Randy Wedin is a Sinai and Synapses Fellow. This blog post is adapted from a talk he gave at the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center on October 28, 2025.
Tonight I want to talk about one of the most fundamental and earliest teachings in Buddhism, and I want to show how it can be used to help us understand a very contemporary problem facing us today in America. The title of my talk is “The Three Poisons and Polarization.”
In Buddhism, the three poisons are described as fundamental mental states that are the root causes of suffering. The three words most commonly used to describe the three poisons are greed, hatred, and delusion.
The first poison, greed, is also sometimes defined as attachment, lust, craving, or desire. It refers to the craving for pleasant experiences, possessions, or status. It’s the incessant feeling that when we like something, we need more of it. Greed can lead to actions that harm ourselves and others. It’s at the heart of our materialist, advertising-driven economy.
The second poison, hatred, can also be described as aversion, anger, or aggression. It’s the desire to push away or destroy things that we find unpleasant. It includes a wide range of negative emotions, from mild dislike to intense rage, and is a major source of conflict, pain, and suffering.
The third poison is delusion or ignorance. This has been the hardest one for me to understand. But it’s the most fundamental of the three poisons, because it’s the root from which both greed and hatred arise. Delusion or ignorance is a state of not understanding the true nature of reality. In particular, we are deluded or ignorant when we don’t understand the concepts of impermanence and “non-self.” Buddhism teaches that impermanence and non-self are two of the three marks of existence. The third mark is suffering.
The Three Poisons and the Three Wholesome Roots
Those are the three poisons and they are the root causes of suffering. The goal of Buddhist practice is to purify the mind of these poisons and replace them with their antidotes. The antidotes are sometimes called the Three Wholesome Roots. The antidote to greed is generosity. The antidote to aversion is loving-kindness. And the antidote to delusion is wisdom.
The three poisons are the ancient diagnostics for our individual suffering. But as we look at the world today, we see these same poisons, magnified, leading to massive collective suffering. This brings us to very real problem we’re facing right now in America—the problem of political and social polarization. We’re seeing a societal expression of greed, hatred and delusion.
A recent New York Times poll found that 13% of Americans named political polarization as the nation’s most serious problem, second only to the economy (16%), and a more serious problem than crime, immigration, the state of democracy, inflation, or healthcare.
We’ve seen plenty of evidence of polarization—and the discord and violence that come with it—in just the past few months. Here in our own community, we had the August 27 shooting at Annunciation School and Church. This affected me quite personally, because one of my grandchildren had been a student at that school a few years ago.
Then we had the Charlie Kirk assassination on September 10, which set off a huge debate about free speech and about how should we treat people with different beliefs and opinions.
And we had six weeks of a federal government shutdown that illustrated how political polarization has led to political paralysis.
What Would Buddha Say? (An LLM Simulation)
So, as we confront the reality of this societal suffering—of gridlock, discord, and violence—a question arises: What would the Buddha would say about polarization today? While the term “polarization” doesn’t appear in any of the sutras, a modern tool—artificial intelligence—can offer a unique reflection on this ancient wisdom.
This past summer, I was co-teaching a class here at MZMC on “Zen and Science.” One of the sessions was devoted to “Buddhism and AI.” I wanted to illustrate the capabilities of large language models, also known as chatbots. In particular, I wanted to show how a chatbot could call on its huge database to assemble a response that appeared to be similar to that of a real person.
So I decided to ask my favorite chatbot to respond to a prompt as if it were Buddha. And I just happened to ask it to talk about polarization. Here was the prompt that I gave to Google Gemini:
In the United States today, there is great political polarization. If the Buddha were alive today, what advice would he give? Please give your answer in the form of a Buddhist Sutra in the style of Buddha’s writing in the past. Thank you.
I was very impressed with the response, and I told my class last summer that I could probably use it as the starting point for a dharma talk. So, in fact, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to read some paragraphs from the chatbot’s response and elaborate on them. The full response from the chatbot was 17 paragraphs long, about 1,000 words. [Note: A copy of “Polarization Sutra” is attached to end of this talk.]
So let me start with several paragraphs from the beginning of the response:
You seek wisdom concerning the discord of the present age, the great schism that divides the hearts and minds of the people. Verily, it is a time when the winds of contention blow strong, and the seeds of attachment bear bitter fruit.
Monks, and all who would listen with an open ear, know this: The suffering you witness, the polarization that afflicts the land, arises not from the inherent nature of things, but from the unskillful clinging to views, the delusion of a separate self, and the fires of craving and aversion.
So, right away, this response equates polarization with suffering, and that brings it clearly into the realm of things that are the concern of Buddhism. So, if polarization is causing suffering, then Buddhism has something to offer.
The chatbot goes on to say that this polarization arises from three things: the unskillful clinging to views (clinging to views is a form of delusion, seeing reality as we want to see it, not as it really is); the delusion of a separate self (remember that delusion is one of the three poisons); and the fires of craving and aversion (craving and aversion are synonyms for greed and hatred—two of the three poisons).
Then this sutra, which I call the Polarization Sutra, goes on to look at these causes in more detail and to offer some remedies. In fact, it lays out eight principles that it describes as the path to liberation from the bonds of division. I don’t have to time to go through all eight, but I’ll mention several of them:
Firstly, understand the nature of Views (Ditthi). Just as a man lost in a forest grasps firmly onto a branch, believing it to be the true path, so too do beings cling to their opinions, their beliefs, their political affiliations, convinced of their sole righteousness. Know that all views, however noble they may appear, are but constructs of the mind. When clinging arises, suffering follows. Release the grip of absolute certainty. Hold views lightly, as one holds a fragile flower, knowing it is impermanent and subject to change.
So Gemini is making the point that we tend to cling to and get attached to our views, opinions, beliefs. But those things are just constructs of the mind, and our clinging to these constructs is a form of delusion and can lead to suffering. He advises, “release the grip of certainty. Hold views lightly, as one holds a fragile flower, knowing it is impermanent and subject to change.”
Attachment and Aversion / Greed and Hatred
Let’s look at the second principle in this sutra.
Secondly, observe the arising of Attachment and Aversion [the two poisons of greed and hatred]. When a view is held as ‘mine,’ a sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is born. To ‘us’ belongs all good, and to ‘them’ all error and ill. This is the root of aversion, the desire to push away, to condemn, to destroy that which is not ‘us.’ And with aversion comes anger, hatred, and the perpetuation of strife. Cultivate metta, loving-kindness, for all beings, even those whose views differ from your own. For they, too, seek happiness and freedom from suffering, though their paths may seem obscured.
So here you can see that the Buddha shows how the poisons of attachment and aversion can lead to the “us vs. them” of polarization. And Buddha points out that the antidote of the anger and hatred we feel during polarization is metta, loving-kindness. He recommends that we cultivate loving-kindness for all beings, even those whose views differ from our own. For they, too, seek happiness and freedom from suffering, though their paths may seem obscured.
Those were the first two principles—and I said that this sutra goes on to list a total of eight. Each of them are quite insightful and offer some useful ideas for us to keep in mind.
The sutra shows us what the poisons are and how they cause this societal suffering called polarization. But to understand the mechanism—how we get locked into this “us vs. them” division—I want to turn to a powerful cognitive tool: metaphor. And because I’m a geek, I’m going to use a scientific metaphor and explore the scientific meaning of “polarization.” I think it can provide a fresh perspective on our political predicament.
The Origins of Polarization as a Concept
The word “polarization,” which we’re using now to talk about politics and society, is originally taken from physics and chemistry.
In physics, the polarization of light waves is fundamental, explaining everything from radio signals to how sunglasses reduce glare. Here’s a simplified explanation: As a light wave travels toward you, it oscillates. Imagine standing on a beach and watching a wave approach, with the water oscillating—moving up and down—as the wave moves toward you. An ocean wave approximates a “vertically oscillating wave.” Light waves from the sun, however, oscillate in every direction—vertically, horizontally, and diagonally.
When sunlight strikes a horizontal surface like water or a road, the reflected light that causes glare is horizontally polarized. The polarized lens in your sunglasses—a vertically polarized lens—blocks those horizontal waves, much like a picket fence blocks any object not aligned with its slats. The glare is eliminated, but you can still see the rest of the visual field.
This scientific metaphor aptly describes our political divide. Media editors and social media algorithms act as polarization filters, allowing only certain types of information to pass. A progressive newscast, for example, selectively reinforces a progressive perspective. A social media algorithm keeps feeding users similar news items, political cartoons, or even conspiracy theories to keep them engaged—because in our attention economy, engagement is monetized. The bottom line is that most information we receive is delivered through a filter designed to reinforce our existing orientations.
Filtered perspectives can lead to political gridlock. When one political party only allows one type of policy through its filter and the opposition allows only the opposite, Congress deadlocks, leading to shutdowns and policy paralysis. It’s the same situation that can make a family discussion around the Thanksgiving table so fraught with peril.
You can see how two opposing polarizing filters lead to gridlock by a simple experiment with two pairs of sunglasses. Remember that all the lenses in these sunglasses are vertically polarized. If I look through two of them at the same time, things look pretty much the same, but if I rotate one to 90 degrees, it now becomes a horizontally polarized lens. When I try to look through two lenses—one that is vertically polarized and one that is horizontally polarized—very little light gets through. That’s how you get a government shutdown. You can do this experiment on your own if you have two pairs of sunglasses; most sunglasses have polarized lenses. You can also try it out next time you’re in the grocery story, drug store or gas station, where they have those racks of inexpensive sunglasses.
How Polarization Leads to Individual and Societal Distortion
So I’ve gone on a little tangent with this polarization scientific metaphor, and now I want to bring it back to the three poisons. When I’m wearing sunglasses, the polarized lens is blocking out some of the light rays and I’m not seeing reality as it really is. When I’m reading the newspaper or watching a newscast or reading my social media feed, I’m also seeing a filtered view of the world. And the filter, if I examine it closely, has a flavor of one of the three poisons—greed, hatred or delusion. (Or craving, aversion, and delusion, which are the synonyms I prefer to use.)
So that’s what is happening on a society-wide basis and is leading to our collective suffering and our political and social polarization.
But now, instead of looking at the broad societal perspective, I want to look at this topic from a more individual perspective.
Buddhism teaches us that we all experience the world through filters, including polarization filters. Some are broad filters from the media and social media, but there are also individual filters that are unique to each one of us. Buddhism would say that each one of us individually is still looking at the world through a distorted view—a view that’s distorted by greed, hatred, and delusion. We’re only letting in a partial view of reality. And this distorted view is a cause of our suffering.
How can we use our practice to purify our mind of the three poisons and gain some clarity? That’s the goal of practice: to see the world clearly, experience the world as it really is right here and right now.
As I was thinking about this conclusion to my talk, I realized that I should try practicing what I preach. I should spend some time considering what filters were clouding my vision of reality right now in my life. What filters are most prominent in my life right now? Am I seeing my daily experiences through a filter of craving or aversion or delusion?
Some Practical Examples of the Three Poisons
So I spent some time thinking about a major issue in my current life and examining how I might be affected by the three poisons.
Here’s the major issue:
The past two months I’ve been spending most of my time every day as a caretaker for my 91-year old mother, who has suddenly suffered a number of health challenges and setbacks. She’s made numerous trips to the ER, been in the hospital twice for a total of 17 days, had one surgery, and is scheduled for another surgery. She’s become discouraged, depressed, and anxious. I’ve been the one family member who’s been with her each step of the way.
This caretaking responsibility has come to dominate most of my days, and I’ve cancelled a major vacation and fallen way behind on an important writing project I had been working on. I’ve fallen back into an old family dynamic of being the good son whose role is to fix every problem and to make Mom feel better. I’ve been ignoring some basic self-care tasks like good nutrition, exercise, and spending time with my partner. And it’s leading to caretaker burnout.
So that’s my current issue. When I took a moment during meditation to consider which filter I’ve been using, the first one that became apparent is the filter of delusion or ignorance about the true nature of reality. I’ve been ignoring the reality of impermanence. I’ve been trying to cling to a world where I can make time stand still and people don’t age, don’t get sick, don’t eventually die. I’ve been so focused on the day-to day problems that I’ve been avoiding looking at the big picture of her aging, and I’ve been avoiding tough discussions with her about the realistic outlook of her future.
Several other filters are also at play. The poison of greed or craving or clinging is involved, because I’m attracted to this old familiar role of being the good son, of being the only one who can solve the problems, the only one who can please my Mom. At some level, I’m clinging to that old role.
Another filter at play is aversion. I don’t want to face the reality of aging and death and the grief that comes with it. I want to keep pushing it away.
The Three Treasures
So my practice is helping me spot some areas to work on. And my practice tells me that I can take refuge in the three treasures—in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.
Just last week, I took refuge in the dharma by reading a book by Thich Nhat Hanh. And most importantly, I’ve been reading this book out loud to my Mom, one chapter each day. My hope is that it’s helping both of us to see reality a bit more clearly. And that it’s helping us to move toward a better approach to our current situation.
I also took refuge in the sangha by contacting a sangha member who has expertise in dealing with situations like mine—dealing with aging and dying. And we met for coffee last week, and I felt the support of others and got some good ideas. It’s good to have a supportive sangha.
Now, that’s all probably more than you really needed to know about what’s going on in my life right now, but I wanted you to see an example of how the three poisons can cloud our clear view of reality, just like how polarizing filters can prevent us from seeing a clear view of reality. And I wanted you to see how we can use our practice to see the world a bit more clearly, and how we can take action that reduces the suffering of ourselves and those around us.
Whether we’re looking at a society-wide problem like political polarization or we’re looking at the unique suffering that we each deal with in our own lives, the teaching of the Three Poisons offers both a diagnosis and a remedy. A polarization filter, like the filter you find in the lens of your sunglasses, blocks out part of reality. Our practice is to discover and remove our own personal filters of craving, aversion, and delusion. As we do so, we can see our true situation and our relationships more clearly. And as we do so, we’ll begin to experience the antidotes to the three poisons. We’ll experience generosity, loving-kindness, and wisdom.
Polarization Sutra
Prompt from Randy Wedin to ChatBot (Google’s Gemini Pro 2.5):
In the United States today, there is great political polarization. If the Buddha were alive today, what advice would he give? Please give your answer in the form of a Buddhist Sutra in the style of Buddha’s writing in the past. Thank you.
Response from ChatBot:
You seek wisdom concerning the discord of the present age, the great schism that divides the hearts and minds of the people. Verily, it is a time when the winds of contention blow strong, and the seeds of attachment bear bitter fruit.
If the Tathagata, the Fully Awakened One, were to walk among you now, seeing the strife and the grasping of views, he would speak thus, in the manner of the ancient discourses:
Thus have I heard. On a certain occasion, the Blessed One was abiding in the city of the afflicted, where minds were agitated and words were as sharp arrows. And a disciple, perceiving the great division and the clamor of opposing camps, approached the Buddha, bowed low, and respectfully inquired: “Venerable Sir, in this time of deep cleavage among the people, where minds are set against minds and hearts against hearts, what counsel would the Exalted One offer to those who seek peace and understanding amidst the storm of contention?”
And the Blessed One, with a countenance serene and a voice like the tranquil depths of a clear pool, replied:
“Monks, and all who would listen with an open ear, know this: The suffering you witness, the polarization that afflicts the land, arises not from the inherent nature of things, but from the unskillful clinging to views, the delusion of a separate self, and the fires of craving and aversion.
“Therefore, I say unto you, consider these principles, for they are the path to liberation from the bonds of division:
“Firstly, understand the nature of Views (Ditthi). Just as a man lost in a forest grasps firmly onto a branch, believing it to be the true path, so too do beings cling to their opinions, their beliefs, their political affiliations, convinced of their sole righteousness. Know that all views, however noble they may appear, are but constructs of the mind. When clinging arises, suffering follows. Release the grip of absolute certainty. Hold views lightly, as one holds a fragile flower, knowing it is impermanent and subject to change.
“Secondly, observe the arising of Attachment and Aversion. When a view is held as ‘mine,’ a sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is born. To ‘us’ belongs all good, and to ‘them’ all error and ill. This is the root of aversion, the desire to push away, to condemn, to destroy that which is not ‘us.’ And with aversion comes anger, hatred, and the perpetuation of strife. Cultivate metta, loving-kindness, for all beings, even those whose views differ from your own. For they, too, seek happiness and freedom from suffering, though their paths may seem obscured.
“Thirdly, guard the Gate of Speech (Samma Vaca). See how words, once mere sounds, become weapons when fueled by anger and division. Harsh speech lacerates the heart. Slander poisons the well of trust. Idle chatter, born of prejudice, propagates misunderstanding. Therefore, speak only that which is true, that which is kind, that which is beneficial, and that which fosters harmony. When silence serves peace, let silence prevail.
“Fourthly, cultivate Compassion (Karuna) and Empathetic Joy (Mudita). Behold the suffering of those who are caught in the grip of anger and fear, even on the opposing side. They, too, are driven by their conditioning, by their attachments. See their struggles, and let compassion arise. And when a moment of unity or shared understanding arises, even if small, rejoice in it without reservation.
“Fifthly, seek the Middle Way. Just as the string of a lute must be neither too tight nor too loose to produce harmonious sound, so too must the mind avoid the extremes of rigid dogma and careless indifference. The Middle Way is not a compromise of truth, but a transcendence of divisive extremes. It is the path of wisdom, seeing things as they truly are, free from the distortions of ego and bias.
“Sixthly, understand Impermanence (Anicca). All conditions are impermanent, including the current state of polarization. Views change, alliances shift, leaders rise and fall. When one clings to the present as fixed and eternal, despair or fanaticism may arise. Knowing that all things pass, one can meet the present with greater equanimity and work for positive change without becoming ensnared by outcomes.
“Seventhly, practice Mindfulness (Sati) of the Body, Feelings, Mind, and Dhammas. When the mind is agitated by political discourse, return to the breath. Feel the solidity of the earth beneath your feet. Observe your feelings without judgment. Witness the arising and passing of thoughts without clinging to them. See the Dhamma (truth) in all phenomena, understanding cause and effect. This sustained awareness calms the mind and creates space for wisdom.
“Eighthly, let go of the fruits of action. Engage in wholesome action, speak words of peace, work for justice and understanding, but do so without attachment to the outcome. For the outcome is conditioned by many factors, and clinging to it only leads to disappointment and renewed strife. Your duty is the skillful action itself, rooted in compassion and wisdom.
“Therefore, monks, do not be swayed by the clamor of the many, nor by the fervor of the few. Return to the stillness within. See the roots of suffering within your own mind, and thus you will see the roots of suffering in the world. For as the mind becomes clear, the world itself begins to reflect that clarity.
“This, I say unto you, is the path to transcend the polarization, not by fighting fire with fire, but by extinguishing the flames of craving, aversion, and delusion within the heart. Follow this path, and the peace you seek will manifest, first within yourselves, and then, like ripples in a calm pond, it will spread to the world around you.”
Thus spoke the Blessed One, and the disciples, hearing his words, were filled with joy, and they resolved to walk the path he had illuminated.
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