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Verse 33
It is a corollary to this that the giving up of desires which produce the condition of weakness in the soul must necessarily bring about its liberation from the thraldom of matter, also called the bondage of karma, on account of karmas being the primary causes of the material influx and bandha.
As regards the quality of bandha, the rule appears to be that the stronger the desire the deeper the penetration of the particles of matter and the closer the union between them and the soul, so the worst forms of bondage result from the worst types of desires. Now, desire principally assumes four different intensities and appears as greed, deceit, pride and anger. Greed, it will be seen, is but another word for desire, to gratify which one resorts to deceit; and pride arises from the possession of what is desirable, while anger blazes up in consequence of being foiled in an endeavour to secure an object of desire, or from wounded pride. These four kinds of passions, thus, are the main causes of bondage, so that the strength and thickness', and, consequently, the duration of the karmic chains also actually depend on the degree of their intensity. Besides these powerful passions, desire also takes the form of joking, zest, boredom, grief, fear and disgust, as well as of the three kinds of sex-passion peculiar to the three sexes, the male, the female and the neuter. These are called the nine no-kaṣāyas, and are all potent causes of bondage.
So much for the duration and strength, i.e., malignity or virulence of the forces of karma. As regards the quantity of matter which enters into union with the soul, that obviously depends on the actions performed by the individual, since material influx only follows upon the three kinds of activities, mental, physical and lingual or vocal. So far as the different kinds of karmas are concerned, they all clearly result from the material influx, because they are, in their real nature, only so many different kinds of forces, which, as already observed,
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