MEDITATIONS: THE DHAMMAPADA, CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Craving

The craving of a person who lives negligently
Spreads like a creeping vine.
Such a person leaps ever onward,
Like a monkey seeking fruit in the forest

Sorrow grows
Like grass after rain
For anyone overcome by this miserable craving
And clinging to the world. (Buddha 81)

To life is to have desires, and to desire is to suffer—this notion is nothing new even for one who has not read a word of the Dhammapada. It is not even exclusive to Buddhism; the Greek stoics and Chinese Taoist describe much the same conundrum. But it isn’t so simple as to be reduceable to the famous phrase, “Life is suffering.” The truth is far more frightful: the suffering produces through desire, through craving, is one which feeds itself, growing in exponential proportions.

Like the creeping vine mentioned, a particular species of Indian vine which eventually kills its host tree, craving inevitably becomes addiction if left untended. And by addiction, one should understand the word clinically. One is addicted when his craving interferes with his ability to function in life, when he wishes to stop satiating his craving but cannot will himself to do so. This opens two questions: what does it mean to function in life? and when does one know whether he can choose to stop or whether he truly doesn’t want to.

Negligence is the measure of dysfunction, and by the measure of dysfunction can one grasp the borders of what is functional. If one is negligent in his life, he encounters excess troubles and harms. He does not achieve his ends insofar as his negligence is relevant, or else the results are more transient or of poorer quality. His will is not being manifested in the world. His will, therefore, is not functional.

As for when one knows whether he can’t or won’t stop, he needs only ask himself if he is like the monkey. If he watches himself pursue his cravings, suffering for it, and yet he continues to change nothing, just move from tree to tree as each collapses behind him, suffocated by the creeping vines of his unchecked desires, then there is no difference between can’t and won’t.

Just as a felled tree grows again
If the roots are unharmed and strong,
So suffering sprouts again and again
Until the tendency to crave is rooted out. . . .

Though clear of the underbrush
And out of the forest,
Someone attached to the forest
Runs right back to it.
Come, see that free person
Run back into bondage. (82-3)

The only way out of the cycle is to break the cycle. Moving forward or backward will only every bring one back to the same insufferable place. To break the cycle is to uproot ones desires from there very core. And what is the core of a desire? It is the hierarchy of values which determines the hierarchy of all values within a person. What must be transformed is one’s essence. In Jungian thought, this is the incorporation of oppositional elements into ones own sense of self, a process called individuation. Nietzsche called this the transvaluation of all values. Christians call it being born again.

Whatever the name, one must dig below the surface to the level we call the soul. One questions who one is, what one is—what is attributed to the self and what indispensable. One who delves as described are likely to find:

It’s not a strong bond, say the wise,
That is made of iron, wood, or grass.
A strong bond, say the wise,
Is infatuation with jewels and ornaments
And longing for children and spouse—
That bond is weighty, elastic, and hard to loosen.

Having cut even this, they go forth,
Free from longing, abandoning sensual pleasures.
Those attached to passion
Are caught in a river of their own making
Like a spider caught in its own web.
But having cut even this, the wise set forth,
Free from longing, abandoning all suffering. (83)

“The wise set forth,” they move, they live leaving the coming of their suffering behind them. They do so by letting go of the cravings as the arrive and pass by, for life moves with time, and it is only by our clinging that we pain ourselves trying to halt the inevitable. The desire for wealth, status, power, or a family comes. Perhaps it is in accord with one’s fate that he obtains these things, just as it is necessary that he loses them. The wise man delights in his receiving and further delights in their going—not because he wants to see them go, but because his desires have been transvaluated. He values what is to come and what he is becoming. He is freed from the shackles of craving.

The unwise . . . well, it is as Jung forewarned—be wary of wisdom you have not earned, or wealth, or status, or anything else:

Wealth destroys those who lack in wisdom,
But not those who seek the beyond.
Craving wealth, those lacking wisdom
Destroy themselves
As well as others. (85)

Buddha Siddhartha Gautama. The Dhammapada; Teachings of the Buddha, translated by Gil Fronsdal, Shambala Publications Inc, 2008.