What Are Intrinsic-Nature Obstructions and Afflictive Habits?

Afflictive obstruction (kleśāvaraṇa) refers to afflictions of the mental disposition, corresponding to greed, hatred, and delusion, which can obstruct one's progress on the Path; afflictive habitual tendencies are the inertial effects accumulated by the manas over beginningless kalpas. An arhat of the fourth fruit can only eradicate the manifest activities of the afflictions of greed, hatred, and delusion, but cannot eradicate habitual tendencies and inertia. Therefore, at times habitual tendencies will still inadvertently erupt, 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 and formations of greed, actions and formations of hatred and anger, and actions and formations 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 some distance due to inertia—it does not stop dead immediately—but this force is relatively small. That stretch of distance corresponds to the cultivation process between the first bhūmi and the eighth bhūmi bodhisattva stages. Before the first bhūmi, it is all the manifestation of afflictions; the afflictions have not been fully eradicated. Before the third fruit, when one has not cultivated to the stage of the first dhyāna, the afflictions of greed, hatred, and delusion are merely suppressed, not eradicated in the slightest. Only after the first dhyāna does one begin to gradually eradicate afflictions.

For those who have neither seen the mind nor realized enlightenment, nor attained any of the fruits, even if they have cultivated the four dhyānas and eight samādhis, they cannot eradicate afflictions; the afflictions are merely suppressed. When their meditative concentration regresses in the future, all the afflictions will still manifest. Therefore, the merit of attaining the fruits and of seeing the mind and realizing one's nature is extremely great, enabling sentient beings in the future to have the capacity to eradicate afflictions and escape the suffering of birth-and-death in saṃsāra, being at ease in every life.