Samyutta Nikaya: Khandhavagga Radhasamyutta (III-23)

 

1: Where thre is form, there migh be death, either the one who kills or the one who is killed. The investiture of self in any of the khandhas produces the concept of death, the ending of that concrete self with the ending of that particular khandha.

 

The list of steps:

 

revulsion (turning away)

dispassion

liberation

Nibbana

 

At Nibbana “one has gone beyond the range of questioning.” That is, Nibbana is the state beyond discursive thought, beyond even questions of “what is” (which invariably seem to set up a “what is not” sense of duality.)

 

2: The metaphor of children playing with sand castles: as we grow up, we are less and less attached to them and eventually they don’t mean anything at all to us. So it is to put aside our investment of self in the khandhas…the practice is a growth process away from this investment.

 

3: “conduit to existence” is a synonym for bhavatanha, or craving for existence.

 

Note that the various forms of craving to the khandhas includes ‘mental standpoints’, as well as ‘underlying tendencies’—it’s important to recognize subtle as well as gross forms.

 

11: Mara is here equated with the khandhas. The makes sense: our desires, lusts, temptations and all revolve around our ‘self’—which has been invested in one or all of the khandhas.

 

12: “Subject to Mara”: our functional self is subject to our investment of self in the khandhas. The maturation of practice dissolves this subject-object duality, as we slowly realize the emptiness of the functional self.

 

11 – 22: each sutta assigns the khandhas various attributes. They are as follows:

 

Mara

Subject to Mara

impermanent

of an impermanent nature

suffering

of a paintful nature

nonself

of a selfless nature

subject to destruction

subject to vanishing

subject to arising

subject to cesstion

 

All the “subject to” could possibly be rendered as “nature of”. That is, it is the khandhas’s nature to be destroyed, to vanish, to arise, to cease.

 

23: Abandoning the khandhas is dhamma in brief.

 

24 – 34: Repeats the formulas of 11 – 22, but with “you should abandon lust, you should abandon desire and lust, for whatever is [x]” with [x] standing for the attribute. Then with each khandha—[y] is subject to [x] (or whatever is the attribute.)