During Covid, with time on my hands and my dhamma practice in high gear, I had begun (and still continue) a daily chanting practice. Sometimes, I just rush through, phone it in, chant for the sake of chanting simply because I have taken it upon myself as something I will do. Other times though, something I chant/read will really hit me and I will go down the rabbit hole of contemplating on a single line, even a single word, until I feel like I really understand it.

At some point, I was reciting the part of the morning chanting that says, “the five aggregates for clinging are stressful”, it then goes on to list: Form as an aggregate for clinging, feeling as an aggregate for clinging, perception as an aggregate for clinging, imagination as an aggregate for clinging, consciousness as an aggregate for clinging…and I started wondering what the heck is an aggregate for clinging anyway? Or, another way to ask, how exactly do I use aggregates to cling? So I decided to go ahead and consider rupa a bit more closely:

How do I use rupa to cling:

I cling to my body. My face is broken out and I am embarrassed. Using stickers and creams to clear it, I try to force it back into a non-broken out state I prefer. One I want to be seen with. One that will get folks to desire me. To be awed by my beauty.  I have an old friend coming to visit, I haven’t seen her since before Covid –I am desperate to fix my face before her arrival. Why? I want my face to show her I am on top, I have weathered the pandemic ok, I am not just some shadow of my former self.

But is that all really the truth? My face is damaged. My body is damaged. I have not weathered this time unscathed. I am diminished. Emotionally diminished. Physically hanging on the potential precipice of illness with my newly found autoimmune markers. and with my positive. These are all facts. How do I expect to use a body to prove what isn’t even true? More importantly, why would I want it to?

Rupa is the object I cling to — look at how tightly I cling to my body. Fear for illness, death, loving it even as I despise certain states it passes through –a breakout, an autoimmune disease – states not reflective of ME, that belie my ability to be on top and in control. Embarrass me in front of friends.

And yet still, I somehow convince myself this body is a tool to broadcast who I am to the world. That it is a tool to prove who I am to myself. I cling to it because I believe without it, I can’t prove my identity. Rupa is an ‘aggregate of clinging’, in so far as it is a tool I use to establish an identity. An ALANA, that I desperately cling to.

I try to use body and belongings to paint a character, and then I try and convince myself that is me, who I am. Though in one way, I know the body isn’t me, I still think it is a scaffold. Without it there is no self that can be built, what else could I use to prove the characteristics and behaviors I identify with? Rupa is a fundamental tool for building the identity of Alana who clings. Clings to what? To the identity of Alana, which requires a body, that I then also cling to.

So there it is – its not just that I cling to rupa, the truth is rupa is also a tool for further clinging. I need a rupa body to play in a rupa world, where I search out other things to cling to. I need rupa to hold together the Alana identity I cling to so tightly; the body feeds the summutti, helps me pin down and stabilize as sense of Alana self, when that self, especially nama, shift so quickly. Rupa is a primary tool I use to establish permanence. Most basically performance of an Alana self. A solid, flesh and bone manifestation of who I am.

If I really saw the world as something in contain flux, always changing, I would understand there is nothing to cling to amidst all the shifting movement. But I don’t see that, in fact, I deliberately try to delude myself – to affix things – so that I can cling, and rupa is tool #1 for containing what is always moving, for trying to create a steady state, sameness, in a world where there is none. I guess its starting to make a little sense how rupa can be an aggregate For, ie in the service of, ie a tool to promote, clinging.