  Thus the Buddhist accounts for sensory activity and cognitive  awareness by reducing experience to its contents and analyzing it in  terms of its constitutive elements and functions. In the often quoted formula of dependent arising (see below   §3.3),  any of the six types of cognitive awareness in the first column  arises in dependence upon a corresponding element in columns 2 and 3. Thus, instead of construing cognitive awareness as the activity of an abiding self, the Buddhist uses the notion of ‘aggregate’ in the original sense of the Sanskrit term skandha:  something which is fashioned by the collective combination of  multiple causes and conditions (see AKBh ad I, 7). These  constitutive parts, which collectively make the psycho-physical  continuum that we ordinarily associate with persons, exist as part of a causal continuum of interdependently arising phenomena. 