See the Five Aggregates as All Empty

📖Master’s Reading

However much bone-deep love and hate life passes through, what remains in the end is only a heap of memory. We live each day in the six sensations of eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind, but these sensations are very brief — like tasty food that is gone once it passes the tongue. All worldly gain and loss are, in the end, only a fleeting memory in the mind.

When we still the mind and look back at ourselves, we find "the past mind cannot be grasped, the present mind cannot be grasped, the future mind cannot be grasped." The past cannot be recovered, the future has not arrived, and the present feeling passes in an instant. Since all experience finally leaves only memory, we should not grip a fleeting phenomenon as the eternal.

The Prajñā Heart Sūtra teaches us to "see the five aggregates as all empty," like using the light of higher wisdom to view all things as an X-ray does. When you see through that all matter, body and emotion finally disperse, collapse and turn transparent, you understand that all worldly things merely flow in the arising and ceasing of conditions.

True practice is seeing through the truth. When you can see the five aggregates as all empty, no longer held hostage by illusory feeling and fleeting memory, the soul regains true freedom and great ease.

🌱Reflection for Daily Life

• All of the past and all of the present in fact leave only memory.
• Understand that love and hate finally are only memory.
• See through that the sensations of the six senses are very brief.
• Realize the three minds cannot be grasped; see the five aggregates empty.
• Loosen illusory clinging and regain the soul's great ease.