The important thing to understand is that in describing the skandhas, the Buddha strikes us a hard blow: the birth of any individual person -- Nagasena, for example -- is the coming together of the skandhas, and the death of the individual person is the breaking apart of the same skandhas -- without reference to an individual self or soul. The personal ego, which seems so real and considers its satisfactions so all-important, is just a bundle of thoughts, memories, desires, fears, urges, anxieties, and aspirations that is largely an illusion -- a flux of separate mental events temporarily associated with a physical body, but nothing that anyone could call a whole. The teaching of the skandhas is a way, a method, to break down our attachment -- our clinging -- to the body and all the rest.
---Essence of the Dhammapada, by Eknath Easwaran---
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