The Five Afflictions (Kleśas)
Five poisons of the mind — and the deepest, the clinging to life, grips even the wise.
The kleśas are the five deep 'afflictions' that, in Patañjali's analysis, poison the mind and keep it bound: ignorance of one's true nature; egoism, the false identification of the self with the mind; attraction toward pleasure; aversion toward pain; and abhiniveśa, the instinctive clinging to life and dread of death that grips even the wise. Ignorance is the field in which the other four grow. The whole practice of yoga aims to thin and finally uproot them.
How it traveled
- Yoga-sūtraKāśī (Varanasi) · 375explains
Key passages(15)
From anger comes delusion, and from delusion loss of memory. From loss of memory comes the ruin of discrimination, and from the ruin of discrimination he perishes.
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Vivekacūḍāmaṇi · Śaṅkara (traditionally ascribed; authorship doubted)
'The mind is one Graha, and that is seized by desire as the Atigraha, for with the mind one desires desires.'
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When that god is known, all fetters fall off, sufferings are destroyed, and birth and death cease. From meditating on him there arises, on the dissolution of the body, the third state, that of univers
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The student from sorrow was not able to eat. Then the wife of the teacher said to him: 'Student, eat! Why do you not eat?' He said: 'There are many desires in this man here, which lose themselves in d
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Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad · Vedic Revelation (śruti)
'On this there is this verse: "When all desires which once entered his heart are undone, then does the mortal become immortal, then he obtains Brahman. 'And as the slough of a snake lies on an ant-hil
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