Key idea of the Yoga Sūtras
kleśa · afflictions
The five root troubles: ignorance, I-am-ness, attachment, aversion, clinging to life.
Kleśa means what troubles or afflicts. Patañjali names five: ignorance, I-am-ness, attachment, aversion and clinging to life (2.3), and defines each (2.5–2.9). Ignorance is the field of the rest (2.4). I-am-ness is the seeming oneness of the power that sees and the instrument of seeing (2.6). Attachment follows pleasure and aversion follows pain (2.7–2.8), and clinging to life flows by its own momentum, even in the wise (2.9). The afflictions are the root of the store of karma (2.12). They exist in four states: dormant, thin, interrupted or fully active (2.4), and the method follows the states. Kriyā yoga thins them (2.2). Their active movements are overcome by meditation (2.11). Their subtle forms are overcome only by returning to their source (2.10). Their final end comes with the cloud of dharma (4.29–4.30). Īśvara is the one self never touched by them (1.24).
Vyāsa
“So all those hindrances without exception are varieties of undifferentiated-consciousness. … Whenever there is a misconceived idea, they become apperceived; and when undifferentiated-consciousness dwindles, they too dwindle away.”
Vyāsa's Yoga-bhāṣya in J. H. Woods' translation (1914), p. 108.
How it has been read
The same word asmitā names an affliction here (2.3, 2.6), a form within absorption with an object (1.17), and the source of constructed minds (4.4), so translators vary its English by context.
A common misreading
The kleśas are sometimes treated as bad emotions to be pushed away. In the text they grow from one error of seeing (2.4), and the remedy works on that root, not only on the feelings.
Where the text defines it
- 2.2 It cultivates absorption and thins the afflictions.
- 2.3 The afflictions are ignorance, I-am-ness, attachment, aversion and clinging to life.
- 2.4 Ignorance is the field of the others, whether they are dormant, thin, interrupted or fully active.
- 2.10 In their subtle form, they are overcome by returning to their source.
- 2.11 Their active forms are overcome by meditation.
- 2.12 The store of karma is rooted in the afflictions and is felt in this life or in lives not yet seen.