THE ROLE OF DESIRE IN THE BUDDHIST PATH
"All phenomena, the Buddha once said, are rooted in desire. Everything we think, say, or do--every experience--comes from desire.
Even we come from desire. We were reborn into this life because of our desire to be.
Consciously or not, our desires keep redefining our sense of who we are. Desire is how we take our place in the causal matrix of space and time.
The only thing not rooted in desire is nirvana, for it's the end of all phenomena and lies even beyond the Buddha's use of the word "all." But the path that takes you to nirvana is rooted in desire--in skillful desires.
The path to liberation pushes the limits of skillful desires to see how far they can go.
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The notion of a skillful desire may sound strange, but a mature mind intuitively pursues the desires it sees as skillful and drops those it perceives as not. Basic in everyone is the desire for happiness. Every other desire is a strategy for attaining that happiness.
You want an iPod, a sexual partner, or an experience of inner peace because you think it will make you happy.
Because these secondary desires are strategies, they follow a pattern. They spring from an inchoate feeling of lack and limitation; they employ your powers of perception to identify the cause of the limitation; and they use your powers of creative imagination to conceive a solution to it.
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But despite their common pattern, desires are not monolithic. Each offers a different perception of what's lacking in life, together with a different picture of what the solution should be. A desire for a sandwich comes from a perception of physical hunger and proposes to solve it with a Swiss‐on‐rye. A desire to climb a mountain focuses on a different set of hungers--for accomplishment, exhilaration, self‐mastery--and appeals to a different image of satisfaction. Whatever the desire, if the solution actually leads to happiness, the desire is skillful. If it doesn't, it's not. However, what seems to be a skillful desire may lead only to a false or transitory happiness not worth the effort entailed. So wisdom starts as a meta‐desire: to learn how to recognize skillful and unskillful desires for what they actually are...
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...Most of us, when looking at the four noble truths, don't realize that they're all about desire.
We're taught that the Buddha gave only one role to desire--as the cause of suffering.
Because he says to abandon the cause of suffering, it sounds like he's denying any positive role to desire and its constructive companions: creativity, imagination, and hope.
This perception, though, misses two important points:
The first is that all four truths speak to the basic dynamic of desire on its own terms: perception of lack and limitation, the imagination of a solution, and a strategy for attaining it. The first truth teaches the basic lack and limitation in our lives--the clinging that constitutes suffering--while the second truth points to the types of desires that lead to clinging: desires for sensuality, becoming, and annihilation. The third truth expands our imagination to encompass the possibility that clinging can be totally overcome. The fourth truth, the path to the end of suffering, shows how to strategize so as to overcome clinging by abandoning its cause.
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The second point that's often missed is that the noble truths give two roles to desire, depending on whether it's skillful or not. Unskillful desire is the cause of suffering; skillful desire forms part of the path to its cessation.
Skillful desire undercuts unskillful desire, not by repressing it, but by producing greater and greater levels of satisfaction and well‐being so that unskillful desire has no place to stand..."
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Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Excerpt from "Pushing the Limits: Desire and Imagination in the Buddhist Path"
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You can read the complete talk here:
https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/PurityOfHeart/Section0007.html
or here:
eBook PURITY OF HEART
http://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/purityofheart_v120208.pdf
10th November, 2022
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