10. Implications

The issue gets even more unsettling when you step back to reflect on the dual role of desire and passion in relationship to the aggregates, both after and prior to the factors of fabrication, consciousness, and name-and-form, the main section of dependent co-arising where all the aggregates are found.

Looking at desire and passion in their role as craving and clinging, we can see that the craving and clinging focus on aggregates already in existence. We come along, thirsting for them, finding them, deciding that we want them, and then feeding on them. To subdue desire and passion here would mean that we learn how not to feel hunger and thirst for them even as they still exist.

Even this much, of course, goes against the grain. We often associate feeding with pleasure, yet here the Buddha is saying that feeding is suffering because we feel a lack and are trying to arrive at a state of fullness. This places us in an unstable state of dependency. What’s more, given the inconstant nature of the aggregates, the aggregates we take as food can never provide a fullness that lasts. Whatever satisfaction they give us is only fleeting. The sense of lack will always be there. We always need to keep looking for more food and protecting our food sources from others who want to take that food for themselves. Even when we succeed, we have to keep feeding over and over again.

But there’s more. We have to keep bringing more and more aggregates into existence so that we can feed on them. This points to desire and passion in a second role: that of giving rise to the whole process of dependent co-arising, including the fabrication of the aggregates to begin with. This means that we don’t simply play the role of hunters and gatherers, searching for aggregates already in existence. We’re farmers and producers, growing and manufacturing our food. Our desires and passions are what give rise to the aggregates to begin with.

The Canon illustrates this point with another analogy: building houses. It likens the process of going from one birth to another to going from one house to another, with each house standing for each person’s identity as a being (DN 2). However, it also states that our desire and passion are what build the houses to which we go (Dhp 153–154). In fact, the desire and passion of craving are what create locations. Wherever there’s desire and passion for creating more aggregates, that’s where each person’s identity as a being will settle as long as those aggregates are still being produced.

This means that if we abandon desire and passion for the aggregates, we stop producing them (SN 22:25). Further, it means that, in subduing desire and passion for the aggregates, we’re not just learning to live peacefully in our houses. We’re putting an end to the process of building houses and creating the raw materials from which they’re built. We’ve found a freedom so secure—that’s one of the Buddha’s names for unbinding, the Secure (SN 43)—that we have no need for the makeshift protection of houses ever again.

To return to the feeding analogy, we’re not just learning to be at peace with our old food sources. We’re so free from hunger that we can stop producing the food supply from which we create our sense of ourselves and of the world around us. We’re dismantling our sense of who and where we are.

These facts show that two common interpretations of the Buddha’s teachings are actually misinterpretations. The first is that the subduing of desire and passion means simply accepting the way things are—that if we can stop desiring for things to be different from what they are, we can live peacefully in the world. But simple acceptance doesn’t put an end to hunger. It merely represses it, and repressed hunger refuses to stay repressed for long. It finds other sources of food and ways to feed, even if it has to sneak off and eat garbage. Given that the Buddha promises long-term happiness from subduing desire and passion, he also has to promise a way that satisfies the hunger for happiness so thoroughly that the mind is never hungry again. This will require more than acceptance.

The second misinterpretation is that the Buddha is teaching a path back to our original nature. Given that our sense of ourselves—what we are, along with what the world is around us—is fabricated from desire and passion along with ignorance, and given that the Buddha states that ignorance has no discernable beginning point (SN 22:99), the knowledge that subdues desire and passion will totally undo what we’ve been all along.

Which means that there’s no good reason to want to go back there, and we won’t be able to go back there anyhow—ideally, because we don’t need to. So again, when the Buddha promises a long-term happiness from subduing desire and passion, he’ll have to promise something so total that you won’t even care to ask the question of who is enjoying that happiness or where.

This is the happiness that the Buddha promises through the realization of the third noble truth. That’s “through,” rather than “in” the realization, because the act of realizing the third noble truth involves a series of mental actions through which the happiness of unbinding is attained. Unbinding itself, however, is beyond actions of any sort. Once it’s been fully realized, there’s no need to do anything more to bring mental suffering to an end, because it’s been ended for good. Although the realization of unbinding is an action, the ultimate happiness of unbinding is free from any need to act.