Skip to content
Mind Only

Index

T1586 · VERSE 12 OF 30 · LAYER 3: SENSES

The six root afflictions

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

mānadṛgvicikitsāś ca krodhopanāhane punaḥ | mrakṣaḥ pradāśa īrṣyātha mātsaryaṃ saha māyayā || 12 ||

煩惱謂貪瞋　癡慢疑惡見 隨煩惱謂忿　恨覆惱嫉慳

Triṃśikā, verse 12 · from Xuanzang's Chinese · tr. Claude (Anthropic), 2026

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.

Apparatus — five witnesses

DSE

The Distributed Systems Engineer

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
CYN

The Cynefin Practitioner

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
COG

The Cognitive Scientist

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
PRO

The Process Philosopher

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
SKP

The Skeptic

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