The asavas are 1. craving for sense pleasures, 2. craving for existence, 3. ignorance, and 4. attachment to mistaken views.
When the Buddha described the gradual path of training leading to nirvana, he defined nirvana as the end of the asavas.
The word “asavas” has been translated as inflows, outflows, influxes, taints, cankers, corruptions, intoxicant biases, carbuncles and boils.
A better translation of asavas may be “flows.” Our mind is not a closed system. Our body is not either. They do not function like hydraulic systems, by inflow and outflow. We function as integrated open systems, connected to the world through experience and action. The boundaries are fields. Nothing about us is fenced off, walled in, or separate.
There is motion in our sense experience, our feeling, perceptions, volitional activity and consciousness. That motion resembles convection. The flows are not sharply bounded ones. The movement is in fields, with variation, gradients, unpredictable and irregular areas of motion. They are influenced and are influencing wherever there is contact.
The flows are intensified when energy is added to the system. Energy is added to the system – to our minds, our lives – in the form of sense stimuli. It is increased, decreased or modified by our responses to it. The motion ceases in nirvana.
Inner and outer disturbances – turbulence in our field of experience – are linked by sense perception, sense contact, sense consciousness and our mental proliferation in response. The motion of our minds and bodies, the flows, are produced by craving and clinging, our misunderstanding of our experiences and ourselves. The movements of our hearts and minds are the asavas.
The motion is continual and never satisfied. Our desire is not vanquished when we get what we pursue. It is intensified. We seek to repeat it. We enter a vortex, not a linear flow but a whirlpool, a trap, formed by a self-perpetuating cycle of pursuit, gratification and yearning. That flow takes the form of convection in our minds, like heat in an oven, or the air over a blazing fire.
Our lives are consumed by desire and rage at obstruction of desire. Our vision is obscured by ignorance of what is going on and why, and what alternative views and actions can subdue the fire, ease the pain, stop the endless restless unsatisfiable quest.
The flows of craving slow and cease as the fuel for the fire is withdrawn. The fire dies down, the convection, the flows, the motion that disturbs us and distorts our views, subsides.
Insight arises as the flows, the motion, the disturbance and distortion, ceases.
In the Tevijjasutta, Digha Nikaya 13, section 4, Teaching the Path to the Divinity, the Buddha outlines the steps on the path:
Accomplished in ethics – we govern our body, speech and mind with self-restraint and with regard for others. We engage in wholesome action and avoid unwholesome action.
Giving up the hindrances – we let go of desire, ill will, restlessness and remorse, laxity and dullness and doubt about the efficacy of training.
Entering the four jhanas in succession – we enter deeply into peace, elation, happiness and equanimity.
Cultivating the four brahma viharas – we do not isolate, we connect, cultivating a heart of kinship, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity in deep understanding.
Past karma is abandoned – the past is infinite, but we no longer carry it.
As a result of this the practitioner ascends through the four stages of awakening – stream enterer, once returner, non-returner and arhat. These stages are defined by abandonment of the asavas, in succession.
The stream, fire and flood similes describe our condition. Our experience of the endless rising and passing away of sense experience, of feelings, perceptions, volitions, which keep us moving. We get caught in the vortices of addiction, cycles of transitory experience of pleasure which bind us, which prevent us from crossing the stream, which deprive us of satisfaction and peace, trapping us in the flow, seeking fuel, burning it, craving more.
Like convection, rising, cooling, falling, and burning new fuel, new desire, rising again, we are confined in the convection cycle by our own action, by what we say and think and do. By what we chase and run from. By what we value and what we neglect. By what we notice and what we miss.
The asavas prevent us from moving with purpose, breaking out, seeing clearly, finding peace.
Asavas are flows. They disturb the peace. The fire is not permanent.
The stream is to be crossed. The stream moves in accord with the condition of our mind, our choices, our life. We cross it by skillful action. When we do we finish with the great flood of samsara. We reach the other shore. There is no need to feed the fire anymore.
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Post copyright © 2026 Jeffrey Brooks, MountainKarateNC.com, Yamabayashi Ryu, Mountain Karate Dojo, in the mountains of western NC.
Photo Manya Krishnaswamy via Unsplash
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