7. The Causes of Ignorance

As the Buddha notes in AN 10:61, it’s impossible to trace back into the past to find a point in time when ignorance began. But it is possible to look into the present moment to see what mental qualities sustain it. There we discover how desire and passion play their beginning role in the processes leading to suffering.

The Canon contains two lists of factors that sustain ignorance.

The first list is composed of what are called the five hindrances:

Of these hindrances, sensual desire and ill will are the strongest, and also the two most clearly related to desire and passion. Sensual desire is a passion for sensual plans and fantasies. Ill will is the desire to see someone suffer, either yourself or somebody else.

When the mind is obstructed by these two hindrances, it can’t see clearly what’s in its own best interest and what’s not. For this reason, these hindrances can keep you from wanting to know that you’re actually causing yourself to suffer by engaging in them, as you’re more focused on other goals. Even if you know the four noble truths and their duties, you don’t really pay attention to them because you don’t believe them, your defilements tell you that you’re incapable of understanding them, or you don’t care what the truths say. You have other agendas.

A similar principle applies to the second list of factors that sustain ignorance. These are the three effluents. The Pali word for “effluent” here—āsava—literally means, “flowing out.” Idiomatically, it’s also applied to wine: Fruit wine is fruit-āsava. So the implications of the term are that these effluents are qualities that flow out of the mind and keep it intoxicated. The three effluents are:

Here again ignorance can be caused by misinformation or misunderstanding: You don’t know, for example, what causes suffering or you have wrong ideas about how it’s caused. Or ignorance can be willed: You simply don’t want to know what the Buddha says about suffering and its causes because you have other desires, for sensuality or becoming, that get in the way.

These effluents lie deeper in the mind than the hindrances. The preliminary levels of awakening can eliminate the hindrances, but only full awakening can eradicate the effluents. The hindrances are simply obstacles to concentration. The effluents are the motor forces that sustain all the steps in the sequence of dependent co-arising through repeated rebirths in spite of the suffering it causes, all because of the desire and passion to have the pleasures of sensuality or the desire simply to be a being in a world where passions can be followed and pleasures found.

The Canon notes that these effluents that sustain ignorance are, in turn, sustained by ignorance: darkness leading to darkness—not knowing and not wanting to know, feeding on each other in repeated feedback loops. It’s only when you sense that you’ve suffered enough that you look for a light in the darkness. This may be why, when people who were receptive to the Buddha’s message when they first heard it, compared his teaching to the act of bringing a lamp into the dark, so that those with eyes could see the objects that otherwise had been obscured.

So the first spot in dependent co-arising where desire and passion play a role is prior to ignorance. In this sense, they underlie the whole process leading to suffering. This is why the Buddha equates the subduing of desire and passion with the unfettered freedom of release.