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How to Investigate the Materiality Aggregate

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In Buddhism, large focus is placed on examining the aggregates, often called skandhas or kandhas. They are an important focus of study as they reveal an important factor that we call "I" is but a divisible and impermanent collection of mental and bodily experiences and processes.

There are five aggregates, materiality, feeling, perception, formations and consciousness.

Central to the path of developing understanding is investigating all of the aggregates. The main reason its studied in meditation is that the intellect can agree with it in principle, but deeper parts of the mind refuse to agree as they can run free and indulgent while we believe in the self or soul.

Meditation is about revealing the parts of the mind that throw up fear, revulsion and all kinds of obstacles to prevent the rest of the mind seeing things as they are. These hindrances may either distract us, or frighten us away so when we see in the mind how and what is happening we can put a stop to it and grow above it. This article covers the material aggregate for beginners as well as how to develop it further.


  1. 1
    Find a quiet peaceful place and relax into a meditation posture. The Do Mindful Meditation page looks at the four types, but any are suitable - sitting, standing, walking or lying down. Focus your attention on something, such as the breath or feelings in order to relax but also to build up the awareness & focus to be mindful. For this meditation any posture is suitable, although sitting is typically the most popular. The benefit is this type can be done in day to day life by using normal mindfulness or awareness of the subject to see things as they happen.
  2. 2
    Examine the physical properties of everything you experience, including the body. Start to mentally divide & classify everything up into their physical states such as considering each aspect of the subject, some examples are:
    • Is it solid, liquid or gaseous,
    • Does it generate heat, have a relative temperature (etc),
    • Is it in motion, generating motion on its own or gain motion from other things.
    • Change-ability or impermanence, does it decay, evolve, erode, dissolve, grow, expand or change in anyway?
  3. 3
    Examine things which are dependent on physical states, and see if any of the following things apply to it:
    • Sense organs - such as eyes, ears, nose (etc)
    • Senses - taste, hearing, seeing (etc)
    • Gender - For example, is the blood, brain, liver (etc) masculine or feminine, is furniture masculine or feminine (etc).
    • Is it alive? This is slightly more complex as you need to divide it further, for example we might say we are alive, but what part alive, is it alive in isolation or without conditional biological supports and processes?
    • Can it communicate? It doesn't just have to be speaking words, but body organs can send chemical messages directly to the brain or to its surrounding tissue which can then be felt or understood. A typical example is the stomach, that when too much food or too little has been consumed it sends a message that it is full or hungry. But other parts can do the same thing, when blood sugar is low, it sends a message to the brain to consume more to be able to address that issue.
    • Is it light or heavy? Malleable or brittle? Does it have an edge, skin or boundary?
    • Does it depend on food of some kind?
    • Does it grow or continue, change, die? etc
  4. 4
    Frequently ask yourself what is the purpose or function of these things. Some things have absolutely no function whatsoever, but some do serve a purpose. For example, the nose has a clear purpose - to smell, to serve as an airway and to filter dust out of air breathed through the nose and a host of other purposes. Why we smell is also for a whole range of purposes, such as knowing if something is rotten and unsafe to eat, but there are lots of other uses.

    But the nose is dependent on having lungs and muscles to breathe the air in. It needs moisture so it doesn't dry out. It needs scents to smell and a brain that can work out what the scent is and if it is important. It does continue to grow and change over time, it doesn't live on its own, but it is part of a living body and so on.

    The subject meditation is to look deeper to see there is a lot more to things than first meets the eye. They are a lot more complex, interactive, inter-dependencies and so on, but because we seldom look at them in detail we are far more ignorant about what they are, why they are and so on. Once a practitioner understands these things - and indeed this can take some time, then they can look at how the mind is interacting with them and can act further to train the mind towards being more calm, happy and healthy.

    This can be achieved by sincerely asking key questions that people typically don't ask:

    1. Is anything eternal, permanent and lasting? Or does it completely disappear without any trace when destroyed? Or does it change from one state to another, a river of phenomena through time and space?

    2. If it is a living thing, which part of it is its "soul" or "entity"? Is there any real owner, self or soul in it? Or is there just a compact chain of events where the gaps just aren't visible. Continue to examine more characteristics in order to gain a better understanding, such as:
    • Is it produced, formed, born or developed?
    • Is it visible, or invisible (eg. tastes and sounds are invisible)
    • Is it subject to external physics or cause and effect?
    • Can it get sick, damaged or injured?
    • Is it internal or external, is it near or far away?
    • Is it heavy or light?
    • Can it feel or sense anything?
    • Does anything claim it, or is it just a part amongst many?
  5. 5
    To develop it further it is important to extend these questions to everything. There are three main reason why studying Buddhism or its meditations does not give lasting results or "breakthroughs" to a practitioner:

    1. That the information gained wasn't relevant enough for the mind to kick out the old fantasies. The mind still prefers the warm, cosy environment that self deception provides.

    2. That people did not look deeply enough for long enough. Its all about balance again as parts of the mind that are attached to its fantasies and physical things are too strong, so the parts of the mind that incline towards understanding have not been strengthened enough to balance the other side.

    3. People still have something to lose, so there may be a mix of both first and second examples where either they still choose to hang onto some attachments and some fantasies are still too strong for the practitioner to grow above it.

    Sometimes a practitioner expects the meditation methods, or the knowledge such as simply hearing the Four Noble Truths to just do the work for us. But it is we who must make the changes until there is enough learnt, enough trained and enough trust for the mind to let go. The mind generally does not trust us so we must demonstrate we are capable of taking over. This is why virtue, wisdom and mental training (often known as sila, samadhi and panna or prajna in Buddhist circles) is so important.

    With practice and consistent, calm observation the goal can be achieved. When the practitioner continues to do this meditation, eventually they can see what things are and that there are no more mysteries about how or why. There just is the here and now.

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