11. The Place of Dispassion

Given that desire and passion play such a major and complex role in causing suffering, it should come as no surprise (1) that dispassion plays a prominent role in the Buddha’s discussions of the truth of the cessation of suffering, and (2) that he explains the role of dispassion in ending suffering in a wide variety of ways.

Two similes are useful to keep in mind when we look at the Buddha’s discussion of dispassion in these contexts. We’ve already encountered them both: the simile of feeding and the simile of building houses.

In terms of the feeding simile, the cause of suffering is the hunger that makes us want to feed. Suffering itself is the act of feeding on the food of the aggregates.

So one of the ways in which the Buddha describes the actions leading to the end of suffering tells of how meditators can contemplate the aggregates in ways that lead to a sense of disenchantment for them. In the Buddha’s time, the Pali word for disenchantment—nibbidā—was used in everyday contexts to describe the feeling you have when you’ve had enough of a certain food and don’t want any more. Some translators have translated nibbidā as “revulsion,” but that’s too aversive. Nibbidā is more a simple sense that you’ve had all you want of that food, and the idea of eating any more has no appeal. The main difference, of course, between disenchantment in its everyday sense and disenchantment in the sense the Buddha gives it in his discussions of the end of suffering, is that everyday nibbidā can wear away when you get hungry once more. The nibbidā leading to unbinding, however, is so thoroughgoing that you’ll never want to feed on the aggregates ever again.

In the descriptions following the food analogy, disenchantment with the aggregates is then followed by dispassion, which is then followed by release and the realization that the mind is released (SN 22:59). It’s interesting to note here that, whereas disenchantment is said to have an object—you’re disenchanted with the aggregates—dispassion isn’t. In other words, it’s not limited to the aggregates.

You may remember that the Buddha taught people to abandon, not the aggregates, but the desire and passion for them. Other discussions in the Canon make the point that dispassion has to be all-around—not only for the aggregates but also for the acts of desire and passion, and for dispassion itself—to lead to full awakening (AN 9:36; Sn 4:4). If the mind at this point tries to feed on dispassion, for example, its awakening is only partial. This is why there are levels of awakening. In the first three levels, even though there is an experience of dispassion, the deathless, and unbinding (MN 1; MN 48), there is still passion for these two things. Only at the fourth and total level of awakening is dispassion so total that it applies to the deathless and to dispassion itself. For suffering to cease, you have to reach a point where you’re no longer driven by hunger of even the most refined sort.

As for the simile of house-building, two striking passages show how dispassion puts an end to the places that craving creates and where desire and passion take up residence. The first is a pair of verses that, according to tradition, the Buddha exclaimed shortly after his awakening:

Through the round of many births I roamed
	without reward,
	without rest,
seeking the house-builder.
	Painful is birth again
		& again.

House-builder, you’re seen!
You will not build a house again.
All your rafters broken,
the ridge pole dismantled,
immersed in dismantling, the mind
has attained to the end of craving.  — Dhp 153–154

The “dismantling” here is the process of examining the aggregates out of which two related things—a state of becoming and an identity as a being in that state—are created. When you see that the raw materials provided by aggregates are unworthy of passion, you feel no craving, either to create more of them or to create any sense of yourself or your world from them. You don’t simply stop living in houses. You dismantle them and, in so doing, bring them to an end.

The second passage lends a humorous touch to the house-building analogy by reducing house-building to a childish game:

As with “dismantling” in the previous passage, “demolishing” in this passage means ending desire and passion for the aggregates by examining them to see how ephemeral and stressful they are. When you feel no craving for them, you don’t simply stop playing with them. You bring them to an end.

These images lie behind another standard way in which the Canon depicts the actions constituting the third noble truth: dispassion is followed by cessation. Because passion was what fueled the fabrication of becomings and identities, and even the aggregates from which they were constructed, thoroughgoing dispassion is enough to bring them all to an end.