The Three Poisons

Buddhist art often draws life as a great wheel, the bhavachakra, the wheel of existence. Everything on it turns: births, deaths, fortunes, moods. And at the very hub, where a wheel takes its motion, three animals chase one another in a circle: a rooster, a snake, and a pig, each chasing the tail of the next. They are the three poisons, the roots from which suffering grows, and the picture makes its claim before a word is spoken. The wheel does not turn on its own. It turns because the hub spins.

In many renderings there is a second detail worth catching: the rooster and the snake are drawn issuing from the pig's mouth. Greed and hatred are not independent troubles that happen to share a hub. They grow out of delusion, the not-seeing underneath both. That is most of the teaching, held in one image.

The three animals

Greed — Raga. The rooster: strutting, pecking, never done. Raga is grasping, the reach for more of whatever felt good, and the quiet certainty that the next thing will finally be enough. Held wide, it is tanha, the craving the second noble truth names as the engine of suffering itself; watched up close, it is what keeps the hedonic treadmill turning, the mind adapting to every gain and wanting again.

Hatred — Dvesha. The snake: coiled, quick to strike. Dvesha is greed turned the other way, aversion instead of grasping: the flare of anger, the grudge kept warm, the running list of things and people you are against. It binds just as tightly as wanting does, because being against something is still being fastened to it. The conduct that starves it is the first of yoga's ethical vows, Non-harming (Ahimsa), and the heat itself, met from the inside while it is up, is the work of Anger.

Delusion — Moha. The pig, in the old image: head down, rooting, not looking up. Moha is not stupidity. It is fog: taking the passing for the permanent, the story for the fact, the self for something solid and separate that must be fed and defended. The other two poisons grow out of this one, because you only grasp and recoil like that on behalf of a self you have misread. What clear seeing sees instead is laid out on the three marks of existence.

Fires, and what puts them out

The Buddha's own image for the three was less decorative than the wheel. In one early discourse, given to a gathering of fire-worshipping ascetics, he told them that everything is burning: burning with the fire of greed, the fire of hatred, the fire of delusion. The word the tradition keeps for the goal, nibbana (nirvana), means a blowing-out, the way a flame goes out. Not the extinguishing of you; the extinguishing of these three fires. What remains when they go out is treated on absorption (Samadhi), where this site holds nirvana beside the other traditions' names for the same still ground.

The tradition also names the cure, and it is not willpower aimed at the flames. Each poison has an opposite that starves it: generosity (dāna) for greed, loving-kindness (mettā) for hatred, wisdom (paññā) for delusion. Practise the opposite and the poison thins. Loving-kindness trained deliberately, with its three companions, is the Brahmaviharas; that page widens the map, matching the four abodes to the whole range of ways a mind harms. Wisdom trained is the first of the eightfold path's three trainings. And generosity has an old cousin on yoga's map: Non-grasping (Aparigraha), the open hand.

The same knot, other names

Yoga maps this ground with five afflictions rather than three, and two of them are the same words: raga and dvesha sit on both lists. The third differs, moha here, avidya there, and the two traditions part ways over what the fog is hiding, an awareness at the centre or no fixed self at all. The full side-by-side lives on the five kleshas. The terms differ, the territory rhymes; the knot being worked loose is the same one.