Giving Up the Hindrances

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Each of the five hindrances has one thing that feeds it and one thing that starves it, and knowing which is which turns an unworkable mood into something you can actually do something about.

A table, not a sermon

The chapter divides cleanly in half. AN 1.11–15 take the five hindrances in their standard order and name, for each, what gives rise to it and makes it “increase and grow.” AN 1.16–20 take the same five in the same order and name what prevents it from arising, or abandons it once it has. Entry sixteen answers entry eleven, seventeen answers twelve, and so on down the line. Reading the two halves as a single table — rather than as ten separate sayings — is most of what there is to understand here.

The formula is the same one the opening chapter used: I do not see a single thing that … like this. The superlative is doing real work. It is not claiming these are the only causes, but that in each case one factor dominates — which is what makes the chapter usable as a practical instrument instead of a list of contributing conditions.

The five hindrances

The five (nīvaraṇa, from a root meaning to cover or obstruct) are sensual desire (kāmacchanda), ill will (byāpāda), dullness and drowsiness (thinamiddha), restlessness and remorse (uddhaccakukkucca), and doubt (vicikicchā). They are not sins and they are not personality flaws; they are the five states that make a mind unworkable for meditation, and the tradition treats them as weather rather than as character. This chapter is a set of instructions for changing the weather.

Notice that three of the five are compounds of two things — dullness with drowsiness, restlessness with remorse — which is why the English keeps doubling up. Each pair names a single condition seen from two sides: the sunken mind and the sleepy body, the agitated mind and the guilty conscience that will not let it settle.

Rational attention is the hinge

The phrase that recurs across the chapter is yoniso manasikāra, which Sujato renders “rational application of mind,” and its negative ayoniso manasikāra. Yoni is a womb or origin, so the literal sense is attention that goes to the source of a thing — attending in a way that gets at how something actually came to be, rather than in a way that takes its appearance at face value.

It works at two levels here, and it is worth separating them. At the specific level, it is the difference between the two halves of every pair: the feature of beauty is only a problem when attended to irrationally, and the feature of ugliness only helps when attended to rationally — the object alone does nothing. At the general level, in AN 1.15 and 1.20, irrational attention is itself named as what feeds doubt, and rational attention as what ends it. Doubt is the hindrance whose cause and cure are the quality of attention as such, which is a fair indication of what the tradition thinks doubt actually is.

The one that gives Western readers trouble

The stated antidote for sensual desire is asubhanimitta, “the feature of ugliness” — in practice, the traditional contemplations of the body’s parts and stages of decay. It is worth being direct about this, because it reads to a lot of modern students as body-shaming, life-denying, or simply morbid, and pretending otherwise does not survive contact with a classroom.

Two things make the practice more intelligible without explaining it away. The first is that it is prescribed as a corrective to an existing distortion, not as a neutral description of reality: subhanimitta, the feature of beauty, is already an act of selective attention, and asubha is the equal and opposite exaggeration applied to pull the mind back to center. It is a counterweight, and counterweights are sized to the load. The second is that the tradition itself puts a hard limit on this practice — there is a well-known and disturbing episode in which monks given contemplation of ugliness to work on took it far enough to become revolted with their own lives, after which the Buddha taught mindfulness of breathing in its place. Overdosing on the medicine is a known failure mode, not a modern squeamishness.

It also helps to point out what the chapter does not do. The antidote for ill will is not asubha but the heart’s release by love, mettā cetovimutti. Each hindrance gets the specific remedy that fits it, and the collection is not recommending revulsion as a general attitude toward experience.

How the Chinese tradition uses this material

Zhiyi builds the same content into the twenty-five preliminary conditions that a meditator settles before formal practice: censuring the five desires and then discarding the five hindrances, one at a time, each with its cause, its symptoms, and its specific antidote. A student who knows this chapter will recognize the whole structure immediately in the fourth fascicle of the Mohe Zhiguan and the second of the Shi Chan Boluomi, both of which are linked below. It is a good example of continuity that is easy to demonstrate: the Pāli gives the table, and the Tiantai manuals give six hundred years of working notes on how to use it.

Key terms