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CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT earth, heaven and hell -- is always tending to renovation or destruction, is always in a course of change, a series of revolutions or of cycles, of which the beginning and end are unknowable and unknown.
As to the nature of man, Buddha's teaching is that it consists of an assemblage of different properties or qualities or aggregates none of which corresponds to the Hindu or modern notion of soul. These are - rüpa (forms or material attributes), vedanā (sensation), sanjñā (notions or abstract ideas), saṁskāra (tendencies or potentialities) and vijñāna (consciousness or mental powers). These aggregates along with hundred and ninety three sub-divisions exhaust all the elements, all the material, intellectual and moral properties and attributes of the individual. There exists nothing apart from these, either fixed principle or soul, or simple or permanent substance of any kind. They unite and arrange themselves so as to form a separate being, undergo incessant modification along with it and dissolve at its death; the individual being throughout a compound of compounds entirely perishes. The influence of its karman (acts) alone survives it and through this the formation of a new group of skandhas or aggregates is immediately effected; a new individual rises into existence in some other world and continues in some degree the first. The Buddhist, strictly speaking, does not revive but another, if I may say so, revives in its stead and it is to avert from this other, who is only the heir of his karma, the pains of existence, that he aspires to Nirvāṇa.
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