Desire Is Part of the Path

A group of monks once went to pay their respects to Ven. Sariputta before they were about to head out to a foreign part of India where there hadn’t been any Buddhist monks going before. He asked them, “The people there are intelligent. What if they ask you, ‘What does your teacher teach?’ How are you going to respond?” They said, “We’d come a long way to hear what response you would give.”

He started with an interesting phrase: “Our teacher teaches the subduing of desire and passion.” Then he went on to explain, “Subduing desire and passion for what?” “The five aggregates.” And then, “Why? Why would you do that? What benefit would there be in doing that?” He said, “Because you’re able to avoid the suffering that comes when you’re passionate about things like form, feeling, perceptions, thought constructs, and consciousness, and they change on you.”

Why did he say that? To give rise to a desire in his listeners, the desire to want to practice. So he talked about subduing desire and passion, yet then he spoke in ways that give rise to desire.

Then he continued. He said that if developing skillful qualities in the present moment led to pain now and into the future, the Buddha wouldn’t have taught it. But because it gives rise to a sense of well-being in the mind now and leads to good results in the future, that’s why he taught it.

The same for abandoning unskillful qualities. If it led to pain in the present moment and to painful results in the future, the Buddha wouldn’t have taught it. But actually, when you abandon unskillful qualities, you have a sense of well-being in being skillful here and now, and it gives rise to good things in the future. So again, Sariputta said that to spark in his listeners a desire to practice.

Yet he’s not being inconsistent here. He’s being strategic.

You can see the same pattern in the four noble truths. The path to the end of suffering, the Buddha says, is the karma that leads to an end of karma. There are things you have to do in order to stop doing.

You have to have a desire to act. You see this in right resolve. You set your mind on doing things that are going to be skillful, and then with right effort you actually give rise to the desire to abandon whatever is unskillful and to develop what’s skillful.

So desire is an important part of the path. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to do it. It’s good to keep this in mind as you’re practicing concentration. In the old days, every time you’d hear about concentration, especially in books that came out of the vipassana schools, they’d say, “Watch out for concentration. It’s very pleasurable, very seductive. You’re going to get stuck. You’re going to get attached. You’re going to get addicted. So stay away.”

Even now, the jhāna merchants—the people who offer online retreats in jhāna—want to make it very clear that you’re not going to get addicted to the pleasure of jhāna. Well, a lot of people do get addicted, and it’s not a bad addiction. It’s the kind of addiction that pulls you away from other, more unskillful addictions. All your clingings to unskillful thoughts, unskillful attitudes are addictions. In fact, you could use that as a definition of clinging aggregates: being addicted to the aggregates.

Aggregates, you know, are not things. They’re activities. Your body is constantly active. Your feelings are activities. Your perceptions are things you do. Thought constructs, fabrications are things you do. Consciousness is something you do. And we’re addicted to these activities. With the path, the Buddha is giving us something better to be addicted to as we get the mind into concentration.

He himself said he got on the right path when he realized that he could divide his thoughts into two types: skillful and unskillful. He had to keep unskillful thoughts under control in the same way that a cowherd has to keep his cows out of the rice fields when the rice is growing. If he doesn’t, they get into the rice, eat the rice, trample the plants, and he’ll get into a lot of trouble. So he has to beat them back.

As for skillful qualities, skillful thoughts, skillful attitudes, you can let them roam around, just as the cowherd can let the cows roam during the dry season when the rice has been harvested and there’s nothing that they can do to harm any more rice plants. Just be mindful about where they’re going.

But, as the Buddha noticed, you could think skillful thoughts for a whole day and it wouldn’t cause any harm, wouldn’t have any drawbacks, except that it would tire the mind. And you know what happens when the mind gets tired. The body gets tired. When the mind and body are tired, you don’t have the strength to keep up the practice. So the mind needs to rest.

So after establishing right resolve to overcome unskillful qualities and making the right effort to actually do it, he realized that that was not enough. He had to get the mind into concentration, to settle down. Here again, he had to want to do it.

As he said, he realized he had to drop all thoughts that were not related to the concentration. At first, his mind didn’t leap up at the idea. So he had to remind himself of the drawbacks of thinking sensual thoughts, thinking about things that aren’t skillful, and he was able to focus his thinking on getting the mind together with its object—based on the realization that if he didn’t do that, there’d be trouble down the line.

That’s one of the ways he gave rise to the desire: realizing that if you don’t learn how to get the mind concentrated, there’s going to be trouble. All your work in being skillful and in trying to get some control of your thoughts starts to unravel. You need a good solid place to stay to gather your strength. So that way, you might say, he’s using the stick—“If you don’t do this right, if you don’t do this well, you’re going to suffer.”

But then there are other positive things that come from concentration: a sense of well-being, a sense of refreshment that you can spread throughout your body. It doesn’t depend on things outside at all. It’s your own independent source of well-being. Thinking about that is like the carrot. Then actually experiencing it as you get the mind to settle down is much better than carrots. It’s a much more refined food.

So the desire is important, which is why the Buddha talks in so many ways to remind you of the drawbacks of an untrained mind and to remind you of the virtues and the rewards of training your mind: being able to find some pleasure with the breath, to find a sense of refreshment with the breath that strengthens your mind, strengthens the ability to stay here and stick with the path. It’s good for the body, good for the mind. Even if you’re not planning to gain awakening, it’s a good skill to develop because it helps get your mind under control.

As we’ve seen many times in our lives, when the mind goes out of control, it can inflict a lot of damage. You can fall into all kinds of wrong attitudes, and they reinforce one another. Your mind becomes an echo chamber of bad ideas, unskillful ideas, and they reinforce one another. So you’ve got to learn how to get some control over your thinking.

Give it something simple to focus on, something that gives you a sense of well-being. As for any thoughts that would go in any other direction, you subdue them, as the Buddha said. You put them aside because you’ve got something better to focus on.

In the description of right mindfulness, which is basically the Buddha’s prescription for how you do right concentration, he says you keep track of the body in and of itself—and an aspect of the body would be the breath—ardent, alert, mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world.

Greed and distress cover all the unskillful attitudes you might have about the world. Just put them aside—because you’ve got something else you’ve got to focus on. And you do that by developing three qualities: mindfulness, ardency, and alertness.

Mindfulness is keeping in mind what you’re going to be doing here and how best to do it. Alertness is watching what’s actually happening, what you’re doing and the results you’re getting. Ardency is trying to do this well. Again, there’s an element of desire there—you really want to do this well. It’s not going to happen on its own.

There are people who talk about nothing more than relaxing into your awareness in the present moment. They’re replacing the Buddha’s path with something else. Right relaxation is not one of the factors. There are activities you’ve got to abandon—that’s for sure—but there are other activities you’ve got to develop, other skills you’ve got to master.

There’s more going on here in the meditation than just being aware in the present moment. The awareness of the present moment is something that’s manufactured—something you’re putting together yourself. And you’re not going to see that if you tell yourself that the awareness of the present moment is unconditioned or outside of space, outside of time. Actually, it’s very much in time, and it’s very much conditioned. After all, it’s the consciousness aggregate, and all the aggregates are conditioned. You’ve got to see how these conditions are put together. The best way to do that is to put them together in a good way. And that requires desire.

So you remind yourself of the drawbacks of going out in the world and you remind yourself of the virtues and the rewards of gaining some control over your thinking. As Ajaan Lee points out, of those three qualities—mindfulness, alertness, ardency—ardency is the wisdom factor. It really burns into things, tries to understand them, and tries to do this well.

So these are the qualities that go into right concentration. You’re not just zoning out. You’re not just blissing out. The bliss is there, but one of the skills of concentration, especially if you want to get good at it, is to learn how to experience the bliss, the sense of well-being, and not get sucked into it.

In other words, you stay focused on the breath because your focus on the breath is going to be the cause of the sense of pleasure. By that, you manufacture the pleasure, but then you have to let the pleasure do its work on its own. You don’t have to stretch it here or there or gobble it down for fear that it’s going to go away. You let it do its work. When it’s done its work, then you can let it go.

It’s like eating your meal. Once you’re full, you can stop. And then the mind can settle into a state of equanimity that’s really solid, because it’s well-fed. You’re not just telling yourself to be equanimous. You’ve got good reason to be equanimous. You’re well-fed, well-provided for. Then you can watch what’s going on in the mind a lot more clearly and with a lot more objectivity.

So the pleasure is an important part of the practice—partly as your motivation, partly as your sustenance—so that you can be with what’s going on in the mind, watch it, and not get sucked in. You develop a state of equanimity that’s strong because it’s well-fed. It’s good because it allows you to see things clearly for what they are, as they’re happening. After all, if you’re going to gain some control over the mind, you have to be able to observe clearly what’s actually going on. For that, the best time is when the mind is still, perfectly balanced. That balance is something that has to be maintained, so let your desire get focused there.

The Buddha teaches that all dhammas are rooted in desire. By that, he means that all objects in the mind, all activities in the mind, are rooted in desire. So you have to desire for the path, desire to develop concentration. Don’t be afraid of those desires. Just learn how to relate to your desires in a mature way. That makes them part of the process of getting the mind to settle down, and turns them into the ardency that wants to do this well. Focus your desires on the causes, and the results will come.

You can see that the Buddha’s thinking strategically here. And Ven. Sariputta’s comments on talking about the rewards that come from subduing desire and passion are part of that strategy. Use desire to get past desire. As you develop the path, right view teaches you to look at all things fabricated as worth letting go. At first, you’re going to be letting go of things that are opposed to the path. But then you realize that the path itself is fabricated, so that, too, has to be let go.

This is why right view is right. It directs you in a way that you use it and then you can put it aside—and it gives you good reasons for putting it aside. The reasons are built into the view itself. You end up putting it aside and the whole path gets put aside. Then the mind is really free—and that’s when you can put your desires down.

Because desire is what? It’s a sense of lack. It’s aimed at gaining something you don’t have. But when you’ve got the ultimate happiness, you don’t need it anymore. So you simply let it go—not because you’ve been told to let it go, but because it serves no further purpose.

An analogy that the ajaan’s in Thailand like to use is that you’re building a table. You’ve got the tools needed to build the table. As long as your table isn’t yet done, you pick up the tools, you put them down, you pick them up again, you put them down again. But then when the table is done, then you can put them all down for good, and you can enjoy the table you’ve got.