What Are Innate Afflictive Obstructions (kleśāvaraṇa) and Afflictive Habitual Tendencies

Innate afflictive obstruction (kleśāvaraṇa) refers to afflictions of the mind's disposition, associated with greed, hatred, and delusion, which can obstruct one's progress on the Path; afflictive habitual tendencies are the inertial patterns accumulated by the manas since beginningless kalpas. An arhat of the fourth fruit can only eliminate the manifest activity of the afflictions of greed, hatred, and delusion, but cannot eliminate habitual tendencies and inertia. Therefore, sometimes habitual tendencies still erupt inadvertently, but they pass very quickly, leaving no trace in the mind—one will not remain angry and fuming for a long time, nor harbor resentment in the heart.

Ordinary beings, however, manifest all their afflictions; this manifests concretely as actions of greed, actions of hatred and malice, and actions of delusion, and these are the direct manifestation and outflow of the afflictive dispositions of greed, hatred, and delusion within the mind. Habitual tendencies are like a car that, after braking, still travels forward for a stretch due to inertia—it does not stop dead immediately—but this force is relatively small. That stretch of road corresponds to the cultivation process between the first bhūmi and the eighth bhūmi bodhisattva stages. Before the first bhūmi, it is all the manifest activity of afflictions; the afflictions have not been completely eliminated. Before the third fruit, without having attained the first dhyāna, the afflictions of greed, hatred, and delusion are merely suppressed, not severed at all; only after the first dhyāna does one begin to gradually sever afflictions.

For those who have neither seen their true mind and awakened to their nature nor attained any fruit of realization, even if they have cultivated the four dhyānas and eight samādhis, they cannot sever afflictions—the afflictions are merely suppressed. When their meditative concentration regresses, all the afflictions will still manifest. Therefore, the merit of attaining realization and of seeing one's true mind and awakening to one's nature is extremely great: it enables sentient beings in the future to have the ability to sever afflictions and escape the suffering of birth-and-death in saṃsāra, being at ease in every life.