sybe07:
Buddhism would be an extremely negative religion if it would aim at stopping the khandha’s to arise, while at the same time you and i would be nothing more than those five khandha’s.
I think Lord Buddha never define a “self” or “I”, he never said “you and i would be noting more than those five khandha’s”. Instead, he asked us to drop those useless questions of ‘Am I? Am I not? What am I? How am I? Where has this being come from? Where will it go?’ https://suttacentral.net/mn2/en/bodhi
And regarding the five khandha, as Ven Sariputta mentioned that whether you are just a monk (or even layman I suppose), or a stream entry, up to even an arahant, we should “attend in an appropriate way to these five clinging-aggregates as inconstant, stressful, a disease, a cancer, an arrow, painful, an affliction, alien, a dissolution, an emptiness, not-self.” https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn22/sn22.122.than.html
sybe07:
The most obvious views for me are full identification…”i am rupa, vedana, sanna, sankhara and vinnana”.
Would you want to associate something like disease or cancer as yours? Definetly I think you will not want to, right? However, even if you want to, you can’t, because they are not your properties! Can you ask your body not to get old, sick and die? Can your ask your feeling not to feel bad ( after reading some disagreedable posts here in the forum :) )? Can you ask your memory to remember this and forget that, or forget this and remember that? In https://suttacentral.net/mn35/en/sujato, Lord Buddha give a smilie of why these five khandha cannot be assume to be our properties, cause we have no full say in them!
With Metta
