Patrick Kearney's Vipassana Retreat Talk at Bodhi Tree Monastery (2009)
Tonight we come to Adittapariyaya Sutta (Burning …). The Buddha taught this to the former dreadlocks ascetics, presenting his analysis of the human being as constituted by six sense fields. These are the sensitivities of eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind, and their corresponding sense objects.
The six sense fields are the counterpart of the five aggregates, which were presented to the five companions in his first teaching. While the aggregates are predominantly mental (four of the five are mental), the sense fields are predominantly physical (five of the six are physical). While the aggregates construct a self primarily through cognition, culminating in our sense of narrative unity, the sense fields construct a self primarily through feeling, culminating in our sense of sensual unity. The teaching of the sense fields are centred on drivenness (tanha) and the dis-ease (dukkha).
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