THE LAST STEP GIVEN in the gradual training is the ending of the āsavas.a The Pali word āsava gets variously translated as “outflows,” “influxes,” “effluents,” “cankers,” “taints.” According to the Pali Text Society’s dictionary, āsava literally means “that which flows (out or on to) outflow & influx.” It is a word used by the Jains to indicate that which has to be stopped in order to escape the wheel of birth and death—basically, these influxes are the bad karma that has to be avoided. As he so often did, the Buddha took a popular word from a competing spiritual tradition and tweaked it to
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