Post #177: Desire

5 May 2025

“The rain could turn to gold

And still your thirst would not be slaked.

Desire is unquenchable

Or it ends in tears, even in heaven.

He who wishes to awake

Consumes his desires

Joyfully”

—Dhammapada, ch. 14 (Thomas Byrom)

     It’s curious how much our perspectives can shift, not always in big breakthroughs and upheavals, but sometimes in more subtle ways that we hardly notice until we realize with surprise that something we might before have found far-fetched, or even annoying, suddenly sounds quite sensible.

     Something of the sort happened to me relatively early in my practice, when universal loving kindness still looked unwarranted to me—appearing in the light an unconvincing invitation to bad behavior and undeserved affection. Then came an intermediate stage in which I wrestled with the contrary position, but eventually, without much fanfare, my resistance quietly subsided and the universal and indiscriminate dimension to loving kindness not only ceased to bother me, but became an expression of common sense.

     For a long time, almost twenty years, the Dhammapada sounded beautiful and inspiring to me, save for the grating refrain that made desire the root of all problems in life. However much it may have fit with the Teaching, it just didn’t sit right with me, and seemed to make for a rather dull, lukewarm kind of existence. The hapless fellow who gets washed away by a surprise flood while picking flowers quite innocently by the side of a river (or so I would have said then) did not look to me as if he deserved his cruel fate (Dhp. 4.47-49, 24.339*).

     Imagine my surprise when my latest reading (in Byrom’s version*) no longer had such an irritating effect. That the flower-picker was doing some injury to his harvest, in contrast to the bee wandering peacefully from one blooming petal to the next, had occurred to me earlier; but more than that, the whole tendency of my negative reaction to “plucking the poisoned arrows of desire” (Dhp. 14.180, 20.285*) seems to have shifted, if not completely, then at least considerably enough for me to take note and wonder about it.

     Not that any and all wishing for this over that must be thinned out to the point of vanishing (although some weakening of our addiction to liking and disliking is probably indispensable for) serious progress to me made on the Path. Desire need not refer to any and all wanting to see this and not that occur; it carries a more specific meaning, namely the hollow, hungry feeling that cannot take no for an answer—the craving that binds one to an object, in the more blatant cases, as closely as a calf to its mother-cow (Dhp. 20.284*). An image I now shudder at even more than I balk at the renunciations required to shake off the yoke of attachment. Or is it still a tie between the two? Hard to tell, but at any rate the contest is getting closer, whether that be owed to ageing or disenchantment, to incipient wisdom or mere defeatism, to growing equanimity or to waning hope.

     “But desire is fun!” you cry. Well yes, so we tell ourselves: thus the honey that Buddhist picture on the razor’s edge, smeared on to lure us into taking a good lick. It can be fun when you get what you want—glorious even, on rare occasions. But how often is that, and how long does it last before the hydra rears another head and sinks its insatiable fangs into your flesh again with the gnawing pangs of a hunger that any votary of desire knows only too intimately. It is said that Marius was still rehearsing battlefield moves on his very deathbed; so was Hugh Hefner, presumably, with another field of distinction in mind. Is that the position you want to be in when the bell tolls for you at last?

     “Desire gets things done!” Who would deny it? There’s the whip that lashes us forward along the rocky roads of sentience, and like the merciless driver of an ancient ox-cart, it must be allowed to carry a certain crude persuasiveness. So accustomed are we to this incessant whipping by desire, and to the carrots we are so much more often promised than given, that we may not even be able to imagine any superior way of getting things done. Again, the Buddhists know better, as do all who invite worldly incredulity and raillery when they insist that love provides not only a purer but a more powerful fuel than desire (and that the two are not to be confused with each other just because we happen to use both terms to describe certain particularly salient constellations).

     So we wander on through Samsara, rushing from one desire to another—for how long? It can look as if the hedonic treadmill is simply unavoidable in life. But ask yourself: if we could do something to step off, or at least to slow its turning, should the change not be welcome to us? The answer you give may change with time, or at least the question may begin to look more pressing and less easily brushed off.

Like fish out of water,

Stranded on the shore,

So thoughts thrash and quiver

For how can they shake off desire?**

     How indeed, and when? “O Lord, grant me purity,” as a young Augustine pleaded before he became a saint, “but not yet”? Methinks I am getting ready, or at least I am getting closer. Then again, everything changes, and who knows about tomorrow, when the retreating legions of desire may well come roaring back again and carry everything before them.

*Thomas Byrom’s version is not so much a translation as a free “rendition” in its own right; my cross-references are to the corresponding passages in more literal translations that often read quite differently.

**Byrom, ch. 3 (3.34).