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Hume's Bundle, and the Five Aggregates

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Hume's Bundle, and the Five Aggregates

The five-aggregate analysis, which finds no self among the constituents of a person but only a describable process, is one of the most frequently drawn comparisons in modern philosophy of mind to David Hume's eighteenth-century bundle theory of personal identity, and the comparison illuminates both a genuine convergence and an important difference.

Hume, in the Treatise of Human Nature, reports that when he introspects he never catches "myself" without a perception, and never observes anything but the perception itself, concluding that the self is nothing but a bundle of different perceptions succeeding each other in perpetual flux, and that belief in a unified self persisting through this succession is a fiction the mind generates, a conclusion strikingly close to the aggregates' denial of a self findable behind form, feeling, perception, formations and consciousness.

Where the comparison breaks down is in what each tradition does with the conclusion. Hume largely set the question aside as one philosophy cannot resolve satisfactorily, remarking that everyday habit would carry him past it regardless, and proposed no practice built on the insight. Buddhist teaching treats the identical conclusion as the entire point of the exercise, a truth whose direct meditative realization, not merely intellectual assent, actually frees a person from suffering, which is why scholars conclude Hume and the Buddha arrived at a similar description of persons while treating it as doing entirely different work.

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