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Moha in Practice, Two Prescriptions

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Moha in Practice, Two Prescriptions

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.

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