The Characteristic of Dosa - Dosa is conditioned by lobha

Dosa is conditioned by lobha: we do not want to lose what is dear to us and when this actually happens we are sad. Sadness is dosa, it is akusala. If we do not know things as they are, we believe that people and things last. However, people and things are only phenomena which arise and then fall away immediately. The next moment they have changed already. If we can see things as they are we will be less overwhelmed by sadness. It makes no sense to be sad about what has happened already.

 

In the 'Psalms of the Sisters' (Therīgāthā, 33) we read that the king's wife

Ubbirī mourned the loss of her daughter Jīvā. Every day she went to the

cemetery. She met the Buddha who told her that in that cemetery about

eighty-four thousand of her daughters (in past lives) had been burnt.  The

Buddha said to her:

 

'O, Ubbirī, who wails in the wood Crying,

O  Jīvā! O my daughter dear!

Come to yourself!

See, in this burying-ground

Are burnt full many a thousand daughters dear,

And all of them were named like unto her.

Now which of all those Jīvās do you mourn?'

 

After Ubbirī pondered over the Dhamma thus taught by the Buddha she

developed insight and saw things as they really are; she even attained

arahatship.