The word “sorites” comes from the Greek word for “heap.” It is applied to the “sorites paradox,” a variation of which is the paradox of the heap. Consider a heap of sand. This pile of sand contains 1,000,000 grains. If you remove one grain of sand from the heap of 1,000,000 grains, you still have a heap. If you continue removing one grain at a time, you’ll eventually reduce the pile by half. Then you’ll have two heaps of sand. But what happens when you get down to two grains in the first pile? Can you call two grains of sand a heap?
Buddhism has its own paradox of the heap. One of the renderings of the Pali word “khandha” (the Sanskrit is “skandha”) is “heap.” Another rendering is “aggregate.” The Buddha taught that a person is comprised of five heaps, or aggregates: form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness.
Form is the heap of things that make up the body. The other four come together in the shape of the mind.
Feelings describe a how we feel about something that has come into our sphere of awareness. That is, we have a pleasant feeling, an unpleasant feeling, or a neutral feeling. I hear a warbling sound that feels pleasant to my ear.
Perceptions are the labels we apply to things that come into our sphere of awareness. A warbling sound comes to my ear. I gives me a pleasant feeling. I immediately label it “birdsong,” or even “robin.”
Mental formations are those things we are constantly creating in that little workshop of the mind. They are the thoughts and emotions which become the seeds of action. I hear the pleasant sound of a robin and begin to think about spring, cutting the grass, cleaning up the lawnmower, getting gas for the mower, what about fertilizer for the lawn?… and on, and on.
Consciousness is the quality of awareness. Without consciousness we are not aware of the other four aggregates.
So where is the paradox? All these heaps together make a person. And each of us identifies with the five parts and the myriad parts of the parts: my eyes, my hair, my toenails, my mind, my thoughts, my opinions, my knowledge, my worries. This is who I am. This is what makes me me. Or is it?
These heaps of things are inconstant, insubstantial, always changing. Take the body, for example. And let’s leave aside the millions of subtle physiological changes the body goes through day to day and look at a drastic way the body can change. I worked once with a man named Bill. He was a happy-go-lucky average guy, good-looking and always whistling. One day he said, “I didn’t always look like this.” This surprised me, because there was no indication he’d ever looked different. No scars or anything I could see. He went on to tell me about the car crash he’d been in years before. It killed his wife and the two others in the car and left him hospitalized for a year. His face, he’d said, had been completely reconstructed. He had become, by appearances, a different person. But was he really?
And what of someone with Alzheimer’s disease, or memory loss? If I don’t remember who I am, am I not me?
It doesn’t take much effort to come up with dozens and dozens of examples of how people can change either physically or mentally: the beauty queen who has become old and flabby, the high-powered CEO who can no longer remember how to tie his shoes, the athlete bound for the rest of his life to a wheelchair. Imagine yourself suddenly different from who you were yesterday. Are you still you? Or not you?
Day to day we identify with the shape of our bodies and landscape of our minds. This identification is a significant source of tension and stress.
Much of Buddhist practice is toward dis-identifying with the five aggregates – piece by piece, grain by grain. That doesn’t mean striving to not exist or becoming a nobody. It means seeing your body for what it is: a conglomeration of things that are subject to instability and change and not something permanent and forever reliable. Same with the mind: unstable, inconstant, changing moment to moment. In some ways it seems rather silly to try to hold on to and defend and justify something so slippery. Yet we do hang on with vigorous determination.
There is the paradox.
