Moha (Delusion)

Moha names the same failure in both traditions that use it, a basic misperception of how things actually are, but the two build different structures on top of that shared diagnosis. In Buddhism it is the third of the three root kleshas alongside raga and dvesha, and the Abhidharma tradition treats it as the deepest of the three because craving and aversion are read as consequences of it: a mind that did not misperceive impermanent, interdependent things as solid and separate would have nothing stable to crave or resent. The early suttas describe it as the root darkness from which the other two grow, which is why liberating insight, prajna, is aimed at moha specifically rather than at craving or anger directly. Hindu ethical literature places moha instead among the arishadvarga, the six enemies of the self alongside kama, krodha, lobha, mada and matsarya, a list built less around a single root cause than around six obstacles a householder or renunciant must each master in turn.

The Bhagavad Gita gives moha its most famous scene, Arjuna overcome by grief and confusion on the battlefield at Kurukshetra, unable to distinguish his duty from his attachment until Krishna's teaching in the Gita restores his discernment, viveka, the term Vedanta treats as moha's direct opposite. Two traditions, one word, two different pictures of what surrounds it.

Because the two traditions diagnose moha within different structures, they prescribe different remedies, and the contrast is instructive precisely because the underlying word is identical. Buddhist practice aims at moha through insight meditation, vipassana, cultivating direct experiential recognition of impermanence, suffering and non-self until the misperception that sustains craving and aversion loses its grip; the Visuddhimagga treats wisdom, panna, as the specific antidote to delusion in the same way it treats loving kindness as the antidote to hatred, a targeted remedy rather than a general moral improvement. Hindu traditions more often reach for jnana yoga, the path of discriminative knowledge, or bhakti, devotional surrender, depending on the school: Advaita Vedanta frames moha as the misidentification of the self with the body and mind, dispelled by sustained philosophical discrimination between the changing and the changeless, viveka, while devotional traditions treat surrender to a personal deity as what cuts through confusion where argument alone cannot.

The History of Dharmasastra reads moha's presence in the arishadvarga as primarily an ethical and social danger, the confusion that leads a person to neglect duty, dharma, appropriate to their station, a more this worldly framing than the Buddhist concern with the roots of continued rebirth. Neither tradition treats the word as fully translated by the other's remedy, which is part of why the row here carries both rather than forcing a single doctrinal home.