The History of Buddhist Thought c13.15

c13.15

Here we have the well-known analysis of the individual into the material part, the body, and four divisions of the spiritual part. The only term here needing separate comment is *saṅkhāra*. The aggregates evidently form one of the groups of the spiritual part, and the scholastics explain them as “the mental concomitants or adjuncts which come or tend to come into consciousness at the uprising of a *citta* (thought).”¹ They include everything that may come into the mind, permanent qualities like memory, ideas, good and bad impulses or dispositions, as well as unconscious habits. It is evident that in the above legend they are supposed to explain one part of the constituents of the individual man. Māgandiya had just before congratulated himself on his perfect health, and Buddha here points out that it ends in old age and death. It is this grasping after the things of the body which results in coming to be, i.e. passing into a new existence. Rebirth is a term here out of place, birth is a stage, but the new existence, the coming to be, begins not with birth but with conception. The next stages of birth, old age, and death are clear.