Vices

Asmita

Dharmic Vices

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Asmita." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/vices/asmita.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Asmita. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/vices/asmita

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-asmita,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {Asmita},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/vices/asmita},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Asmita is the second of Patanjali's five kleshas in the Yoga Sutra, the afflicted identification of pure awareness, purusha, with the instrument through which it sees, chiefly the intellect, buddhi. Yoga Sutra 2.6 states it directly: asmita is when the power of seeing and the power of the instrument of seeing appear as if they were one and the same. Where avidya is the root confusion the other four kleshas grow from, asmita is that confusion's first concrete form, a bounded sense of I built from what is actually a borrowed instrument rather than the seer itself.

Facts

Origins

Place of Origin

India, in the tradition traditionally associated with Patanjali; no more specific locale is recorded for the text's composition. 1

Origin of the Name

Sanskrit asmita, from asmi, I am, plus the abstract suffix ta, literally I-am-ness or egoism; related to but kept distinct in Patanjali's own vocabulary from ahamkara, the more general term for ego or self-sense used elsewhere in Indian philosophy. 1

Attributed Author / Compiler

Defined at Yoga Sutra 2.6 as the second of the five kleshas Patanjali names at 2.3, and elaborated across the classical commentarial tradition on the text, including Vyasa's Yogabhashya. 1

Language

Sanskrit 1

Status

Status Within the Tradition

Standard teaching, not formally defined 1

Doctrinal Status Detail

The second of Patanjali's five kleshas, avidya, asmita, raga, dvesha and abhinivesha, named as a set at Yoga Sutra 2.3; classical commentary treats it as the pivot point where the root ignorance of avidya first crystallizes into the personal sense of a separate self, from which raga, dvesha and abhinivesha are then said to follow in turn. 1

Attestation

Meaning in the Attesting Source

The affliction of mistaking pure awareness for the intellect that merely serves it, the felt sense of being a bounded I built from a borrowed instrument, the second of Patanjali's five kleshas and the point at which root ignorance becomes personal. 1

Disputed

Origin Period

Named within the Yoga Sutra, a text whose own compilation and dating remain unsettled among scholars: traditional accounts place Patanjali well before the Common Era, while modern philological scholarship has proposed dates ranging from roughly the second century BCE to as late as the fourth or fifth century CE, with the text possibly compiled from older material rather than composed at a single sitting. 1

Cross-Tradition Connections