The word's field
Saṅkhāra is built from saṃ- "together" and the root kar- "to make," and it carries both halves of that construction at once: the act of putting together and the thing put together. The Pali–English Dictionary opens its entry by calling it one of the most difficult terms in Buddhist metaphysics, precisely because the word refuses to settle on one side of the active-passive line. A saṅkhāra is at once a forming, a volitional shaping activity, and a formation, a conditioned thing that such activity produces. The dictionary reaches for a cluster of English approximations rather than a single word: preparation, coefficient, constituent potentiality, synergy, composition-aggregate. None is the translation; each holds one face of a term the lexicon admits cannot be turned cleanly into an Occidental idiom.
The word does distinct technical work in several doctrinal frames, and the commentarial tradition kept these uses in view together. As the fourth of the five khandhā, the aggregates into which a person is analyzed, saṅkhārā names the mental formations: the volitions and dispositions that answer to intention and habit. As the second link of dependent origination, it stands for the karmically potent formations that condition the arising of consciousness in a new existence, the constructing activity that carries momentum across the boundary of a life. In a third and widest use the word takes in all conditioned things whatsoever: whatever has been put together by causes, and so whatever is impermanent and liable to come apart. The reading of the āyusaṅkhāra, the life-formation, belongs to this last register — the sum of conditions that hold a life in being, which can be surveyed, sustained, or let go.
In the corpus
Within our corpus saṅkhāra occurs 25 times across 3 works, and the distribution is markedly uneven. The Digha Nikaya carries 19 of the occurrences, far more than any other work; the Dhammapada and the Udana hold 3 each. The weight of the lemma in this record sits, then, in the long discourses — the collection where the word appears inside sustained expositions of the aggregates, of dependent origination, and of the conditions that hold a life together and let it end.
That concentration is legible in the two contributing registers. In the Digha Nikaya the occurrences cluster in the discourse on the Buddha's final passing, where saṅkhāra names the life-formations that are relinquished and the conditioned things whose passing the closing verse announces. In the Dhammapada the word appears in its most compressed doctrinal use, the flat declarations near the head of the path of insight. The Udana contributes a smaller share, not itemized among the citations in the present record. The figures are the corpus counts only; no claim is made about the word's frequency in the wider canon beyond these three works.
Canonical moments
The Dhammapada holds the word's most concentrated statements. At Dhammapada 277 the formations are declared impermanent, all that is put together being subject to arising and passing, and the verse makes this the first of the insights by which one wearies of suffering and turns toward the path. At Dhammapada 278 the same frame carries the second declaration, that all formations are dukkha, unable to give lasting rest because they are conditioned and so unstable. The pairing matters for the word: saṅkhāra is the subject of the two marks of existence that apply to conditioned things, and only when the third mark shifts to dhammā does the analysis widen to the unconditioned. Nearby, Dhammapada 255 sets the formations against what does not waver, holding the conditioned up against a stillness they cannot reach.
In the Digha Nikaya the word turns from doctrine to narrative. At Digha Nikaya 16:3.51.4, within the discourse on the great passing, the account moves through the relinquishing of the life-formation, the āyusaṅkhāra: the sum of conditions sustaining the body in being, surveyed and let go rather than merely suffered to fail. The same discourse closes, at Digha Nikaya 16:6.10.10, on the formulation that gathers the whole teaching into the word itself: the formations are of the nature to decay, and the work is to bring their passing to completion without heedlessness. Here saṅkhāra is not one topic among others but the name for everything that arises and ends — the closing word set over the founder's own death, making the analysis of the aggregates concrete in a single life reaching its term.
The word's world
Saṅkhāra sits among the Pali soul-words as the term for process where the others name a seat or a faculty. It is the constructing that produces and sustains what citta, the mind, and mano, the mental faculty, work with; and its karmically weighted sense stands close to kamma, the deed whose momentum the formations carry. Because the formations are the aggregate most bound up with intention, the word is the pivot on which the analysis of a person turns toward the analysis of becoming: the saṅkhārā are what condition viññāṇa, consciousness, in the chain from ignorance to birth and death. Its two predicates in the corpus, impermanence and dukkha, are the marks whose seeing wears away attachment; and the stillness the formations cannot reach is nibbana, the unconditioned that the analysis of the conditioned sets in relief.
Across the wings the resonances fall not on the soul-substances but on the words for the made and the shaping. Sanskrit karman, from the same root kar-, is the deed whose formative power saṅkhāra generalizes into the whole class of conditioned things. Sanskrit prāṇa, the life-breath, holds the ground the Pali āyusaṅkhāra occupies when the word names the conditions that sustain a life — though prāṇa is a vital substance, while saṅkhāra is the compounding any such substance undergoes. Against the enduring self of Sanskrit ātman the Pali term stands in exact opposition: the formations are precisely what has no self, and atta in this tradition names a thing looked for among the saṅkhārā and not found. The word's world is the world of the composite as such — everything that causes have put together, and that the seeing of impermanence takes apart.
Grounding: corpus figures and citations from the live Logoi corpus record (receipt soul-word-journey-v0). PTS Pali–English Dictionary senses from the wing's lexicon shelf. Cross-references: citta, kamma, viññāṇa, dukkha, nibbana, karman, ātman.