Upādāna

Buddhist concept referring to "attachment, clinging, grasping"

Upādāna is a Sanskrit and Pali word that means "fuel, material cause, substrate that is the source and means for keeping an active process energized". It is also an important Buddhist concept referring to "attachment, clinging, grasping". It is considered to be the result of taṇhā (craving), and is part of the dukkha (dissatisfaction, suffering, pain) doctrine in Buddhism.

Upādāna is the Sanskrit and Pāli word for "clinging", "attachment" or "grasping", although the literal meaning is "fuel". Upādāna and taṇhā (Skt. tṛṣṇā) are seen as the two primary causes of dukkha ('suffering', unease, "standing unstable"). The cessation of clinging is nirvana, the coming to rest of the grasping mind.

Professor Richard F. Gombrich has pointed out in several publications, and in his recent Numata Visiting Professor Lectures at the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), that the literal meaning of upādāna is "fuel". He uses this to link the term to the Buddha's use of fire as a metaphor. In the so called Fire Sermon (Āditta pariyāya) (Vin I, 34 5; SN 35.28) the Buddha tells the bhikkhus that everything is on fire. By everything he tells them he means the five senses plus the mind, their objects, and the operations and feelings they give rise to — i. e. everything means the totality of experience. All these are burning with the fires of greed, hatred and delusion. In the nidana chain, then, craving creates fuel for continued burning or becoming (bhava). The mind like fire, seeks out more fuel to sustain it, in the case of the mind this is sense experience, hence the emphasis the Buddha places on "guarding the gates of the senses". By not being caught up in the senses (appamāda) we can be liberated from greed, hatred and delusion. This liberation is also expressed using the fire metaphor when it is termed nibbāna (Sanskrit: Nirvāṇa) which means to "go out", or literally to "blow out the flames of defilement". (Regarding the word Nirvāṇa, the verb vā is intransitive so no agent is required.) Probably by the time the canon was written down (1st Century BCE), and certainly when Buddhaghosa was writing his commentaries (4th Century CE) the sense of the metaphor appears to have been lost, and upādāna comes to mean simply "clinging" as above. By the time of the Mahayana the term fire was dropped altogether and greed, hatred and delusion are known as the "three poisons".

The term Upādāna appears in the sense of "material cause" in ancient Vedic and medieval Hindu texts. For medieval era Vaishnavism scholar Ramanuja, the metaphysical Hindu concept of Brahman (as Vishnu) is the upadana karana (material cause) of the universe. However, other Hindu traditions such as the Advaita Vedanta disagree and assert alternate theories on the nature of metaphysical Brahman and the universe while using the term upadana in the sense of "substrate, fuel". More generally, the realist Hindu philosophies such as Samkhya and Nyaya have asserted that Brahman is the Upādāna of the phenomenal world. The philosophies within the Buddhist schools have denied Brahman, asserted impermanence and that the notion of anything real is untenable from a metaphysical sense.