The Five Hindrances

2.3 The Five Hindrances

The mind—why will it not settle?

The Āgamas' answer is a list of five items: sensual desire, ill-will, dullness-and-drowsiness, restlessness-and-remorse, doubt. Together they are called the five hindrances.

First let the five be seen clearly. Sensual desire is the mind led away by what it wants. Ill-will is the mind burning with resentment. Dullness-and-drowsiness is in fact two things reckoned as one—dullness is the heaviness of the mind, drowsiness the sleepiness of the body. Restlessness-and-remorse is likewise two—restlessness is the wavering of the mind, and remorse is regret, the chafing over what one has done or left undone that will not be set down. (The old translators' word for it is easily read askance: it means regret—kukkucca, the looking back in remorse—not "doing evil.") Doubt is indecision—toward the Dharma, toward the path, toward whether one can walk it oneself.

With the five counted out, what matters is not the list; it is the single word "hindrance."

What It Covers

"Hindrance" here is the word for a lid, for covering over. The treatises give the word a string of glosses: it "obstructs, screens, presses down, conceals, covers, veils, entangles, and wraps"—eight words circling one and the same meaning: it lies as a cover upon the mind, so that the mind cannot be clear and bright, cannot be put to use.

Then what, exactly, does it cover? The Saṃyukta Āgama says it plainly:

These five hindrances cover and hinder the mind, defile it, and can enfeeble wisdom … these five cover over the world, so that beings, deeply attached and hard to ferry across, are screened off and do not see the right path.

What is covered is wisdom, is the right path, is the capacity to see things as they really are. "Can enfeeble wisdom"—to enfeeble is to make thin and weak. With the five hindrances pressing on the mind, wisdom grows thin, grows weak, and can no longer see the road.

The Saṃyukta Āgama has two more images that bring this meaning to life. One is darkness: a mind covered by the five hindrances is as if in a dark room, as if it had lost its eyes. The other is the seed under the shade of a tree: the seed falls beneath the deep shade of a great tree; water and soil are all there, only the daylight never reaches it, and it cannot sprout. A covered mind is just so—not broken, but pressed down; not without roots of good, but with roots of good given no room to grow.

The texts also set the five hindrances and the seven awakening-factors into one tidy pair. Of the seven awakening-portions, every factor "is knowledge, is awakening, leads onward to nirvāṇa"; of the five hindrances, every hindrance is "not knowledge, not awakening, does not lead onward to nirvāṇa." And then one summing sentence:

What is called the wholly unskillful heap is the five hindrances … what is called the wholly purified heap is the seven awakening-portions.

In this pair, one thing must be seen clearly: the five hindrances are hindrances not because they make a person feel bad, but because they stand in the road that leads to nirvāṇa. The name is established relative to the path. The same dullness, while an afternoon doze does the path's work no harm, the texts do not call a hindrance; only when it blocks wisdom, blocks the path, does it get the name. "Hindrance" is a term of the road, not a term of the emotions.

Seclusion: Concentration Spoken by Subtraction

With the five hindrances seen clearly, look back at the four-jhāna formula read in Part One—"secluded from sensual desires, secluded from unwholesome states"—and that word "secluded" can now be glossed all the way down. The Poṭṭhapāda Sutta of the Dīrgha Āgama:

Having extinguished the five hindrances that cover the mind … putting away sensual pleasures and unskillful states, with applied thought and sustained thought, with the rapture and ease born of seclusion, one enters the first jhāna.

"Seclusion" is glossed, explicitly, as extinguishing the five hindrances. The act of entering the first jhāna is not the developing of something but the extinguishing of something—the extinguishing of the five hindrances that cover the mind. The Assapura discourse of the Madhyama Āgama carries this subtraction all the way to the fourth jhāna, and gives the five hindrances a vivid compound name:

Having severed these five hindrances—defilements of the heart that weaken wisdom … one dwells having attained the fourth jhāna.

Defilements of the heart, an enfeebling of wisdom—the five hindrances are stains upon the mind, the thinness of wisdom. Wipe the stain away, lift off what was pressing down, and concentration is there.

And so this part arrives at its deepest sentence: concentration is defined not by what it accumulates, but by what it sheds. What remains once the five hindrances are stilled simply is concentration. The first chapter said that when the water grows still, the moon was already there; this chapter has named what was churning in that basin of water—what stirs the water is exactly these five.

Here again is a coordinate on the border with volume one, Mindfulness. The same set of five hindrances, in the practice of the establishments of mindfulness, is an object that is watched—when there is sensual desire within, one knows, as it really is, that it is there; when there is none, one knows, as it really is, that it is not; how it arises, how it ceases—watched, item by item. In jhāna, the five hindrances are what one is secluded from—concentration is their very absence. One set of hindrances, two relations: mindfulness watches the hindrances; concentration is secluded from them. The boundary between mindfulness and concentration is here made fast by the texts themselves.

Suppression, Not Severance

One last layer—and it is the weighty sentence this part leaves to the whole volume.

Concentration extinguishes the five hindrances—does it extinguish them thoroughly? It does not. The treatises draw the line cleanly: toward the five hindrances, concentration is capable only of suppression—a temporary holding-down, like a stone pressing down grass; only wisdom is capable of severance—pulling up by the root, never to grow again. The Vimuttimagga divides the two layers into two releases:

One who, practicing now, suppresses the hindrances by the first jhāna—this is called release by suppression … as for release by severance, one cultivates the supramundane path, which can extinguish the remaining fetters.

What the practice of the first jhāna yields is the "release by suppression" that holds the hindrances down; to extinguish them by the root, one must cultivate the supramundane path—one must have wisdom. Like a stone pressing down grass—lift the stone, and the grass grows back. While the strength of concentration holds, the five hindrances do not arise; let the strength of concentration ebb, and the five return. So concentration cannot be the end-point. It presses the hindrances down and clears out a stretch of brightness—precisely so that wisdom can set to work within that brightness and cut the root.

This seed the volume's final chapter will come back to harvest. Here only one sentence is set down: concentration's subtraction is reversible; to make it irreversible, it must be handed over to wisdom.

And the same word of proportion once more: what this chapter has told is what the five hindrances are, and what "seclusion" is—the structure of concentration, not a manual of antidotes. How to work when a hindrance is met belongs to the teacher's lineage and to actual practice, and is not this book's business.

Part Two Is Walked

Three chapters, three coordinates. Place: right concentration is the eighth factor of the path, borne up by seven factors, its direction being its "right." Sequence: concentration sits sixth among the seven awakening-factors—the channel forms when the water has arrived—a fruit that is given rise to. Seclusion: the content of concentration is the absence of the five hindrances, and that absence is suppression, not severance. Put the three together, and the Āgamas' concentration is complete.

But reading this far, a careful reader will have noticed: what the Āgamas give is everywhere a seed—lists that name and stop, definitions scattered across the discourses, similes abundant but never made into a system. The five hindrances actually list seven items—how is that to be counted? The jhāna-factors—how many in the end, and each countering what? The substance of concentration—what, finally, is it? Inside the Āgamas these questions cannot be asked to the bottom. To ask them to the bottom, one must walk into another workshop—the treatise-masters' workshop.

The next part, the Abhidharma.