To Comprehend Craving (long extract)

 "When Westerners went over to Thailand to study with the great ajaans, they often found they had problems with the heat, the bugs, and the general hardships. The ajaans would teach them a lot about equanimity and patience — so much so that, in some cases, that seemed to be the only message that got through. This may be why we sometimes hear craving, the cause of suffering, defined as wanting things outside to be different from what they are — the implication being that if you accept things as they are, and are okay with things as they are, then you’re not going to suffer. All you need is some contentment, some patience, some equanimity.

But when the Buddha explained craving, it was something much deeper than that.

The equanimity that comes from just accepting things in the senses the Buddha called worldly equanimity. It’s the lowest stage of equanimity, and there are two stages higher than that. There’s the equanimity that comes from getting the mind into good concentration and then the equanimity that comes as a result of finding the true happiness of unbinding. You look at the rest of the world, and you’re perfectly fine with the fact that things are not the way you want them to be because you’ve found something deeper and more satisfying inside.

But the craving that has to be overcome in order to find that happiness goes a lot deeper than just craving for things to be different from what they are. The Buddha defined it as craving that leads to further becoming. Now, the term “further becoming,” punabbhavo, basically refers to the processes that lead to rebirth. That seems to be the Buddha’s main focus for wanting to understand craving. After all, as a young prince, that was the main reason he went off into the wilds to begin with: seeing that he was subject to aging, illness, and death. He didn’t know if there was something that was not subject to aging, illness, and death, but if there was, he wanted to find it so that he wouldn’t have to suffer at the moment of death — he wouldn’t have to suffer from death at all.

You can imagine the cravings that come at death. They’re a lot stronger than simply wanting to be away from the heat or the bugs. The Buddha identified them as three. First there’s craving for sensuality, which is the craving to fantasize about sensual pleasures. Of course, from that craving comes the desire to find those sensual pleasures. It’s a craving that goes very deep. You can be perfectly okay for a while with things being the way they are outside as long as you get to fantasize about things being otherwise. But eventually your fantasies open a huge Pandora’s box. At the moment of death, when the mind can’t stay here in the body, when this being that you’ve created out of your attachment to the aggregates has to move on, if it hasn’t uprooted craving for sensuality, it’s going to go for sensual pleasures of almost any kind. People can be reborn as dogs — or even worse — through sensual craving.

Then there’s craving for becoming itself: to be a being in a particular world. When you find that you can’t be a being in this world anymore, you’re going to feel strongly threatened. If you haven’t overcome the raw craving to be a being, you’re going to grasp at any identity that opens itself up to you. And, given that we’re driven by craving at that time, this tendency can lead you anywhere.

Then there’s the craving for non-becoming, which is basically the craving to annihilate what you are or the world you’re in. Suicide would be a prime example of that, but there are other ways of trying to obliterate yourself as well: the people who drink themselves into oblivion, the people who want to destroy the world they find themselves in. They don’t like what they’ve got, so they want to blow it all up. Of course, if you’ve indulged in that kind of craving, that too becomes a craving that will carry you on at the moment of death — usually to some pretty obliterated states.

These are very strong, deep-rooted cravings that we’ve got to work with here. We have to keep that perspective in mind, because all too often, in recent times, Buddhism has become the religion of the present moment. As long as you’re okay in the present moment, that’s all that’s asked. Don’t worry about what happens after death: That’s what they tell us. In fact, there are some versions of Buddhism now that say, “We have to leave what happens after death as a big mystery, honor its status as a mystery, and not try to resolve it.”

But the whole point of the Buddha’s teaching was to bring light to that mystery and clear it up. He didn’t want to leave any stone unturned. After all, he was the Buddha — the one who knows. And one of the things he came to know in his awakening was how beings die and are reborn in line with their actions. Their actions, of course, are driven by their cravings.

We come to the present moment not because it’s the goal of the practice, but because it’s the place where we get to work on the skills we’ll need at the moment of death, so that we can see and master our cravings clearly right here, right now."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "To Comprehend Craving" (Meditations11)