Modified: March 22, 2023
five hindrances
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.Buddists identify five factors as obstacles to concentration in meditation:
- Sensory desire (kāmacchanda)
- Aversion or ill will (vyāpāda)
- Sloth-and-torpor (thīna-middha)
- Restlessness-and-worry (uddhacca-kukkucca)
- Doubt (vicikiccha)
NameRedacted summarizes the first two as 'wanting' and 'not-wanting' respectively, and the third and fourth as having 'too little energy' and 'too much energy' respectively.
The antidotes to the hindrances are the corresponding five jhana factors:
- One-pointedness (ekaggatā) counteracts sensory desire
- Rapture (pīti) counteracts aversion
- Applied thought/attention (vitakka) counteracts sloth and torpor
- Contentment/joy (sukha) counteracts restlessness
- Sustained thought-examination (vicāra) counteracts doubt
frustration
Meditating with the hindrances can feel extremely frustrating. Imagine you ask some Christians, "I have all these problems in my life, can God help me with them?" and they say, "yes, just pray to him and ask", so you think, okay, I'll give that a try. You pray diligently every day, but a year later, nothing has improved. You go back to the Christians and they say, "ah, your problem is that you're doubting. The prayer won't work if you have any doubts." That's not how things are supposed to work! Actually-effective practices work regardless of your beliefs about them.
"Also, even as you're asking God to fix your problems, you can't desire that they be fixed, or have any aversion to them not being fixed." At this point your head explodes in rage.
The situation with meditation is a little bit better than this. Faith in the practice can be built and supported by intellectual arguments and objective evidence, so it's not totally groundless. Desire and aversion are problems only on short timescales (see fixation), so you can still have preferences over things in the world. And the hindrances are only to concentration practice; insight / emptiness practices do still work to some extent even when concentration is poor. But still.