What is "defilement"

Usage examples of "defilement".

The phobia of defilement allows the group to condone actions such as ghettoization, purging, and killing, which assure the integrity of the boundaries between pure and impure.

She is fed from crystal fountains unfailing, and guarded from defilement by Ulmo, Lord of Waters, who wrought her beauty in ancient days.

On hands and knees, she retraced the few feet to the scene of her defilement and, fighting to hold down the goatmilk, set her bruised and clumsy hands to unfolding the damp, sticky bundle of her clothing.

The trefoil symbol the sibyls wore was a warning against defilement, against trepass on sacred ground.

Nagarjuna's Mahayana (Madhyamika) revolution, on the other hand, was Non-dual (advaya) to the core, seeing that nirvana and samsara are "not two," which also gave rise to tantric or Vajrayana Buddhism, where even the lowest defilements were seen to be perfect expressions of primordial wakefulness (rigpa).

And these in turn often gave way to Paths of Self-Liberation, where the defilements are seen to be already self-liberated just as they are, and just as they arise, since their basic nature is always already primordial Purity (pure Emptiness in pure Presence: the radical and already spontaneously accomplished union of Emptiness and awareness/ clarity/form: the already accomplished union of Ascent and Descent: Emptiness and Awareness, Emptiness and Clarity, and Emptiness and Form).

The coarse contacts of street life and tenement life--the choice between monstrous defilements from human beings and monstrous defilements from filth and vermin.

He should by rights demand compensation for defilement but contented himself with getting the hell out, not paying his bill, and asking the taxi driver who had brought him hither and was staying to share in the excitement to take him and his defilements to the Sheraton Hotel in Indianapolis.

He knew that the men in the house were foreignersthat even Marius, with his too-perfect English, was a foreignerand that no one but the Saint and Patricia could be expected to be familiar with the more abstruse perversions and defilements possible to the well of native English.

A Modern Utopia will have done with yapping about nationality, and so the ugly fortifications, the barracks and military defilements of the earthly vale of Urseren will be wanting.

And all the defilements in a mass her attendants bore forth from the palace--the Naiad nymphs who ministered all things to her.

I have been accused of heterodoxy for putting my Pentasm in guard over my mind rather than my soul, but I successfully defended myself before the tribunal because of my defilement.

With the results still incomplete, the score stood at 2 murders, 76 rapes, 332 aggravated assaults, 13 arsons, 20 kidnappings-mostly of teen-aged girls-56 robberies with violence, uncounted cases of public drunkenness and disorderly conduct, and several thousand lesser misdemeanors such as child abuse, micturating on and throwing bottles at pedes­trians from hotel windows, driving stolen buses off bridges, hijacking an airliner, pulling down statues in public parks, defilement of churches and cemeteries, and destruction, theft, burning, and looting of private property valued at $33 million.

When this compensation becomes an intrinsic part of the natural pleasure principle, there can be no gratification without pain or defilement.

But it should not be only the Most High Reverend Father of Carpathianism who knows what a defilement it would be to presume to sit on the throne of god!