The Face Behind the Five Skandhas

von Murfreesboro

146 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

The Face Behind the Five Skandhas follows Elias Hawthorne, a former scholar of linguistic philosophy who retreats to the severe monastery of Mount Oakhaven after cholera destroys his wife Clara and young son Julian. Elias enters monastic life not to seek comfort, but to dismantle the assumptions that once governed his identity. He becomes convinced that beneath the body, sensations, perceptions, habits, and consciousness there must be an enduring Witness: an immutable self capable of surviving every change.After five years of ascetic practice, Elias receives permission to descend into the Hollow of the Five Depths, a legendary subterranean passage containing five obsidian surfaces associated with Form, Sensation, Perception, Volition, and Consciousness. He intends to approach the cavern as a rigorous investigator. Armed with vellum, ink, and an empirical mindset, he believes he can reduce its terrifying legends to observable mechanisms and use the experience to discover the permanent self he has spent years seeking.The archivist Brother Leonard Hayes warns him that the Hollow does not provide data in the ordinary sense. It strips away the structures by which a person identifies and names experience. Elias dismisses the warning, believing his intellectual discipline makes him less vulnerable than earlier seekers. His descent gradually proves otherwise. Each depth confronts a different layer of his assumed identity, forcing him to experience form, sensation, perception, volition, and consciousness without the stable owner he expects to find behind them.The deeper Elias travels, the more his philosophical certainty collapses. The Hollow does not reveal a hidden soul or supernatural master. Instead, it exposes the processes that Elias had mistaken for evidence of an eternal observer. His faith in language, classification, memory, and intellectual control loses its authority. Juliette Ashford's surviving journal, whose deteriorating handwriting records another seeker's breakdown, becomes evidence of how desperately the mind tries to preserve a permanent center where none can be located.When Elias emerges, Abbot Vincent Rhodes asks whether he found the one he was sent to find. Elias does not answer with a theory. He releases the bronze key and silently shakes his head. There is no owner behind the five aggregates, no eternal identity waiting to be recovered. The conclusion is not despair but simplicity. On the mountain terrace, Elias experiences cold, wind, breath, light, and heartbeat without constructing a separate observer who possesses them. The novel ends with dawn itself as the final image: experience continuing freely, without a permanent face behind it.

• Themen: Belletristik Spekulative Literatur Metaphysische / philosophische Belletristik
• ISBN: 9798182806565
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 22.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: JENNY SULLIVAN MURFREESBORO