Even in such abstract thinking, the Buddha remains in touch with his audience. Everyone would have been familiar with the village marketplace, where vendors spread their wares on mats for passersby to see. When someone wants spices for that night’s dinner, the spice-seller takes a banana leaf, doles out little heaps of coriander, ginger, and the like, wraps them up in the leaf, and ties the bundle with a banana string. That is how the Buddha describes personality: a blend of five skandhas or “heaps” of ingredients like these piles of spices in their banana-leaf wrapper. These ingredients are rupa, form; vedana, sensation or feeling; samjna, perception; samskara, the forces or impulses of the mind; and vijnana, consciousness. Without reference to an individual self or soul, the Buddha says that birth is the coming together of these aggregates; death is their breaking apart.

“Form” is the body, with which most of us identify ourselves and others. It is the sameness of body from day to day that provides the continuity of who we are. When the body dies, what is left? Even in an afterlife, we can’t really imagine ourselves without form.

For the Buddha, however, this physical identification is as ridiculous as mistaking the dinner spices for the leaf in which they are wrapped. The body is only a wrapper.