Welcome to this deck on human personality and destiny in Buddhism. This is one of the most important comparison topics in your AQA GCSE Religious Studies exam, because it asks you to contrast two major traditions: Theravada Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism. The exam regularly asks you to evaluate statements about the self, the soul, and what happens to us after death, and to argue from both sides. By the end of this deck, you will know exactly what each tradition teaches about what a human being is, and what a human being can become. Let us start with the big question: what are you?

In Theravada Buddhism, the question of what a human being is gets a very precise answer. There is no permanent soul, no unchanging self that travels through life and into the next. Instead, what we call a person is actually a collection of five constantly changing processes, bundled together and mistaken for a fixed self. These five processes are called the skandhas in Sanskrit, or khandhas in Pali. The word is sometimes translated as aggregates, or heaps. The idea is that a human being is not a thing but a process, like a flame that keeps burning without being the same flame from one moment to the next. This teaching is one of the most important in all of Buddhism, because it directly explains why we suffer and how we can be free.

Let us go through the five aggregates one by one. The first is form, which in Pali is rupa. This is the physical body, the material dimension of a person, everything you can touch and see. The second is sensation, or vedana. This is not emotion in a complex sense, but the basic feeling tone of every experience: pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Every moment of experience has one of these three qualities. The third is perception, or sanna. This is the process of recognising and categorising what we experience, identifying a sound as a voice, a shape as a face. The fourth is mental formations, or sankhara. This is the broadest category and includes all our intentions, emotions, habits, and dispositions, everything that shapes how we respond to the world. The fifth is consciousness, or vinnana. This is awareness itself, the knowing quality that arises when a sense organ meets its object.