Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c10.s3.20

c10.s3.20

Grasping is thus an aspect of rather than distinct from thirst;¹ it is hyper-thirst, demanding never to leave the pleasure possessed and asking more. It is also thirst for existence; thirst generates the false idea of a self, and hence we have a fourfold division of grasping into the contaminations (*kleça*) of attachment to the pleasures of sense, to heretical views, to moral and ascetic practices regarded as adequate to salvation, and to the belief in the self; the first is pure thirst, the others ignorance. But the term denotes also the object of attachment or grasping; thus thirst is the Upādāna when consciousness passes to a new existence, and in this sense we have the doctrine that the five aggregates constituting the individual are the objects grasped. Akin is the idea that the Upādāna serves as support in the sense of aliment, in the shape of the assimilation of food for the body and of psychic matter for the spirit; thus grasping is treated as taking upon oneself the five aggregates, material and psychic, and making them one's own by assimilation. Some such idea seems to explain the term aggregates of grasping (upādāna-kkhandha) which often replaces the aggregates in the Canon.¹