The Ten Fetters

Buddhist teachings refer to misperceptions as perceptual knots—ways of viewing that block freedom and keep us entangled in knotty thoughts. These misperceptions include our attachments, aversions, distortions, and delusions. They keep us thinking that life is personal and permanent and that it should be perfect.

Desire means to be caught in unwholesome longing. Form, sound, smell, taste, and touch are the objects of the five kinds of sense desire, which are desire for money, sex, fame, good food, and sleep. These five categories of desire produce obstacles on the path of practice as well as many kinds of physical and mental suffering.

Yogis discovered that there are two primary roots to physical suffering. One is craving and its many effects: greed, grasping, clinging, addiction. The other is aversion: fear, terror, hatred, avoidance, anger, resentment.

A Buddhist teaching is that being caught in attachment is a cause of suffering for us. Yet it is also a form of suffering for others who become obsessed by their attachment to us.

inexhaustible. That which obscures the brilliance of our essential nature is called “illusion” in Buddhism, “sin” in Christianity, and “defilement” in Shintō. The distinction between self and other is the fundamental source of all three.

the Truth of the Cause of Suffering identifies craving and attachment—mental