Verse 12 of 30 Layer 3: Senses

The six root afflictions

煩惱謂貪瞋　癡慢疑惡見隨煩惱謂忿　恨覆惱嫉慳

The afflictions (kleśa): greed, hatred, delusion, pride, doubt, and wrong views. The secondary afflictions (upakleśa): wrath, resentment, concealment, spite, envy, miserliness,

The six primary afflictions (kleśa). They are the engines of suffering, the patterns that drive harmful action. The traditional ordering puts the three roots — lobha (greed), dveṣa (hatred), moha (delusion) — first, with pride, doubt, and wrong views as their further elaborations. The verse then immediately begins the longer catalog of secondary afflictions (upakleśa) that will continue through verse 14: wrath, resentment, concealment, spite, envy, miserliness — and on.

filter_alt Five Lenses

memory

The Distributed Systems Engineer

DSE

Treats alaya as an append-only log, manas as a hot cache, the six senses as consumers.

Six categories of misalignment in the cognitive runtime:

Greed (lobha) — pull toward content
Hatred (dveṣa) — push from content
Delusion (moha) — mis-modeling
Pride (māna) — misweighted self-comparison
Doubt (vicikitsā) — uncommitted reasoning unable to act
Wrong views (dṛṣṭi) — structurally bad priors

The first three are the alignment problem in miniature: any cognitive system has a pull-push-mismodel triad. The next three are the higher-order corruptions that build on top of the first.

Draft not yet reviewed

hub

The Cynefin Practitioner

CYN

Maps each verse to Clear, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic, or Confused.

Each affliction is a failure mode of sense-making.

Greed and hatred: premature commitment to attractor states.
Delusion: operating in the Complex domain as if it were Clear.
Pride: treating one’s own assessment as authoritative.
Doubt: paralysis in a domain that requires probing.
Wrong views: applying the wrong category to the situation.

Cynefin would say all six are specific cases of domain confusion.

Draft not yet reviewed

psychology

The Cognitive Scientist

COG

Reads through predictive processing, Bayesian inference, and self-model theory.

Map to contemporary affective and cognitive failure modes: appetitive overweighting (greed), threat overweighting (hatred), motivated reasoning (delusion), narcissistic schema (pride), decision paralysis (doubt), persistent priors in face of counter-evidence (wrong views). Each is a well-studied pattern with significant empirical literature.

Draft not yet reviewed

water_drop

The Process Philosopher

PRO

Whitehead, Heraclitus, Bergson — reality as flow, not substance.

The afflictions are not contents in consciousness; they are modes of relating to contents. Greed is not a feeling-state but a directional tendency. Removing the affliction is not removing a content; it is removing a way the system holds contents.

Draft not yet reviewed

report_problem

The Skeptic

SKP

Mandatory on every verse. Names where the metaphors break.

“Wrong views” (dṛṣṭi) is not the same as “incorrect belief.” It refers to a specific class of structural misperceptions about the nature of self and reality. The new translation uses the plural because Yogācāra recognizes five canonical subclasses — including satkāya-dṛṣṭi, the view of a real self, which is the source of all the others. Translations that flatten dṛṣṭi into “false ideas” obscure the technicality.

Draft not yet reviewed

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