  The Buddhist tradition conceives of the human individual as  consisting of five types of aggregates that serve as the bases of what we ordinarily designate as persons: (1) material form or body  (rūpa); (2) sensations (vedanā); (3)  apperception (saṃjña); (4) volitions or  dispositional formations (saṃskāra); and (5)  consciousness (vijñāna). This aggregated view of  persons informs all aspect of Buddhist thought and is indispensable  to any account of cognition. Thus, in replacing the agent or  cognizing ‘I’ with a play of causal factors resulting in  momentary cognitive events, the Buddhist tradition treats the  cognizing agent as merely another way of referring to the embodied  and dynamic functioning of the five aggregates. The specific nature  of these aggregates is the subject of the Abhidharma descriptive  analytic (see   §3).  Following Vasubandhu's Treasury of Higher Knowledge (AKBh  ad I, 14–16), the five aggregates may be defined as  follows: