experience. Hence each khandha represents 'a complex class of phenomena that is continuously arising and falling away in response to processes of consciousness based on the six spheres of sense. They thus become the five upādānakhandhas, encompassing both grasping and all that is grasped.'