5 Poison as Medicine

W

ith the slogan“Three objects, three poi-
sons, and three seeds of virtue” we begin to
enter into the teachings on relative bodhichitta, the
teachings on how to awaken compassion. We have so
far been attempting to establish that the ground of all
of our experience is very spacious, not as solid as we
tend to make it. We don’t have to make such a big
deal about ourselves, our enemies, our lovers, and
the whole show. This emphasis on gentleness is the
pith instruction on how to reconnect with openness
and freshness in our lives, how to liberate ourselves
from the small world of ego. We’ll keep coming back
to this sense of freshness and open space and not
making such a big deal, because we are now about to
get into the really messy stuff.
In the Buddhist teachings, the messy stuff is
called klesha,which means poison. Boiling it all
down to the simplest possible formula, there are
three main poisons: passion, aggression, and igno-
rance. We could talk about these in different ways—
for example, craving, aversion, and couldn’t care less.
Addictions of all kinds come under the category of
craving, which is wanting, wanting, wanting—feel-

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