Five Aggregates

A person is made of the ever-changing five aggregates. Each aggregate acts and changes independently of the other four. When a person dies, the body (rupa) will stop functioning. With the body (rupa) stopping functioning, so are feelings, perception, fabrications (mental or physical), and the first seven levels of the nine consciousness.

Five Aggregates (五蘊, 오온)

1. Form, body (Rupa, 색온, 色蘊) - made of earth, water, sun, air (지수화풍, 地水火風)

2. Feeling (Vedana, 수온, 受蘊) The sensory process of experiencing feelings such as pain or pleasure

3. Perception (Sanna, 상온, 想蘊) The process of representation (thinking) through which objects are perceived and conceptualized

4. Fabrications (Sankhara, 행온, 行蘊) Mental operations and executive functions, such as volition and desire

5. Consciousness (Vijñāṇa, 식온, 識蘊) - discern, aware. The totality of mind and consciousness responsible for knowing and discerning objects

Nine levels of Consciousness

5-1. Eye (visual) consciousness

5-2. Ear (hearing) consciousness

5-3. Nose (smell) consciousness

5-4. Tongue (taste) consciousness

5-5. Skin (touch) consciousness

5-6. Mental consciousness (mano-vijñāna)

5-7. Ego consciousness (manas-vijñāna)

5-8. Storehouse consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna)

5-9. Pure consciousness (amala-vijnana)—this is the state of nibbana. Obviously only an extremely small number of people reach this stage by the time of their deaths.

Everyone possesses one's own eternal storehouse of karma. That is the 8th consciousness (alaya-vijnana) that never dies or is destroyed. It keeps flowing like a stream. This is why the 8th consciousness is sometimes referred to as the karmic stream, a stream that is always flowing and changing.

Ālaya-vijñāna is also compared to seeds (bija), karmic seeds that sprout to a new life when their preceding life ends.

Here, life, the 8th consciousness, is anatta (no-self), not atman (soul). The karmic stream (alaya-vijnana) is defiled mind consciousness, so whatever karmic seeds (bija) are stored in its own storehouse will sprout when certain conditions are met for that seed to sprout.

The 6th is mental consciousness and is the brain consciousness that acts as the CPU of a computer and processes all the input data the first five consciousnesses send to the 6th consciousness. It is only consciousness that is able to think, imagine, and attach emotional values (happy, sad, worry, and hope) to input data coming from five organ consciousnesses.

The 7th, ego consciousness, is like a hard drive of a computer that acts as "I," storing all of its past memories of conditioned activities from the birth of its current life cycle, believing the "no-self" is actually a "self," an eternally unchanging one's own unique entity, soul. This is the consciousness that defiles and contaminates the original pure "self," the 9th amala-vijnana, even further to perpetuate the ever-continuing samsara cycle.

When a person dies, the first seven consciousnesses stop their activities and erase whatever information is stored within one's hard drive in the physical body. 

The 8th alaya-vijnana is the sub-consciousness that survives, continues, and never dies through an infinite cycle of samsara (rebirth). This is the storehouse consciousness that warehouses all the karmas stored from the very first life form. This consciousness determines which karmic seeds, bija, will sprout to bring the next life cycle. 

The 9th amala-vijnana, pure consciousness, is just the 8th storehouse consciousness, alaya-vijnana, that is empty of all karmic seeds. This is the consciousness state of nibbana.