The Three Poisons

Episode 91 of the Secular Buddhism Podcast

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast. This is episode number 91. I'm your host, Noah Rasheta, and today I'm talking about the three poisons.

Keep in mind that one does not need to become a Buddhist in order to benefit from Buddhism teachings and concepts. The goal of these ideas is to help you befriend who you already are.

The Wheel of Samsara

In classical Buddhist depictions of the wheel of samsara, some of you may have seen this if you know that the symbol of Buddhism is a wheel with eight spokes representing the Eightfold Path. Often in the middle of this depiction, it shows three different animals—usually a pig, a rooster, and a snake. These three animals represent the three poisons.

I wanted to talk about the three poisons today because this is a common teaching in Buddhism, but I want to unravel it a little bit and talk about the words we use to describe it.

When I think of poison, I think of something that you consume and it kills you. Most people would probably think, "Well, this isn't something I need to be concerned about because I'm not dying. I'm not dead, so obviously I haven't had poison in my life." That makes it difficult to really identify with this teaching because most of us don't go around thinking, "Oh, I'm being poisoned right now."

Reframing "Poison" as "Unskillful"

The word actually used to describe the three poisons can also be translated as "the unskillful." We talk about the word "unskillful" a lot in Buddhist teachings, and this actually fits better for me than poison. What you're talking about is that these three unskillful things—these roots of unskillfulness—are the foundation from which all unskillful or harmful actions spring forward.

When we talk about it in this context, rather than thinking of poison in the sense of something that kills you, think of poison as something causing unnecessary discomfort or pain in your life. When you think about it that way, the whole teaching makes a lot more sense.

Greed, hatred, and ignorance are commonly referred to as the three poisons, and they're often the source of a lot of discomfort, pain, and unnecessary suffering.

The Hamster Wheel Analogy

I like to think about this with an analogy. Imagine yourself on a giant hamster wheel. There you are, running and running and running, just like a hamster does. We have three unskillful mental conditioning things going on.

Think of ignorance as essentially running on the hamster wheel without realizing the reality—that you're on a hamster wheel and it goes nowhere. You don't realize that. To me, that's a good way to visualize ignorance.

Then we have greed, or desire. On the hamster wheel, it's that you're running towards something. What are you running towards? You think you're finally going to get to the thing you're running towards. That's greed.

On the flip side, there's hate, which is also aversion. It's essentially you're running from the thing that you think, "Man, if it ever catches up to me, then life is gonna be bad."

Here we are on this hamster wheel of life, running towards the things we think are going to fix everything, running away from the things we think are going to ruin everything. And then there's ignorance—not realizing you can't ever reach what you're trying to get after and you can't ever get away from the thing you're trying to get away from. You're just on a hamster wheel, running.

What Are We Running Toward?

Now, what are some of the things that we run towards? It can be prestige, fame, fortune. There are so many things we run towards. I often joke about this with a good friend of mine, Kevin. We've had this inside joke for years where when something happens in life—like "I just got a new car" or "I just got a new job"—we always joke and say, "Now I can finally be happy."

It's been an inside joke for years because what we're joking about is recognizing that you don't ever finally get to be happy. You're always chasing after whatever the next thing is. Whatever that thing is that you're like, "Oh, now life is gonna be good"—if you really believe that, that's the ignorance part again. It's realizing, no, you're on a hamster wheel. It doesn't stop.

Sure, you may be content for a little bit, but then you're gonna be chasing after the next thing and the next thing. On the flip side, what are the things that we run away from? A lot of them. We're running away from feeling pain, from feeling embarrassed, from being unliked. We're running away from discomfort—losing a job, ending a relationship. There are so many things we run from, and we think, "Man, if that thing never happens to me, then life will be good."

Some of them are big things, like not wanting to lose a family member or a loved one. I think deep down we all know that's unavoidable. At some point, we're all going to contend with the loss of a family member or a loved one. But we still seem to be running on this treadmill, pretending like it'll never happen if we can just run fast enough, hard enough.

The Three Poisons Condition Our Actions

It's understood in Buddhism that as long as our thoughts, words, and actions are conditioned by these three mental poisons, they're essentially going to generate harmful actions and reactions that affect ourselves and others. We try to combat these things by following the Eightfold Path and trying to see life clearly as it really is—trying to see reality as it is.

Ignorance: The Foundation

Let's start with the first one: ignorance. Ignorance has a negative connotation. Sometimes we think somebody who's ignorant is somebody we look down upon. But really, what it's getting at here is not knowing. That's all it is. There's nothing wrong with not knowing.

If you don't know that you don't know, then you're just going through life thinking everything's good, right? What I think is helpful with this understanding of ignorance is realizing first that we're all ignorant—all of us. If you ever reach the point where you're thinking, "Man, I'm glad I'm not ignorant anymore," be careful. You don't know the things that you don't know.

If there are things that you don't know that you don't know, then you're always ignorant, right? We're all caught up in that. There are certainly levels, but even the smartest human—imagine a scale that goes from a chicken to a human. Now imagine that same scale from a human to something at that same scale higher. Then we're nothing again.

What I want to get at with that is that when we're talking about ignorance, it's essentially a form of blindness. It's not being able to see things as they really are.

Understanding the Three Poisons Through Buddhist Teaching

When we talk about ignorance in Buddhism, we're talking about the failure to see the three characteristics of all phenomena. These are impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and non-self. If we don't see these characteristics, then we're blinded by ignorance. We don't see the world as it really is.

Ignorance is the root. It's the fundamental poison that causes everything else. From ignorance, greed and hatred spring forth. Ignorance is not seeing the nature of impermanence. It's not seeing the nature of interdependence. It's not seeing the non-self nature of things. So in a way, ignorance supports both greed and hatred.

Greed and Desire

Now let's talk about greed, or what's also often called desire. In Buddhism, we distinguish between two kinds of desire. There's desire for something we don't have—that's craving. And there's the desire to get rid of something we do have—that's aversion. When we're talking about greed, we're generally talking about the desire for something we want to get or keep.

Greed shows up in our lives in so many ways. It's not always about wanting a bigger house or a fancy car. It can be the desire for recognition, the desire to be right, the desire to be seen, the desire to win, the desire to be better than others. It's the mentality of scarcity where we think there's only so much to go around and if you get it, I don't get it.

But think about it differently. If there's one cake in the room and there are four of us, and I'm just thinking, "I want that cake for me," I'm approaching it from a place of scarcity. But if I approach it by saying, "Hey, let's split this cake and all enjoy it together," the whole dynamic changes. Now, that's a very simplified example, but with many things we don't think that way.

Think about time, energy, pursuing something at all cost. It's like, "I have to have that, not you." Imagine being in the workplace and you're aspiring to a position that you want, but having the ability to look around and say, "You know what, so-and-so actually might be better for that than me. They would be best at that position. I should probably be doing this other thing, and I would be best at that." What if we all thought that way?

Now, obviously that would have its own complications because we all think differently. But I'm just saying imagine being able to see things a little bit differently, where it's not always you, you, you, me, me, me. That's essentially what we're trying to work with when addressing this sense of desire or greed.

Working With Desire

For me, it's been helpful in my own life to joke about it. Like I said, I have this inside joke with my friend. I catch myself. Part of what makes it funny is that there is a real feeling underneath it. When you get something, it's like, "Oh, now things are gonna be good." Then I catch myself in that moment and I make a joke of it where I'm like, "How funny to think that now I can finally be happy."

But somewhere inside that stems from an actual real feeling that's saying, "Okay, now you can relax a bit. Things are gonna be good because you finally got this." I like to catch it, mock it a little bit, and then laugh.

The point here isn't to eradicate that feeling and say, "Okay, I'm gonna become numb and I'm not gonna feel any happiness when I obtain new things." That's not the point. That's not natural. I don't think that's helpful for you or for anyone else.

But to try to see it as it really is and say, "Okay, now that I've achieved this or obtained that, do I have this sense of permanence—that now life is finally good?" If I catch that in me, for me that's an invitation to pause and reflect. Why do I feel this way? Why did I think that this would be the thing that changes everything?

Even if I recognize, "Well, it does change things for a little bit because today things are a little bit easier than they were yesterday because of this or that"—that's fine. But do I feel a sense of permanence? Do I feel that sense of clinging, like "I would have done anything to make this happen"? If so, I really try to analyze that. Why did it feel that way? What am I thinking I'm after? Why am I after it? What would happen if I finally get it? Then what?

I'm trying to understand myself and the context of all of this.

Hatred and Aversion

Now, hatred—or what we also call aversion—is running from things we don't want. It's the opposite of greed in some ways. Where greed is pushing toward, hatred is pushing away. It's the desire to get rid of something, to avoid something, to resist something.

This can show up as actual anger and hatred toward people, but it also shows up as our resistance to discomfort. It's our fear of loss, our fear of pain, our fear of change. It's wanting things to stay the same even though we know they can't.

Like the hamster wheel, we're running away from all the things we think will ruin our life. And we don't realize that the more we run from them, the more power we give them. The more we resist them, the more they seem to persist.

Working With All Three Together

So I want to wrap this up. With the three poisons, what I would say is that like with all these teachings, the whole point of understanding this is having a tool to understand myself better. I want to understand what are the things that I'm chasing after. What are the things that I'm running away from? And in what way am I ignorant about how that mindset is causing me and the people I love, or people around me, unnecessary suffering?

That's my whole approach with this teaching of the three poisons. My invitation to you would be the same. Make this an introspective practice where you analyze and understand in yourself what the things are that you're chasing after and what the things are that you're running away from and why.

What would happen if that thing finally caught up to you? What if you lost your job, for example? I have a friend who's going through a really difficult time right now, and one of his big anxieties and fears is this aversion toward losing his business. That's something I've gone through, and I understand all those same feelings.

So I was able to say, "Well, what helped me in that time was just to ask yourself, okay, so what? If this thing that I've been running from finally does catch up to me, then what?" Play with that a little bit. From the context of just understanding yourself, ask: Why am I so scared of this? Why am I running from this? If this thing finally catches me, then what happens?

That's been a really helpful tool for me to experiment with in my head. If this thing that I fear finally catches up to me, then what? You know what—often you'll find that it's not as bad as you thought it was. And similarly, the thing that you're chasing after, when you work with that introspectively, you'll often find it's probably not as good as you thought it was going to be. Yeah, you got the thing you wanted. Now what? So what? Play with that and see what happens.

Again, this is all to help change the relationship you have with the things that you desire and the things that you feel aversion toward. It's not to change the feelings and say, "I don't want to feel desire. I don't want to feel aversion." All the while, you're minimizing the ignorance a little bit because every day you're understanding yourself a little bit better.

You're understanding yourself better in the context of being interdependent—not separate or independent. And you're understanding yourself in terms of being impermanent and constantly changing instead of thinking that it's fixed and things are always this way.

Closing Thoughts

That's all I wanted to share on this topic. Again, if you want to learn more about Buddhism and mindfulness and these topics from a very general standpoint, there are several good books out there. I like recommending Secular Buddhism and No Nonsense Buddhism for Beginners, which is now available on Audible. Both are available in paperback, audiobook, and digital formats like Kindle.

There's also the Five-Minute Mindfulness Journal, which is a great way to practice some of this introspection.

As always, if you've enjoyed this podcast episode, please share it with others, write a review, and give it a rating on iTunes. You can join our online community at secularbuddhism.com/community, and if you'd like to make a donation to support the work I'm doing with the podcast, you can visit secularbuddhism.com and click the donate button.

That's all I have for now, but I look forward to recording another podcast episode soon. Until next time.

For more about the Secular Buddhism podcast and Noah Rasheta's work, visit SecularBuddhism.com