Greetings, Friendlies!
One more round in Make-Believe Land before returning to complete faith and reverence. (Maybe.)
An hour into that fateful saṅkhāra talk I asked something to the effect: “I get confused when people say: that’s a sankhāra, also, that’s a sankhāra, and that other thing. Also a saṅkhāra. Listening to this talk, I’m wondering, is there any aspect of human experience that is not a saṅkhāra? Is there anything on a Buddhist list or somewhere else that a non-saṅkhāra-thing is mentioned? Is there anything that isn’t a saṅkhāra? Because everything is formed or forming…”
John Peacock responded that classically the only non-saṅkhāra thing is Nibbāna. (I think meaning the cessation version of Nibbāna, not Buddhadasa’s Nibbāna For Everyone version of Nibbāna.)
Remembering back to our post On Noumena: The world of human experience is conditioned by the kind of beings we are. Our world is phenomenal, not noumenal. Our access to Being, to noumena, is constrained by our sensory perceptions and our cognitive faculties. The world as we experience it is constructed, not given.
Is there a way to talk about saṅkhāras that says simply this? That our experiential world is constrained/constructed by our being?
Peacock highlighted (as he often does) that Pāli is more a verb-based language than a noun-based language. He referred to “Saṅkhāra” as a “verbal noun”.
So what about “Saṅkhāra-ing” rather than “saṅkhāras”?
This idea of Saṅkhāra-ing, of constructing/constructions, jives not only with our world-as-construction, it also jives with human-being-ness through a Neuroplasticity lens. Every moment of our waking lives, and probably some in sleep, our neurological system (both brain and body) is sensitive to/responding to/engaging with the environment (inner and outer). Neuronal pathways are being modified, strengthened, erased, re-written as appropriate. The neurological system (a construction) is constantly constructing itself.
What about Saṅkhāra as “principal of construction”? I mean here the “big” Saṅkhāra, when we are speaking of saṅkhāra very generally.
“Principal of Construction” takes into account Akincano Weber’s previous quote regarding the force, the action, and the product, all as being constructed or formed. When we zoom in on particular aspects of being/experience, we might use different translations, kaya-Saṅkhāra, the body-as-construction, or we might speak of habits-as-constructions or intentions-as-constructions.
Perhaps Gotama was highlighting how every aspect of being is constructed, is conditional, is dependently originated. Perhaps using one word to encapsulate the force, the action, and the product is to highlight that all of Being (so far as it is experienced/understood by humans) is the same in that it is construction/fabrication.
“Principal of Construction” chunk is maybe closer to Gotama’s chunk.
Your thoughts?
Dharma PhD 