Skandha is Buddhist term meaning heap, by which is meant a collection without essential overarching unity whose parts do not determine the formal unity of their combination.

This is the special utility the term “heap.” It intends to denote a collection but without imputing any additional unifying essence over and above the mere heap as such. For example, all the elements making up a car would be referred to as that heap of elements and withhold from intending car.

Using a name richer than “heap” risks imputing an extra semantic essence onto the collection and would be ontologically additive. It would project some modicum of svabhava, or see the parts as dependent on a formal cause, or subsume them under some homogenous property that makes them intrinsically coherent.

If we impute formal essence A onto mere collection B, then the shared quale A must be our own projection. The newly synthesized thing, we realize, rests entirely on nama. In cases where we impute formal essence A onto collection A′ (one that seems intrinsically connected by A-ness) we think that the imputed sense has an objective basis, that it sprouts from that basis and arises from the parts themselves, from the objective stratum of rupa. But if each element of A′ has parts, shall we then say that each A″ contains both A′-ness and A-ness? If so, then the collection has necessary A-ness—an A-ness that penetrates all the way down to its ultimate simples.

This, according to Buddhism, is never the case.

The real value of skandha is that it untethers the form of the whole from determination by its parts. The object of interest in Buddhism is cognitive experience. Cognitive experience is multipart, intelligible, and—most importantly—without static essence. This goes beyond the unreality already contained in the stance of mere logical nihilism. Not only does being proper only belong to partless parts, but the imputed essence at any given level of unity (say, car) is not dictated by its lower levels (wheel, engine). The upshot (in a phenomenal epistemology) is that this meaning and unity has been added by the subject. The One is imputed. With practice, you can project your beam of intentionality on the parts. If you can sustain an intentional beam that sees the parts, or perhaps between them and thus nothing, a new ontological schema emerges. They say.

Thus for Buddhists, experience, which includes both the physical world and its subject, decomposes along certain fault lines. The remaining heap is called the Five Skandhas. These are:

Consciousness—an aspect of a sensory stimulation system, the perturbation of a receptive field and some elaborate second messenger system that transmits this vibration inside the medium of illumined (though here thoroughly confused) sense presence.

Perception—epistemic apprehension for discursive cognizers occurs through an act, which is concept-application in judgment.

Feeling—Pleasure or pain is secreted in response to perceived meaning.

Samskara—Your inner biological motion is inertial and repetitive. Motions are, in fact, stored in flattened form as rules. (BLANK, _TODO: This is a possible topic. How are the rules of stored biological motion, aka chemical transformations including endothermic ones that cause system-wide change. A system that is on one level both rigidly homeostatic, such as the constitution of a a chromosome or the arrangement of parts in a mitochondrion, and on another full of variable activity (sudden cell repair, sudden transcription) and also message-passing. It is a stability that rests on two contrary powers:

1. Stability—The real stability of chemical solids and a morphological inertia built on, what is most strong in this ontology of rule, conservation laws.
2. Motion—Capacity for great motion, transformation, recreation (mitosis and meiosis), locomotive transport, pointed dispatching of enzymes, factory processes, and, perhaps the most pro-motion of all, a chemical trick to mock-up electrical message sending—the lightest mass is none at all. A wave builds a field that pushes the wave along. Incredible! These little marbles lined themselves up with windows and polarized fluids on either side. Insane! The fact that a signal passing specialized cell evolved just brings me to tears. Oh auspicious day!

Well, samskara is just a set electrochemical pattern—stored and triggerable. Our motions sequences, our Doing, which really is almost always our reacting, are ready. Complex sequences out to be stored outside the executive whole-body umbrella agency consciousness. That little part has more important things to worry about, like deciding how to survive in a resource-deficient and predator-filled space. So action is outsourced to local ganglia or CNS systems that are unconsciously performed, such as cerebellum stuff.