9. Desire & Passion Engendering Conflict

A third spot where desire and passion play a role in dependent co-arising is found in one of the non-standard lists of conditions, in DN 15. There, as the discussion goes backward through the sequence, starting from aging-and-death, it arrives at the connection between craving and feeling, and then inserts a brief detour into the ways in which craving leads to conflict in society. Given that the discussion starts with craving, it’s basically an expansion of the role of desire and passion in craving and clinging, adding a social dimension to the issue.

This is one of the few descriptions of dependent co-arising in which desire and passion are explicitly mentioned. The passage is this:

To illustrate this sequence, consider again the act of feeding: You start by being hungry for food, so you search for it. You acquire something and then ascertain that it actually is food. At that point, you feel desire and passion for it—you start clinging to it and eating it. You get attached to it and feel possessive of it—think of stray dogs growling at anyone who gets near them while they’re wolfing down their food. You refuse to share it, you get defensive when others demand a share, and you end up fighting them off if they try to take it by force.

In this passage, the fact that desire and passion come between ascertaining—checking to see what you’ve found—and attachment to what you’ve found, suggest that desire and passion here are equivalent to clinging. You’ve found your food, you know that it’s food, and you start eating it. The satisfaction you get from eating is why you’re attached.

This passage is basically offering an analysis, in impersonal terms, of one of the main drawbacks that the Buddha saw in sensuality: It leads inevitably to conflict, both on a personal level and between nations (MN 13). Given that beings are defined by their attachments (SN 23:2), and that the one thing all beings have in common is that they’re sustained by food (Khp 4), this analysis points to one of the radical issues we have to face in putting an end to suffering: As long as we take on the identity as a being located in a particular world—as long as we keep on giving rise to the processes that lead to becoming—we’re going to keep getting involved in conflict with other beings in that world. The only way out of that conflict will be to stop identifying ourselves as beings. If you think that identifying yourself as a being is the only way to find happiness, the idea of stopping that identification is a scary thought.