Lobha (Greed)

Lobha stands third among the arishadvarga, and classical Hindu ethical literature treats it as artha's characteristic corruption in the way kama is desire's: artha, the legitimate pursuit of material prosperity and one of the four purusharthas, becomes lobha when the accumulation of wealth stops serving dharma and the wellbeing of dependants and instead becomes an end pursued for its own sake, without limit.

The Mahabharata gives lobha one of its most memorable illustrations in the game of dice at Hastinapura, where Duryodhana's greed for the Pandavas' kingdom, egged on by his uncle Shakuni, drives a sequence of escalating wagers that costs the Kaurava line everything the greed was meant to secure, a narrative the tradition reads as demonstrating that lobha, left unchecked, characteristically destroys the very prosperity it was grasping toward. Manusmriti pairs lobha with krodha as the two faults most dangerous in a person holding power over others, on the reasoning that a greedy ruler taxes and extracts beyond what dharma permits, converting a personal vice into a public injustice that falls on subjects who have no part in the ruler's own moral failing, which is part of why classical treatises on kingship, artha shastra literature included, spend considerable attention on restraining a sovereign's lobha specifically.

Jain texts single lobha out among the four kashayas as the passion practitioners find hardest to eliminate completely, on the grounds that krodha, mana and maya each require some object or occasion to provoke them, while lobha can attach itself to almost anything, including, commentators note pointedly, to the very practice of asceticism meant to overcome it, as when a monk becomes attached to his own reputation for detachment or to the karma bound possessions he has renounced fewer of than he believes.

The Tattvartha Sutra's four degree grading applies to lobha as it does to the other kashayas, but Jain commentarial literature treats even its mildest recorded degree as more persistent than the equivalent mild degree of anger or pride, since a flash of anger dissipates once its occasion passes while a subtle craving can simply relocate onto a new object without ever fully extinguishing.

Padmanabh Jaini notes that this is precisely why aparigraha, non possession, occupies its place as one of the five mahavratas, the great vows, in its own right rather than being folded into a general instruction to avoid the four kashayas: lobha's specific tenacity is judged to need a dedicated positive vow, continuous non attachment practised as a discipline, rather than the negative restraint that suffices for passions more easily triggered and more easily released once the triggering occasion is past.