Most lists of what gets in the way of a spiritual life are lists of appetites. Food, sex, money, sloth, distraction. You know the genre.
This one has four classes with four subdivisions each, and then a second sort by origin — and the fourth origin is devotional practice itself.
Not the failure of practice. Not laziness about practice. Obstructions produced by practice, arising from doing it. The book names them: desires for gain, for worship, for prestige, arising from devotion performed with desire attached.1
That's the entry that makes this taxonomy worth a page. A system that lists its own practice as a source of the thing the practice removes is doing something most diagnostic schemes never do.
Anartha means, roughly, that which is worthless or against your purpose. Four classes, each in four parts.2
Illusion about identity — svarūpa-bhrama. Four kinds: about your own spiritual identity; about the identity of the Absolute; about practice and its goal; and about the Lord's external energy. Notice the third — illusion about what practice is and what it's for is filed as an obstruction in its own right, not as a mistake to be corrected before you start.
Thirst for the unreal — asat-tṛṣṇā. Desires for enjoyment here; for enjoyment in the heavens; for mystic perfections and the nine jewels of the treasure-god; and for liberation. The desire for liberation is filed with the desire for money and the desire for magic powers.
Offence — aparādha. Against Kṛṣṇa; against his name; against his deity form; and against living beings, who are described as infinitesimal particles of spirit belonging to him. Four targets, and the fourth is everyone.
Weakness of heart — hṛdaya-daurbalya. Attachment to useless things; deceitful behaviour; envy; and the desire for one's own fame and prestige.
Sixteen items. Read the list and notice how few are appetites. Most are errors, offences, or forms of self-regard — and two of them (liberation, prestige) are things a religious life supplies more reliably than an ordinary one.
The fourth offence is worth stopping on, because of how it's phrased. Not offences against people. Offences against living beings who are infinitesimal particles of spirit belonging to the Lord — tadīya-cit-kaṇa-jīvas.
The construction does something specific. It routes ordinary cruelty through ownership: harming someone is an offence because of whose they are. Which is a weaker foundation for ethics than harming-is-wrong, and a considerably stronger one for a devotee, because it puts the shopkeeper you were short with in the same category as the deity form you were careless in front of. Both are his.
And it explains a claim that turns up two Texts later and would otherwise look disproportionate — that the residue of an offence against an advanced devotee can hold a practitioner short of the summit even after the highest emotion has already manifested. If the offence-class is defined by ownership rather than by harm, then an offence against one of his own is a direct injury to him, and no amount of intensity settles it because the injured party is not the one you were rude to.
Then a second cut, across the same territory, by provenance.3
From past bad action — which turns out to be the five classical afflictions: ignorance, false ego, attachment, aversion, and absorption in sinful activity.
From past good action — the various kinds of material enjoyment arising from the pious deeds of a previous birth. Your obstructions include the pleasant circumstances you earned.
From offence — suffering arising from offences against the name and the rest.
From devotion — desires for gain, worship and prestige, arising from devotion performed with motive attached.
Two of these four are startling and they're the second and the fourth. Ordinary religious diagnostics have one bucket: your sins are the problem. This has four, and half of them are your merits and your practice.
The second origin deserves its own look, because it's easy to skim as a technicality.
Merit from a previous life produces enjoyment in this one. Enjoyment is enjoyable. And enjoyment is anartha — it obstructs.
So the person who arrives comfortable, well-liked, healthy and unbothered is not neutrally placed. They are carrying, in the form of a pleasant life, the ripened fruit of past good conduct, which functions here as an impediment. Nothing they did was wrong. The reward is the obstacle.
This has a consequence the book doesn't state. It means the taxonomy is not a moral ranking. You cannot read someone's position from their circumstances in either direction — hardship isn't evidence of past sin in any useful sense, and ease isn't evidence of favour. Both are anartha, from opposite origins, and the practitioner's job with respect to both is the same.
The fourth origin is the sharpest thing in Text 3 and I want to be exact about what it says.
The obstructions are lābha, pūjā, pratiṣṭhā — gain, worship, prestige — arising from the performance of sakāma-bhakti, devotion with desire, also called conditional devotion.
So the mechanism is: you practise; the practice has desire mixed into it; and the practice generates appetites for gain, for being worshipped, and for standing. Not as a side effect of doing it badly. As the specified output of doing it with motive attached.
And note that the very same three items appear in the sixteen — prestige under weakness of heart, and gain and worship implicit in the thirst for the unreal. They're listed twice: once as things you have, once as things your practice makes. The taxonomy is deliberately redundant at exactly the point where the practitioner is most likely to think themselves exempt.
You've been practising four years. You teach a small group now. Someone new asks you a question and you answer it well, and you notice — not the answer, the noticing — that you enjoyed being asked.
That is item four of origin four, exactly. Not a lapse in your practice. A product of it. The taxonomy predicted this the moment you had something to be asked about.
Now the second scene, the one that stings more. You're clear-eyed about ambition, you've done real work on it, and you find yourself thinking that your practice is more serious than the practice of people who make a lot of noise about theirs.
Mātsarya — envy — under weakness of heart, arriving in the form of a comparison you experience as discernment.
And the third, which most people never check. Your life is comfortable. You have enough. Under this scheme that comfort is sukṛti-uttha anartha — obstruction from merit — and the correct response is not gratitude and not guilt. It's the same response as to any other obstruction on the list, which is that it has to go, and going will not feel like moral improvement. It will feel like loss of something you earned.
The single most revealing placement in the taxonomy is mokṣa sitting in the thirst-for-the-unreal class, fourth item, after the eight mystic perfections and the treasure-god's nine jewels.
Think about what that list is. It's a list of prizes. Worldly enjoyment, heavenly enjoyment, magic powers, legendary wealth — and liberation.
Every other Indian path in this vault treats liberation as the terminus, the thing all the others are renounced for. Here it is renounced with them, and filed in the same class, in a list whose organising principle is that these are things a person wants for themselves.
That is not a passing swipe. It's a claim about the structure of the desire: wanting liberation is wanting an outcome for yourself, and wanting an outcome for yourself is what the class collects. Which means the objection isn't that liberation is a low prize. It's that it's a prize at all, and the grammar of prize-seeking is the obstruction.
And that in turn tells you why the fourth origin can exist. If prize-seeking is the underlying fault, then devotion performed as a means to a prize will generate more prize-appetites, because the practice is being run by the very structure it was supposed to dismantle. The four origins aren't four unrelated sources. They're one fault showing up in four places — and the practice is the fourth place because a practice can be pointed at a prize as easily as anything else.
One structural note, because a sixteen-plus-four list invites use as a checklist and I don't think that's its job.
The book gives the whole thing in a boxed comment, in Text 3, as an elaboration on the fourth rung of the nine-stage ladder — and then says the practitioner should consult a different book entirely, Viśvanātha's Mādhurya-kādambinī, for a detailed description of obstructions and the method of getting free of them.4
So this is an index, not a manual. Its function is to establish the shape of the problem — four classes, four origins, redundant at the dangerous points — and hand you off.
And the one operational instruction it does give is blunt: one should endeavour to uproot all these anarthas, otherwise niṣṭhā will not develop. Steadiness is gated on this work. Which places the taxonomy precisely: it is the content of rung four, and rung four is what stands between taking up practice and being able to keep it.
Strongest support. The structure is not a loose list — it is two orthogonal cuts across the same territory, four-by-four and then four-by-origin, with deliberate overlap at gain, worship and prestige. That redundancy is the mark of a scheme built by someone who watched practitioners fail rather than compiled from precedent.
The tension the book does not close. The desire for liberation is filed as an obstruction, and the same book's account of śānta-rasa describes practitioners who take up devotion as a means to liberation and are counted as devotees at the lowest rung. So the taxonomy's second class rules out what the rasa scheme's first rung admits, and neither passage refers to the other.
A second tension. Obstruction from merit and obstruction from offence are handled identically — both must be uprooted, no difference of method is offered. That's coherent, and it leaves the tradition without any account of why one should behave well, given that the fruits of behaving well are themselves impediments. The gap is real and the book shows no sign of noticing it.
Open question. If devotion with motive attached generates prestige-appetite, and the beginner necessarily has motives, is the fourth origin unavoidable for everyone at the start? The text implies yes and never says it, which would mean every practitioner's early practice is manufacturing the obstructions their later practice has to clear.
The vault's existing list of what helps and harms devotion, from the Bryant material, reads as practical advice — six things that accelerate, six that kill, the sort of list you could pin up. It's addressed to a person choosing behaviours.
This taxonomy isn't addressed to behaviour at all. Nothing in the sixteen is an action you could stop doing this afternoon. They are illusions, thirsts, offences and weaknesses — states, not choices — and the second cut sorts them by causal history rather than by anything you can currently affect.
Which changes the reader's position completely. One list invites you to manage your practice. The other tells you what you are carrying and where it came from, and then sends you to another book. The first is usable and shallow; the second is unusable and structural, and the tradition kept both without ranking them.
A diagnostic scheme that names its own intervention as a source of the pathology. Set this against Malignant vs Generative Innocence. That page's work is to separate two conditions that present identically, where one is a genuine openness and the other a defensive posture wearing openness as a costume — and the reason the distinction matters is that the defensive version is produced by the very self-protective work that was supposed to help.
The fourth origin here is that structure applied to a whole practice rather than to a single trait. Devotion performed with motive attached yields gain-hunger, worship-hunger and prestige-hunger, and those look from outside — and often from inside — like the fruits of successful practice. Recognition, a following, a reputation for depth: the outputs of the pathology and the outputs of the cure are the same objects.
What the pair produces that neither gives alone: any system that intervenes on the self will generate a counterfeit of its own success, and the counterfeit will be built out of the intervention's real byproducts. That's why neither tradition can settle the question by looking at outcomes. Both are forced to ask about provenance instead — where did this come from, what was it aiming at — which is the same move this book makes when it sorts twenty grades of ecstatic symptom by the class of person displaying them. And it yields a working rule for anyone running a practice on themselves: the more effective the practice, the more urgently it needs a provenance test rather than an outcome test, because success and its counterfeit converge on identical evidence precisely at the point where the practice starts working.
Sharpest implication. Your merits and your practice are two of the four sources of obstruction. Which means half the diagnostic scheme is aimed at things you did right — and the correct response to obstruction-from-merit is neither gratitude nor guilt, but the same uprooting applied to everything else on the list. Expect that to feel like losing something you earned.
Generative questions.
sakāma-bhakti described from the other side, as a grade of devotion rather than a source of obstruction