The Gospel and the Three Poisons

So far in this series exploring Buddhist thought as a mirror to better understand Christianity we’ve seen just how central the idea of attachment/non-attachment is in Buddhism: We are dissatisfied with the world, thereby suffering and acting to cause others to suffer, because we are overly attached to the transient things of the world around us, including ourselves. Today we’ll look at three conditions of mind that all too often act as the sparks that ignite and fan the flames of this destructive pattern, the ‘three flames’ or ‘three poisons’ of greed, hatred, and delusion.

The Three Poisons in Buddhism

In his famed Fire Sermon, the Buddha said this: “Monks, all is burning… Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion.” Let’s break these down.

The first poison or fire is raga, translated as greed or lust. (Incidentally, the Greek word we often translate as lust, eros, also has a more general meaning of ‘desire’. So whenever we see lust in a religious text, we should be thinking far beyond just sex.) This is wanting getting out of hand, the disease of more: more money, more things, more security, more affection, more food, more alcohol, more sex, more power.

The second poison is dvesha, translated as hatred or anger. Here we push away what we don’t want, often violently lashing out. We see its power in a low-stakes (for us) situation like finding a gross bug in the house. In those moments, all too often, we don’t just want it out of the house, but we want it utterly annihilated. This same tendency also applies when hatred’s attention is turned to our fellow humans.

Often this poison is caused by the third, moha, delusion or ignorance. Often enough, we hate because we misunderstand. We are deluded into thinking the world is what we want it to be or that we can achieve happiness by controlling the world. What’s so frightening about our present political moment is that the ignorance out of which people are acting is often willful rather than circumstantial.

As an article in a popular Buddhist magazine, The Tricycle, explains the relationship among the three posions:

Indulging greed and hatred shrinks the world down to the exact dimensions of my own likes and dislikes. Every fixed opinion, judgment, and belief of mine serves to further isolate me within walls constructed of anger, jealousy, envy, distrust, and, most of all, fear. My whole reality becomes a threatening standoff between what is perceived as inside and what is outside, with me huddled on the inside behind the barriers fear constructs, clutching my little treasure of preferences and anxious over possible interference from without. When I give in to greed and hatred, I have taken residence in the house of delusion.

Fire is a sensible metaphor for these traits as, not only do they easily get out of control, but they are also intensely destructive. And so the aim of Buddhist practice, and one of the major ways we can achieve some degree of liberation from our attachments, is to extinguish them. In fact, the word nirvana itself derives from the idea of ‘blowing out’ a flame. In Buddhist practice, we extinguish the flames, or find the antidote to the poisons, by cultivating their opposites: dana (generosity), metta or maitri (lovingkindness), and prajna (wisdom, which amounts to accepting the world as it is).

We can see just how strongly tied this is to the idea of attachment by thinking through each of these pairs. Again, from the above-linked article:

If I can just once pry open the tight fist of greed, the hand of generosity is revealed. I needn’t try to be generous; I only have to let go of what I’m hanging on to. The relinquishing is itself the generosity.

The same is true of aversion. What I don’t push away will enter of its own accord and will no longer seem so foreign and threatening to me, opening a pathway to acceptance, and even love, for what was once feared and avoided.

The same can be said for delusion. If I simply let go of my ideas of how the world should be, I will automatically be able to better see and accept how it is, and thereby become wiser.

Christian Response

Jesus, and the whole biblical tradition, have a lot to say about the three poisons and their antidotes.

Greed is one of the Scriptures’ great evils. The Wisdom tradition says such things as, “For the wicked boast of the desires of their heart, those greedy for gain curse and renounce the Lord” (Psalm 10.3) and “Such is the end of all who are greedy for gain; it takes away the life of its possessors” (Proverbs 1.19). Jesus for his part taught: “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions” (Luke 12.15), and “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth,” for “You cannot serve God and wealth” (Matthew 6.19, 24). And Paul puts it simply: “no … one who is greedy (that is, an idolater), has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God” (Ephesians 5.5). On the flip side, generosity is praised: “A generous person will be enriched, and one who gives water will get water” (Proverbs 11.25), and “Those who are generous are blessed, for they share their bread with the poor” (22.9). In the teaching of Jesus (and Paul too), God is consistently shown to generous and the faithful are exhorted to be so as well and to participate in what I’ve called God’s pay-it-forward economy of grace.

Hatred is a bit more nuanced, as the message in the Bible is less that hatred is bad than it is that we are to hate the right things: injustice, wickedness, false attachments, and so on. But we still have strong teachings advocating for a perspective like the Buddha’s, in which hatred is to be set aside for the sake of lovingkindness: “Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all offences.” (Proverbs 10.12); “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5.43). And, several of the ‘works of the flesh’ Paul lists off to the Galatians could fit well under a blanket category of anger and hate, including enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, [and] dissensions” (Galatians 5.19-20). Indeed the whole culture promoted by the New Testament can be defined as being one of pervasive and indiscriminate lovingkindness. This is the message of the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus’ farewell discourse in John, and so many other passages. As Paul summarizes his celebration of love: “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13.13).

Delusion is less of a focus of the Christian Scriptures, but, through the teaching of the nous that has been our constant companion in this series, is certainly present and active in the New Testament. Once again, it tells us that our ability to interpret the world around us is skewed; repentance then is less a matter of saying we’re sorry for what we’ve done wrong than it is recognizing the delusion that we’ve been under and coming to see the world through God’s loving and generous eyes. This is the heart of the biblical conception of Wisdom, which the Old Testament links with the Law and the New Testament internalizes through the ongoing witness of Christ in us and the power and presence of the Holy Spirit living in us.

Conclusions

Christianity is far less concerned with psychology than Buddhism is. But if we were to try to find three great causes for sin, strife, and suffering in the world, we could hardly do better from a biblical perspective than to choose greed, hatred/anger, and delusion/ignorance. We can say this because their antidotes — generosity, love and grace, and wisdom — are commended throughout the Scriptures and our tradition as the highest of virtues.