Klesha (क्लेश) is usually translated as "affliction," "obstacle," or "poison," and all three point at the same idea: the five kleshas are the Yoga Sutra's answer to a very old question — if nothing is actually wrong right now, why does the mind manufacture suffering anyway? Patanjali lists them in the second book of the Yoga Sutra, and the list is strikingly un-mystical. It reads less like theology and more like a diagnostic manual: five root patterns, arranged so that each one grows out of the one before it. You don't need to believe anything to use the map. You only need to have noticed your own mind for about a week.
The five, in order
1. Avidya — not seeing clearly
Avidya is usually translated "ignorance," but that suggests missing information, and this is more active than that: it's misseeing. The Sutra defines it precisely — mistaking the temporary for the permanent, the painful for the pleasant, the not-self for the self. In plain terms: organizing your happiness around things that cannot hold it. The job title, the body at twenty-five, the other person's approval — none of these are stable, and building your sense of okayness on them guarantees a wobble. Avidya is listed first because it's the soil; the other four afflictions grow in it.
2. Asmita — the story of "I"
Asmita is often rendered "ego," which makes people think of arrogance. Closer: the compulsive construction of a self. It's the mind stitching together a character — I am the competent one, the overlooked one, the one who doesn't need help — and then defending that character as if it were under physical threat. Notice how much of a bad day is actually a threatened asmita: the criticism that stings for hours, the meeting where you weren't consulted. The event lasted a minute; the story defended itself all afternoon.
3. Raga — grasping
Raga is attachment to pleasure: the reaching, the refreshing, the one-more-episode. It arises, the Sutra says dryly, from the memory of pleasure — which is exactly the problem, because the memory promises what repetition never quite delivers. Nothing here forbids enjoyment. The affliction is in the grasp: needing the pleasant thing to continue, to repeat, to be available on demand, and suffering when it won't.
4. Dvesha — pushing away
Dvesha is raga's mirror: aversion, the flinch away from the unpleasant. Traffic, a colleague's voice, the first thirty seconds of a plank hold. The pattern is identical to grasping, just with the sign flipped — the mind insists that its okayness depends on the unpleasant thing being gone, and so the unpleasant thing gets to run the day. Together, raga and dvesha form the seesaw most of us ride from morning to night: toward, away, toward, away.
5. Abhinivesha — clinging to life
The last klesha is the deepest: the fear of death, the clinging to continuity itself. The Sutra makes the striking claim that this one persists "even in the wise" — it's not a neurosis you can think your way out of but something closer to firmware. Every smaller fear, the teaching suggests, borrows its voltage from this one. You don't have to accept the metaphysics to notice the pattern: much of what we call anxiety is this root fear wearing everyday clothes.
How they feed each other
The order is the argument. Because you don't see clearly (avidya), you build a self out of unstable material (asmita). Because that self needs protecting, you grasp at what pleases it (raga) and fight what threatens it (dvesha). And underneath it all runs the root clinging (abhinivesha) that gives the whole structure its urgency. The practical value of the chain is that it points to where to work: pulling at the leaves does little, but the Sutra claims that weakening the root weakens everything downstream. This is the same psychological architecture that shows up, wearing different vocabulary, in the samskaras — the grooves of habit — and in the cultivation of vairagya, non-grasping, which the tradition pairs with practice as its two-legged method.
What practice does about them
Patanjali's prescription is not suppression — you cannot argue a klesha into submission — but a slow two-part process. First, seeing: meditation trains you to watch grasping and aversion arise in real time, small enough to notice before they become the evening's mood. This is the entire mechanism described on our meditation page, stated in modern terms. Second, refinement: the Sutra says the afflictions, once attenuated, are "burned" by meditative absorption — grand language for a mundane observation, that patterns seen clearly and repeatedly, without being fed, gradually lose their grip. Nobody finishes this project; the tradition is explicit that even advanced practitioners are attenuating kleshas, not deleting them.
Using the map without the dogma
You can treat the kleshas as metaphysics, or you can treat them as a five-question diagnostic for a bad day: What am I misreading as permanent? What self-image got threatened? What am I grasping? What am I fighting? What am I afraid of losing? The questions work regardless of your cosmology, which is probably why this twenty-centuries-old list keeps surviving translation. Read more of the Sutra's framework in our philosophy section, or browse the rest of the glossary for the vocabulary that surrounds it.