The Three Poisons: Greed, Hatred and Delusion

By Tim Yu · Updated 2026-06-04

The three poisons — greed, hatred, and delusion — are, in Buddhism, the root causes of all suffering. Every harmful action springs from one of them: grasping toward what we want (greed), striking out at what we don’t (hatred), and the confusion that lies beneath both (delusion). The whole Buddhist path is, in a sense, the long work of uprooting these three.

The short answer

The three poisons are also called the three “unwholesome roots” (akusala-mūla) or the three “fires.” They are greed (lobha), hatred (dosa), and delusion (moha). The Mūla Sutta (AN 3.69) names them plainly: “Greed is a root of what is unskillful, aversion is a root of what is unskillful, delusion is a root of what is unskillful” (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu). Whatever harmful thing a person does traces back to one of these three. They are the deep machinery beneath craving — the cause of suffering named in the Four Noble Truths — and their extinction is exactly what nirvana means. The encouraging news, which we will come to, is that each has a precise antidote, and the path is built to apply them. (Unfamiliar terms are in the glossary.)

In more depth

Why “poisons,” “fires,” and “roots”

The three carry three telling names. They are poisons because they sicken the mind and distort everything it touches. They are fires because they burn — the Dhammapada warns that “there is no fire like lust; there is no grip like hatred; there is no net like delusion; there is no river like craving” (verse 251, trans. Acharya Buddharakkhita). And they are unwholesome roots because every unskilful act, word, and thought grows from them, the way a plant grows from what is underground. This is why “nirvana” — which literally means a “blowing out” — is defined as their going-out. Whatever you call them, the three poisons are the drivers beneath our reactive life. Take them one at a time.

1. Greed (lobha)

Greed is the mind reaching out — wanting, grasping, craving, clinging to whatever it finds pleasant and trying to seize and keep it. It runs the whole range from the gross to the subtle: from addiction and the hunger for wealth, status, and pleasure, to the quiet clinging to comfort, to being right, to a pleasant mood, even to spiritual attainments. Its defining trait is that it is never satisfied — the more it is fed, the larger it grows, which is why the Dhammapada calls craving a river, always flowing and never full. The antidote is non-greed, which flowers as generosity (dāna), contentment, and the art of letting go — learning to enjoy and to love without grasping.

2. Hatred (dosa)

Hatred is the mirror image of greed: the mind pushing away. It is aversion in all its forms — anger, ill-will, hostility, resentment, irritation, fear, and even self-hatred — the impulse to reject, resist, and strike at whatever it finds unpleasant. Where greed clutches, hatred repels; together they are the two basic moves of a reactive mind. And hatred has a peculiar cruelty: it burns the one who holds it before it ever reaches its target. Its antidote is non-hatred, cultivated as loving-kindness (mettā), compassion, patience, and forgiveness — the deliberate warming of the heart toward what it would rather reject. (Our guides to loving-kindness meditation and dealing with anger put this to work.)

3. Delusion (moha)

Delusion is the deepest and most important of the three, because it powers the other two. It is the basic confusion or ignorance (avijjā) about how things actually are — not seeing impermanence, not seeing not-self, not seeing how suffering really works. We grasp and we hate precisely because we are deluded: we take the impermanent to be lasting, the not-self to be “me and mine,” and the unsatisfactory to be a reliable source of happiness. Correct the misperception and the grasping and aversion lose their reason to exist. This is why delusion is the root of the roots — and why its antidote is non-delusion, which is wisdom (paññā): the clear, direct seeing trained by insight meditation and the three marks of existence.

How the three work together

The poisons are not three separate faults but a single, self-reinforcing system. Delusion sits at the bottom; from it, greed and hatred branch out. The “self” we are so busy defending is itself a product of delusion, and that imagined self then generates endless greed (for whatever seems to serve it) and endless hatred (toward whatever seems to threaten it). The famous Tibetan “Wheel of Life” pictures this exactly: at the very hub of the wheel, traditionally, are three animals — a cock for greed, a snake for hatred, and a pig for delusion — chasing and biting one another in an endless circle, and it is their turning that drives the whole round of saṃsāra. The image is precise: the three keep each other going, and the wheel keeps turning, until something interrupts them.

The antidotes: three wholesome roots

That “something” is their opposite. The same Mūla Sutta that names the poisons names their cure in the very next breath: “Lack of greed is a root of what is skillful, lack of aversion is a root of what is skillful, lack of delusion is a root of what is skillful” (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu). These three wholesome roots are not abstractions; they grow into the warmest things in a human life:

• Non-greed → generosity, simplicity, and contentment.
• Non-hatred → loving-kindness, compassion, and patience.
• Non-delusion → wisdom and clear seeing.

And the entire Noble Eightfold Path is the systematic cultivation of these against their opposites: ethical conduct restrains the poisons from breaking out into harmful action, meditation calms the mind enough to watch them honestly, and wisdom slowly pulls them up by the root.

Uprooting the poisons: what the path is for

This is why the three poisons are not merely a list of vices but a map of the entire spiritual project. Because they are the root of suffering and the fuel of karma and rebirth, the goal of Buddhism is precisely their extinction — nothing more exotic, and nothing less complete. The Nibbānapañhā Sutta (SN 38.1) says it with great economy: “the ending of greed, hate, and delusion is called extinguishment” (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato). Nirvana, in other words, is not a place you travel to but the state of a mind from which these three fires have simply gone out. Seen this way, every ordinary act of practice has a clear target: each gift weakens greed, each kindness weakens hatred, and each moment of clear seeing weakens delusion. The freedom the Buddha pointed to is whatever remains when all three are finally spent.