The Fifty-One Mental Formations

Mental Formations is a skillful phrase we use to describe the objects of the mind. They are so entangled in our being, we have difficulty distinguishing between what are simply castles made of cloud and what is tangible and enduring. We can observe the mental formations as currents in the river of our being, while at the same time we ourselves are the water rushing downstream. The river watches the river.

Why don’t we just say “thoughts”?

In English, thoughts and thinking are the actions of an individual. They are possessions. Laws have been made to own these possessions, to try and protect them from theft. Statues are made, towering statues, to encase them in silver or precious metals, so they might last forever. Civilizations have risen and fallen, wars have been fought, for the sake of a thought.

The Buddha taught that the mind and its activities are simply an interdependent part of the body. Like the other senses, mind is constantly receiving and processing information from many sources: external, internal and mind itself. The Meditation on the Eighteen Realms helps us look at the mind more clearly, without identifying a self with a thought, or a thought as the self.

Consider the eye. The nature of the eye is to receive light. Perhaps it opens in the direction of trees, and the light that enters through the pupil has a certain frequency. In English we call that frequency green. The eye doesn’t say, “Green is right.” Green is not more correct than blue (in the direction of sky or water). It is not more right than the colors of earth or of sunlight. To put it in words, the correct response of the eye to a color is: “Yes, I see.”

A hand held near the flame feels heat. Heat is not correct or incorrect, but a physical aspect of one place at one moment. The hand may appreciate the heat on a winter day. It might avoid the heat in the summer. Yet there is no right or wrong to the fact of a temperature. The correct response of the hand to temperature is also: “Yes, I feel.”

These objects of our senses are superficial. The eye sees a table and the mind says “I am not that table. I have nothing to do with that table. If I throw that table onto a bonfire it will be consumed, and I will be standing here.” The insides and the outsides of the table are superficial. The now and the then of it, the solidity of it – with your dinner waiting upon it – and the insubstantial nature of it after the bonfire has unmade its structure. A table is just another surface. Our senses are of the nature to perceive surfaces. What the senses perceive is the historical dimension.

The mind is one of the senses. What it perceives naturally becomes a mental formation. Mind is constantly creating notions, the way the eye without pause perceives light and produces images, or the body constantly perceives temperature or texture and produces sensation.

In any one moment, the six senses are by their nature inter-being with the objects of sensation. They take the shape of what is sensed. In the ultimate dimension they are what is sensed, the nature of the color or of the taste, the nature of the scent or sound or texture. The six Sense Consciousnesses are the nature of relationship.

Imagine drawing a line of sight between the physical eye and the physical table. Along this line there is an interaction we call sight. Now draw the line shorter: the activity of sight is a perception, called seeing. When seeing, we no longer have an eye here and a table over there, we have an “eye-table” where they meet.

Now instead of the shorter line connecting eye and table, make it no distance whatever. Make it a dot, the point where eye and table coexist. Instead of eye-table, there is eyetable, no distinct eye and no distinct table, the consciousness of sense.

Finally, erase the dot. Erase all of the dots. Letting go of the illusion of surfaces, the freedom of interbeing in the present moment begins to appear. It’s the first ray of morning sun that turns the edge of the clouds silvery then golden, that reaches straight through the opening between supple branches and breathing leaves, that warms your cheek as you turn to face it, that becomes you as you become it.

The Meditation on the Eighteen Realms of Phenomena traces the lines between sense organs, sense objects and sense consciousnesses in this way:

• eyes - forms - sight
• ears - sounds - hearing
• nose - smells - smelling
• tongue - tastes - tasting
• body - contact - touching
• brain - mental formations - thinking

An image is what the eye touches, and a sound is what the ear touches. A mental formation is what the mind touches. When our mind makes contact, our consciousness of mind takes the shape of that mind object. The brain is a sense organ, and looking deeply at our mental formations

Buddhist sutras and commentaries often speak of observing and looking deeply. The nature of Mind is to touch mental formations, and to create stories of the future and stories of the past around each one. The mind is always talking! It easy to become caught in the notion that these stories are themselves our observations or our deep looking. But thoughts and thinking are a natural consequence of Being, like the leaf we see when we look at a tree; they are not Being itself. Thoughts arise from the many conditions present in the moment. In the English language, you might hear someone say “I just had a thought…” But the notion of owning thoughts is not accurate. It would be more correct to stop, turn to your companions, and say “A thought just had me!”

Remember the for Foundations of Mindfulness. In them we observe the body in the body, the feelings in the feelings, the mind in the mind and consciousness in consciousness. The practice of meditation and the teachings of the Dharma are all trainings. Erase the dots.

The seeds for these mental formations can be anything: bodily sensations, feelings, perceptions, other mental formations, or seeds of consciousness that sprouting in the present moment or lying dormant in our store consciousness.

Looking deeply at the nature of Being, Siddhartha the Buddha discovered a skillful means to free the mind from suffering. This teaching is described in the Heart Sutra as the five rivers of being, or the Five Skandhas. The notion of mental formations is three of these five, with two of the mental formations – namely feelings (between sensations and emotions) and perceptions (between emotions and thoughts) – important enough that they are described separately.

To understand something, it is often helpful to look at its elements. You might take apart a clock to see what makes it “tick”. When you take apart an old clock, you would find a spring that creates its energy and a metal piece that regulates that energy, so it doesn’t simply unravel. You would find several gears that translate that energy into precise motion, and small metal hands that explain the movement to us as seconds, minutes and hours. Under careful observation, what seemed to be a single, solid object is revealed to be a formation of many interlocking parts.

When you practice yoga asana, you are not just exercising. You are becoming intimate with the many interrelated elements of your physical body. If someone asked you “How are you today?”, before you began to practice this awareness of the body in the body, you might answer “I’m sick.” Sometimes, in the fog of living, we identify our whole being as one thing, like the antique clock. I am sick. I am sickness.

But you are not sickness: you are a multitude of elements that are interconnected and always changing. If you practice asana yoga for even a short amount of time, you will begin to identify the elements that make you up: your sources of energy, how your energy is regulated, or how it is expressed so that other beings understand it. When asked “How are you today?”, you might be aware of your internal organs, and the state of each of them. You might notice your fingers and toes, and your eyes, ears, mouth, nose and skin. You might notice every small area of skin distinctly. If you continue to look deeply, you will notice your emotional state; you will recognize your emotions before your friend arrived, and after they arrived. You will noticed how you felt before they asked how you were, and after they asked. You will see the thoughts that bubbled up with each emotion, then floated away, like foam on the river. You will notice the breath arriving cool to your nostrils, and departing warmed by your living body.

Then you might smile, and say: “Thank you for asking. Right now, I am happy you are here. How are you?”

The Vijñanavada School of Buddhism described fifty-one categories of mental formations. They found that it was easier to identify the state of ones emotions and perceptions when there was a word or an idea that could be touched. You could read one mental formation and ask: “Is this present in me?” When you are new to the practice of identifying your feelings, you might read the mental formation “Joy” and ask: do I know what that is? What does “joy” look like and feel like? With time and with practice, you become acquainted with “joy” and befriend it. Your relationship to joy will deepen and change.

We may not have much experienced identifying emotions. In fact, we may have learned in our culture or in our birth families that identifying and naming emotions is not acceptable. When some one asks you how you are, you might not be able to answer or, answering, one emotion – one mental formation – might be equal to any other. When one asks you how you are, you might feel confused. Am I happy? Am I angry? You might not be sure. You might be silent. Similar to the Vijñanavada School, the school of Conscious Communication (as described by Marshall Rosenberg in his book Non-violent Communication) offers a set of “emotion cards”, so you have words for different possible feelings, you have the possibility that they exist, and can look for them inside of yourself.

Below are the categories of Buddhist Mental Formations, so that you have a starting point for the kinds of formation that might exist. Reading them, you might begin to identify parts of your being that may otherwise have been lumped together into one big “I am this” or “I am that”.