Most people are subject to one or other of the poisons from time to time, and an angry mood or a feeling of frustrated craving may last for quite a while, sometimes for days or weeks together. At the same time, the intervals between these states may be filled with experiences of love, joy, and peace. It is amazing how quickly a positive mental state may be followed by a negative one, and vice versa. It is a practice in itself to observe how fickle the mind is and how easily it is distracted.
The Human Condition
What drives the mind: the three poisons
The Wheel of Life is a well known symbol in Tibetan Buddhism. At the centre of the wheel are a cock, a pig and a snake who are chasing each other in a circle, each one biting the tail of the animal in front of it.
The animals represent the ‘three poisons’ (kleshas in Sanskrit), or ‘afflictive emotions’ that drive the human condition and lead us to suffer. Noticing these forces doesn’t require deep meditation or study; they are all around us and at work in our minds.
Craving
The first animal, the cock, represents craving because of its liking for self-glorification. Craving means the the desire to pull things towards us for the sake of enjoyment and security. Early Buddhist traditions identify three kinds of craving. The first is craving for the things that come to us through the senses. The problem isn’t that we find enjoyment or pleasure in things – that’s a natural part of human experience – but that we often become attached to the things that give us pleasure. We want them to last or be repeated, and experience suffering when this doesn’t happen.
Next comes craving for becoming, which we could explain as the desire to be somewhere else, doing something else, perhaps with someone else. We become attached to outcomes and achievements, all of which take us away from the reality of our experience. Finally, there is desire for non-existence or death, which includes suicidal thoughts, but is perhaps better understood as self-hatred.
The one in whom no longer exist the craving and thirst that perpetuate becoming; how could you track that Awakened one, trackless, and of limitless range?
Craving naturally leads to attachment, in fact, it is often hard to separate the impulse of craving for something from the sense of being attached to it. We can become attached to anything at all, and Buddhism particularly mentions sense objects, views or beliefs, rites and rituals as ends in themselves, and the view that one possesses an unchanging self. We can tell we’ve become attached when we we find it painful to let it go or allow it to change.
Many aspects of the Buddhist path are about lessening craving and attachment and eventually letting go of them entirely. This is represented by the deep contentment of the meditating Buddha: one who has gone entirely beyond craving.
Hatred or Aversion
The second animal is a snake which is ready to bite whatever comes in its path and represents hatred. The impulse to push away the things we find painful or threatening underpins everything from a feeling of irritation to violence and war. We often feel that our dislikes and quarrels are justified by the faults of the other person, but Buddhist teachings direct our attention back to our own states of mind. Being destructive, hatred won’t achieve the ends we seek:
"If there is a remedy, then what is the use of irritation? If there is no remedy, then what is the use of irritation?" Shantideva, Bodicaryavatara
Also, when we are in a state of hatred, we are suffering.
The opposite of hatred is love, and Buddhists cultivate loving states of mind by acting with kindness and generosity, through a careful practice of ethics, and through meditations such as the development of loving kindness.
Compassion is an important virtue for Buddhists that is especially cultivated in Mahayana Buddhism.
Ignorance
The third animal, the pig, sleeps in the dirtiest places and eats whatever comes to its mouth, and it represents our our blindness to the real nature of life, or ignorance. This failure to grasp the nature of reality is not because we lack information; it’s because we have a false or misleading view of life.
According to Buddhism, in truth, existence is impermanent, insubstantial and unsatisfactory. These are 'The Three Marks' or characteristics of existence. However, on some level we believe that ordinary life is lasting, substantial, and capable of bringing us true satisfaction. Seeing life in this ‘topsy turvy’ way is the opposite of seeing it with wisdom.
In Buddhist teachings, ignorance is the fundamental source of everything that leads us to suffer, and the essence of the path is gaining wisdom.
Those who take the unreal for the real, and who in the real see the unreal, they, wandering in the sphere of wrong thought, will not attain the real.
Those who have known the real as the real, and the unreal as the unreal, they, moving in the sphere of right thought, will attain the real.
Those who have known the real as the real, and the unreal as the unreal, they, moving in the sphere of right thought, will attain the real.
