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This expression, which occurs in the Upanishads as well as in Buddhist writings, denotes mental and corporeal life. In explaining it the commentators say that form means the four elements and shape derived from them and that name means the three skandhas of sensation, perception and the sankhâras.

Death, that is the breaking up of such constituents of human life as the body, states of consciousness, etc., does not affect taṇhâ. If taṇhâ has not been deliberately suppressed, it collects skandhas again. The result is called a new individual. But the essential truth is the persistence of the taṇhâ until it is destroyed.

But the various stages may influence one another so that under a higher influence the mind which is involved in subjectivity begins to long for Nirvana. Yet Nirvana is not something different from or beyond the world of experience; it does not really involve annihilation of the skandhas.

The word commonly used to signify an individual is puggalo. Thus in one sutta the Buddha preaches of the burden, the bearer of the burden, taking it up and laying it down. The burden is the five skandhas and the bearer is the individual or puggalo. This, if pressed, implies that there is a personality apart from the skandhas which has to bear them.

The doctrine of the Skandhas and that of transmigration are thus opposed, and the doctrine of the nidanas or the chain of causation is the bridge which satisfied Gautama's own mind, but which he was doubtful about presenting to others, to bring them into harmony.

The meaning of this doctrine is that no being or object contains an unchangeable permanent self, which lives unaltered in the same or in different bodies. On the contrary individual existences consist of nothing but a collection of skandhas or a santâna, a succession or series of mental phenomena. In the Pali books this doctrine is applied chiefly to the soul and psychological enquiries.

The Jain theory of fivefold knowledge is unknown to the Buddhists, as is their theory of the Skandhas to the Jains. It is clear that in his own opinion and that of his contemporaries the rule and ideal of life which he prescribed differed widely from those of the Jains, Âjîvikas and other wandering ascetics.

The original meaning is the state of peace and happiness in which the fires of lust, hatred and stupidity are extinguished and the participle nibbuto apparently derived from the same root had passed into popular language in the sense of happy . Two forms of nirvana are distinguished. The first is upâdi-sesa-nibbânam or nirvana in which the skandhas remain, although passion is destroyed.

"Just as the great ocean has only one taste, the taste of salt, so has this doctrine and discipline only one taste, the taste of emancipation ." This practical aim has affected the form given to much of the Buddha's teaching, for instance the theory of the Skandhas and the chain of causation.

The last words of the Master assert that decay is universal; and the doctrine of the skandhas is a corollary from that principle; if all the elements of which the human person is made up are in process of decay, then the self cannot be a substantial and persistent thing. That doctrine, however, does not go well together with the belief in the universality and inexorableness of suffering.