one heading or, in other words, has no idea equivalent to Sankhara, it is not surprising that no adequate rendering has been found, especially as Buddhism regards everything as mere becoming, not fixed existence, and hence does not distinguish sharply between a process and a result—­between the act of preparing and a preparation.  Conformations, confections, syntheses, co-efficients, tendencies, potentialities have all been used as equivalents but I propose to use the Pali word as a rule.  In some passages the word phenomena is an adequate literary equivalent, if it is remembered that phenomena are not thought of apart from a perceiving subject:  in others some word like predispositions or tendencies is a more luminous rendering, because the Sankharas are the potentialities for good and evil action existing in the mind as a result of Karma[412].

The Buddha has now enumerated four categories which are not the self.  The fifth and last is Vinnana, frequently rendered by consciousness.  But this word is unsuitable in so far as it suggests in English some unified and continuous mental state.  Vinnana sometimes corresponds to thought and sometimes is hardly distinguished from perception, for it means awareness[413] of what is pleasant or painful, sweet or sour and so on.  But the Pitakas continually insist[414] that it is not a unity and that its varieties come into being only when they receive proper nourishment or, as we should say, an adequate stimulus.  Thus visual consciousness depends on the sight and on visible objects, auditory consciousness on the hearing and on sounds.  Vinnana is divided into eighty-nine classes according as it is good, bad or indifferent, but none of these classes, nor all of them together, can be called the self.

These five groups—­body, feeling, perception, the sankharas, thought—­are generally known as the Skandhas[415] signifying in Sanskrit collections or aggregates.  The classification adopted is not completely logical, for feeling and perception are both included in the Sankharas and also counted separately.  But the object of the Buddha was not so much to analyze the physical and mental constitution of a human being as to show that this constitution contains no element which can be justly called self or soul.  For this reason all possible states of mind are catalogued, sometimes under more than one head.  They are none of them the self and no self, ego, or soul in the sense defined above is discernible, only aggregates of states and properties which come together and fall apart again.  When we investigate ourselves we find nothing but psychical states:  we do not find a psyche.  The mind is even less permanent than the body[416], for the body may last a hundred years or so “but that which is called mind, thought or consciousness, day and night keeps perishing as one thing and springing up as another.”  So in the Samyutta-Nikaya, Mara the Tempter asks the nun Vajira by whom this being, that is the human body, is made.  Her answer is “Here is a mere heap of sankharas:  there is no ‘being.’  As when various parts are united, the word ‘chariot[417]’ is used (to describe the whole), so when the skandhas are present, the word ‘being’ is commonly used.  But it is suffering only that comes into existence and passes away.”  And Buddhaghosa[418]says: