In the middle of the Bhagavad Gītā, between two armies, Arjuna asks a question that has nothing to do with the battlefield and everything to do with the one inside him. By what force, he asks Kṛṣṇa, is a man driven to do harm even when he does not want to — as though dragged to it against his own will? (Gītā 3.36). It is the most honest question in the book, because every one of us has asked it in the small hours: why did I do that, when I knew better? Kṛṣṇa’s answer is unflinching. It is desire; it is anger, born of the restless quality of nature — all-devouring, deeply harmful. Know this, he says, to be the enemy here (Gītā 3.37). Not an enemy across the field. The enemy here, inside the chest.

The tradition gathered that enemy into a family of six and gave it a name: ariṣaḍvarga, the six adversaries, the six thieves that rob a human being of their own peace. They are kāma (craving), krodha (anger), lobha (greed), moha (delusion), mada (pride), and mātsarya (envy). The Gītā singles out the first three as the widest gates — “three gates of this hell, destructive of the self: lust, anger, and greed” (Gītā 16.21) — but the tradition watched all six, because it saw that they are not six separate diseases. They are six branches of a single root.

The root is two small words

That root is the fixation the Advaita teachers named with devastating economy: ahaṃkāra and mamakāra — the obsession with “I” and the obsession with “mine.” Watch how cleanly every enemy unfolds from it. Wanting what is not mine is craving. The wanted thing not coming to me becomes anger. The thing arriving, and the fear of losing it, hardens into greed. The feeling that I cannot live without it is delusion. The sense that only I have it swells into pride. The sense that others have it and I do not curdles into envy. Six enemies, one mistake, endlessly repeated: the belief that I am this small bounded body-mind, and that the world divides into mine and not-mine.

The text traditionally attributed to Śaṅkara, the Viveka Cūḍāmaṇi, calls this ego an enemy to be cut down with the sword of discriminative knowing — and warns that even once uprooted, if it is merely thought about for a while, it sprouts a hundred mental modes again. This is why the six are called enemies and not merely faults. A fault you correct once. An enemy returns.

The six, and where the body holds them

Seen up close, each has its own flavour, and the tradition described them with a clinician’s precision:

• Lobha (greed): the determination that no one else should partake of even a fraction of what one has — that one’s possessions should not be diminished by use, even in another’s distress.
• Kāma (desire): craving for riches, property, honour, status, fame — attachment to all the things of the sensory world.
• Krodha (anger): the yearning to harm, to cause ruin to those who stand in the way.
• Mātsarya (envy): finding it intolerable that others are as happy as oneself; the misery that rises at another’s good fortune.
• Moha (delusion): seeing life incorrectly — unable to see reality, living in illusion; the delusion that some are nearer to us than others, and the exertion to please them at the cost of the whole.
• Mada / ahaṃkāra (pride): the false swelling that comes from believing one has more — more learning, strength, riches, birth, beauty, fame — than others; the self-centredness that moves through the world without reverence for elders or care for others’ feelings.

One traditional teaching maps the six onto the body’s centres, so that the work of clearing them becomes a work of ascending attention: lobha at the root (mūlādhāra), kāma at the sacral centre (svādhiṣṭhāna), krodha at the navel-fire (maṇipūra), mātsarya at the heart (anāhata), moha at the throat (viśuddha), and mada at the brow (ājñā). Mappings like this vary between lineages, and are best held lightly — not as anatomy but as a map of where, in the felt body, each grip tends to clench.

Lift your eyes from the single chest to the whole living world and you will see the same six enemies wearing planetary size. Lobha is the greed that strips a forest that took ten thousand years to grow. Moha is the delusion that we are separate from the river we poison, that its death is not our death. Mada is the pride of a species that mistook dominion for ownership. And every one of them grows from the identical root that grows the inner enemies: the fiction of “I” and “mine,” the severing of the self from the whole it belongs to. This is why the ancient inner work and the urgent outer work are one work: to dissolve the “mine” that lets a man hoard against his neighbour is the very same act as dissolving the “mine” that lets a species hoard against the Earth.

And here the tradition turns, unexpectedly, tender. When the grip of “I and mine” is loosened, the source teaching says, we do not become cold or empty. We become mothers to this world — protective, nourishing, giving shelter to what is good and vulnerable in it. The conquest of the six enemies is not a hardening. It is the melting of the wall that kept our care penned inside one small self, so that it can finally spill out to where it was always meant to reach.

References

1. Bhagavad Gītā 3.36–37 (Arjuna’s question and Kṛṣṇa’s naming of kāma and krodha as “the enemy here”) and 16.21 (the three gates of hell — lust, anger, greed). See Eknath Easwaran’s translation (Nilgiri Press, 1985) or Winthrop Sargeant’s interlinear edition (SUNY Press, 1984).
2. Viveka Cūḍāmaṇi (“The Crest-Jewel of Discrimination”), traditionally attributed to Ādi Śaṅkarācārya (the attribution is debated by modern scholarship, but the text stands squarely in the Advaita lineage) — on ahaṃkāra/mamakāra as the root to be cut by discriminative knowing.
3. Patañjali, Yoga Sūtras II.3 — the five afflictions (kleśa): ignorance, I-am-ness, attraction, aversion, and clinging-to-life — the Rāja-yoga map of the same inner enemies, rooted likewise in asmitā, the sense of “I.”