These five groups—body, feeling, perception, the sankhâras, thought—are generally known as the Skandhas[415] signifying in Sanskrit collections or aggregates. The classification adopted is not completely logical, for feeling and perception are both included in the Sankhâras and also counted separately. But the object of the Buddha was not so much to analyze the physical and mental constitution of a human being as to show that this constitution contains no element which can be justly called self or soul. For this reason all possible states of mind are catalogued, sometimes under more than one head. They are none of them the self and no self, ego, or soul in the sense defined above is discernible, only aggregates of states and properties which come together and fall apart again. When we investigate ourselves we find nothing but psychical states: we do not find a psyche. The mind is even less permanent than the body[416], for the body may last a hundred years or so "but that which is called mind, thought or consciousness, day and night keeps perishing as one thing and springing up as another." So in the Saṃyutta-Nikâya, Mara the Tempter asks the nun Vajirâ by whom this being, that is the human body, is made. Her answer is "Here is a mere heap of _sankhâras_: there is no 'being.' As when various parts are united, the word 'chariot[417]' is used (to describe the whole), so when the _skandhas_ are present, the word 'being' is commonly used. But it is suffering only that comes into existence and passes away." And Buddhaghosa[418]says: "Misery only doth exist, none miserable; No doer is there, naught but the deed is found; Nirvana is, but not the man that seeks it; The path exists but not the traveller on it." Thus the Buddha and his disciples rejected such ideas as soul, being and personality. But their language does not always conform to this ideal of negative precision, for the vocabulary of Pali (and still more of English) is inadequate for the task of discussing what form conduct and belief should take unless such words are used. Also the Attâ (Âtman), which the Buddha denies, means more than is implied by our words self and personality. The word commonly used to signify an individual is puggalo. Thus in one sutta[419] the Buddha preaches of the burden, the bearer of the burden, taking it up and laying it down. The burden is the five skandhas and the bearer is the individual or puggalo. This, if pressed, implies that there is a personality apart from the skandhas which has to bear them. But probably it should not be pressed and we should regard the utterance as merely a popular sermon using language which is, strictly speaking, metaphorical. 2