From Form, Sensation, Perception, Mental Formations, and Consciousness to the Envelope Surface: Re-expressing the Buddha's Observations in Modern Language

Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Buddha proposed: "Form, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness are impermanent. Impermanence is suffering. Suffering is not self." This is an observable, verifiable path, not a dogmatic assertion. Modern physics has constructed a precise, self-consistent system using mass, momentum, time, space, and energy. While describing the "external world," this system has gradually led humanity to forget self-observation — the direct experience of form, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness has been replaced by physical quantities. Humans have substituted physical readings for their own felt experience. Starting from the envelope surface framework, this paper establishes a correspondence between form, sensation, perception, mental formations, consciousness and the structure of the envelope surface, demonstrating that the precise readings of modern physics do not surpass the Buddha's observations, but are rather another expression of the same structure. This paper argues that physics should not abandon the observation of one's own form, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness; otherwise, it will fall into a fog of readings constructed by itself, forgetting that the source of all readings is the observer themselves. Keywords: Form, sensation, perception, mental formations, consciousness, envelope surface, Buddha, modern physics, self-observation, fog of readings