Isaiah 5:13 Meaning Therefore My People Go Into Captivity

Avijjā: Not knowing Avijjā is the blindness sitting under every other trouble. Lack of knowledge here means something plainer than missing facts: a people who can name every wine on the table cannot see where the road under their feet is going. They walk into captivity one comfortable season at a time, with nobody looking up the road.

Vipāka: Ripening Vipāka is the fruit an action bears once its season comes. "Therefore" is the hinge of the whole line: famine and thirst are the harvest of those long mornings spent running after strong drink. A vineyard gives back what was planted in it, and this one was tended for pleasure alone.

Saṃsāra: Wandering on Saṃsāra is the going on from one condition to the next with no arrival. Captivity is a march, a whole people driven off their own soil and kept moving by a power they did not choose. Craving and blindness supply that same motion, uprooting a settled life and setting it walking again, land after land.

Ādīnava: The drawback inside pleasure Ādīnava is the cost folded into whatever gratifies. Honorable men famished is the sharp turn: those with the fullest tables are the first whose ribs show, having staked their standing on what one bad harvest can take away. The feast held that hunger inside it the whole time.

Taṇhā: Thirst Taṇhā is thirst, and the word means just that. Multitudes who spent their evenings with wine and harps end with dry mouths, because drinking that way works like drinking sea water: every cup leaves you needing the next. Parched is where the road ends whether the wine runs out or not, so the exile only makes visible a condition that was already there.