15. Desires & Determination on the Path

Once, when Ven. Ānanda was staying in a park, a brahman came to him and asked him what the goal of his practice was. Ānanda replied that the goal was to abandon desire.

The brahman then asked whether there was a path of practice leading to the abandoning of desire, and Ānanda replied that there was. He then described the path in terms of a teaching called the four bases of power: mental power endowed with concentration based on one of four things—desire, persistence, intent, and analysis—along with the fabrications of exertion, or right effort.

The brahman then replied that the path would have to be an endless path, because there was no way you could abandon desire by means of desire.

Ānanda responded with an analogy framed as a series of questions: Before the brahman came to the park, didn’t he have a desire to come? Didn’t he make an effort to act on that desire? And when he arrived, wasn’t that desire allayed?

The brahman admitted that that was the case.

In the same way, Ānanda continued, when a person has attained total awakening, whatever desire he or she had for awakening, whatever effort he or she made for awakening, is allayed (SN 51:15).

This analogy explains several aspects of the role of desire in developing the fourth noble truth, the path to the end of suffering.

You need the desire for awakening in order to undertake the path.

While you’re on the path, you need more than just desire: You also need right concentration, right effort, and—by implication—all the other factors of the path and the triple training.

You finally overcome your desire for awakening, not by suppressing or denying it, but by satisfying it. You satisfy it by using it in the course of developing the path.

These facts are reflected in the Buddha’s extended discussion of the four noble truths in DN 22. There he notes that one of the main forms of suffering is not getting what you want, and he defines what you want as freedom from aging, illness, and death; sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, and despair. Simply wanting to gain these forms of freedom through the power of your desire is to suffer. But the Buddha doesn’t tell you not to want them. After all, these were the wants that drove his own search for awakening in the first place (MN 26). Instead, he advises you to channel those wants into developing the path. That’s how he gained results, and how you’ll gain results, too.

The standard definitions for the factors of the path show that desire plays an explicit role in two of them: right resolve and right effort.

Right resolve is the determination to abandon resolves for sensual passion, ill will, and harmfulness, and to develop in their place resolves for renunciation, non-ill will, and harmlessness. The three resolves to be abandoned come under the first two of the hindrances: sensual desire and ill will. These hindrances, you may recall, are the conditions that sustain ignorance. This means that the resolves to be developed are aimed at putting an end to those conditions. Right resolve is, for this reason, the active side of the training in heightened discernment: You not only know the four noble truths, but—based on that knowledge—you also resolve to put an end to the conditions that keep you from mastering those truths along with their duties. That resolve is wise.

Right effort is defined as generating desire, arousing persistence, and upholding your intent to do four things: to prevent unskillful mental qualities from arising, to abandon those that have already arisen, to give rise to skillful mental qualities, and to develop to their culmination any skillful mental qualities that have already arisen.

Right resolve comes under the training of heightened discernment; right effort, under the training in heightened mind. This fact would make it seem as if there’s no role for desire in the other aspect of the triple training, the training in heightened virtue, but that’s not the case. The Buddha points out that right effort circles around every factor of the path: generating the desire to give rise to the right version of that factor and to abandon the wrong version (MN 117). For example, you have to generate desire to abandon wrong speech and wrong action, and to stay within the bounds of right speech and right action. This is why one of the Buddha’s most common teachings to people at large was to point out the rewards of virtue in this life and the next, so that they would generate the desire to practice virtue themselves (DN 16).

What’s striking about the role of desire in developing the path is that it holds to an overarching skillful desire—the desire for awakening—to determine which desires should be encouraged and which should be abandoned. In other words, you establish priorities among your desires and you use skillful desires to stick to your priorities. Then you train yourself—with the help of the training you receive from others—to hold to those priorities every time you’re faced with the choice of encouraging one desire over another.

If there weren’t any conflict among your desires, there would be no need for training. This means that, by its very nature, training will involve inner conflict. There’s no way you can progress in your training without it. As we survey each part of the triple training, we’ll see exactly how this conflict plays out as you progress along the path.

This policy of holding to one desire so as to overcome any other desires that would get in its way is called determination (adhiṭṭhāna). Ironically, given the overriding role that determination plays in the path, the Canon contains only one passage where the Buddha discusses in any detail what it means to be determined on awakening. It’s in MN 140. There he separates this determination into four aims that all come together with the realization of unbinding.

• One, in aiming at unbinding, you’re determined on discernment, because the knowledge of the ending of the effluents—the final knowledge before the experience of unbinding—is the highest noble discernment.

• Two, you’re determined on truth, in that unbinding—the undeceptive—is the highest noble truth.

• Three, you’re determined on relinquishment, because the relinquishment of mental acquisitions—the mental baggage of possessiveness that weighs you down—is the highest noble relinquishment.

• Four, you’re determined on calm, because the abandoning of passion, aversion, and delusion is the highest noble calm.

In this way, discernment and relinquishment find their highest expression in the last steps of the path to unbinding; truth and calm, in unbinding itself. The fact that, in arriving at unbinding, you’ve arrived at the highest expression of each of these determinations means that your overriding desires have been totally satisfied. You’ve managed to establish order among your various desires, skillful and unskillful, seeing that the desire for awakening offers the only prospect for genuine happiness. Now that that happiness has been found, all your desires and determinations are allayed.