Clashing With Kleshas

In the Buddhist view the major obscurations to freedom are called kleshas. A difficult word to translate, kleshas have been called everything from passions to afflictions to conflicting emotions to disturbing conceptions. No one has been able to find quite the right word, for they are not solely emotion nor are they exclusively thought. Joseph Goldstein refers to them as afflictive emotions, while Stephen Batchelor has taken to calling them compulsions. The basic idea is that certain powerful reactions have the capacity to take hold of us and drive our behavior. We believe in these reactions more than we believe in anything else, and they become the means by which we both hide from ourselves and attempt to cope with a world of ceaseless change and unpredictability. The three poisons of greed, hatred, and ignorance are the classic Buddhist examples, but others include conceit, skeptical doubt, and so-called "speculative" views, nothing of self that bind and restrict us.

The kleshas work by grabbing hold of consciousness and taking it over. When I am enraged, I do not stop to question my reality; I am completely caught up in my anger. There is no space in my mind; I am identified one hundred percent with my feelings. The reason that kleshas is so difficult to translate is that it connotes something that underlies both state of mind and emotion.

Simultaneously thought and feeling, but more basic than either, kleshas are so intense that they propel us mindlessly into actions that cause suffering. When angry, I am gripped by my anger, and I don't care, for the moment, what the consequences of my words or actions will be. I feel totally justified. Just as the ancient languages of the Buddha have only one word for head and heart, so they also recognize the power of these primitive states to monopolize the mind, body, and behavior.

When Freud talked of instincts or drives he was trying to explain a similar concept, that there are energies that permeate us, which can grab our entire being and shape who we become. But in Buddhism these energies are not seen as essential, the way they are in conventional psychoanalysis; they are seen as self-created, springing from a fundamental fear or confusion, a reaction to things being out of our control. The great eighth-century Indian Buddhist scholar Shantideva compared the kleshas to bands of thieves lying in wait to steal the jewels inside the house of mind. His comparison is apt but suffers a little from self-estrangement. The bands of thieves are not separate from us. We steal from ourselves, having somehow learned how to rain on our own parades, and we are not passive victims in the matter. The trick, in Buddhist practice, is to uproot the kleshas through the insidious and invisible power of awareness. To become alert to how we restrict ourselves is to begin the process of liberation.

- Mark Epstein