Wanting Comes in Two Kinds

2.1 Wanting Comes in Two Kinds

There is a knot that older lay practitioners often run into. The sūtras are recited with gladness, the daily practice is done with a will, the heart set on practicing well, on walking the road toward liberation—and just then someone at their elbow says: doesn't Buddhism teach putting things down? You want this so much—isn't this "wanting" itself a craving?

That one sentence has stopped many people cold. Some, from that day on, no longer dare even to be diligent, afraid that too much willingness is already an offense of clinging.

This knot was brought to the Buddha while He was in the world. And the answer of the Buddha's gate is not a vague both-and—it takes "wanting" apart and divides it with full clarity. This chapter unties that knot.

One Word, Holding Opposites

The knot can be tied at all because of a fault in a single word.

The word "desire" in the Buddhist texts holds several entirely different things. There is a desire that is craving—the grasping after the five sense-pleasures and the six dusts, which, having gotten one thing, wants the next: the root of the round of birth and death, and the thing to be cut. But there is another desire that is the will toward wholesome states—the drive to hear the Dharma, to practice, to move toward liberation. The Buddha's gate calls it wholesome desire, and it is the thing to be nourished.

Two things, opposite in direction, written with the same word. So when the scriptures say "be free of desire," "cut off desire"—speaking all along of the kind to be cut—a reader, in one careless moment, cuts off the strength that should have been fed.

The treatises handle this very cleanly. The Cheng Weishi Lun—the treatise on the establishment of consciousness-only—defines desire thus:

"Having longing toward a desired object as its nature, and being the support of diligence as its function."

Desire is the function of longing—the mind reaching out toward an object it cares for. In itself it is neutral, like water: flowing into the fields, it is irrigation; flooding into the house, it is disaster. One and the same force is wholesome or unwholesome entirely by what it is turned toward. Turned toward grasping at the five sense-pleasures, it is craving; turned toward wholesome states, it becomes the very strength diligence leans on—the treatise says that wholesome desire can arouse right diligence.

So that practitioner's knot is already half untied at the first step: the question was never whether this force of wanting exists, but where it faces.

A Question in Ghosita's Park

But the second half remains. Even if what is wanted is the wholesome, is liberation—if this "wanting" keeps burning, does it not also go on without end?

The dialogue touched in chapter one must now be looked at closely. The Buddha was staying in the country of Kosambī, in Ghosita's Park, and the venerable Ānanda was there. When that brahmin had understood "relying on desire, craving is cut," what he pressed next was exactly this: if desire is used to cut craving, is this practice not "boundless"—never to be finished?

Ānanda first let him see it for himself with the simile of coming to the monastery: the thought of coming to the monastery ceases at the monastery. Then Ānanda set out the Buddha's teaching whole:

"Just so: the noble disciple cultivates the base of spiritual power that is concentration founded on desire together with the formations of striving, leaning to seclusion, leaning to dispassion, leaning to relinquishment, leaning to cessation, tending toward release—down to the cutting of craving; and once craving is cut, that desire too subsides."

The wording looks deep; the frame is utterly simple. The desire the noble disciple's practice relies on leans toward seclusion, toward dispassion, toward cessation—the direction it faces is the very stilling of desire. So the practice runs its course, and on the day craving is cut through, the desire that was used to cut it goes out as well. It is not pressed out by anyone; having arrived, it goes out of itself.

So to the brahmin's final question, Ānanda's answer was one line:

"It is answered: it is not boundless. Thus it is bounded, not boundless."

Bounded—it has a terminus, and the terminus is its own extinguishing.

Set the two desires side by side, and the whole divide comes out. Craving is boundless: having gotten one thing, it wants the next, propagating itself, never exhausted. Wholesome desire is bounded: it is the one wanting in the world that heads toward "wanting no more," and on arriving, it goes out. One fire burns toward more firewood; the other fire burns toward the place of its own going-out.

The Path Runs on This Force

This wholesome desire is not merely harmless. In the eyes of the Buddha's gate, it is the engine of the path.

The Yogācārabhūmi—the great treatise on the stages of the practitioner's way—records the order of its arising:

"What is wholesome desire? It is that a certain person, having heard the true Dharma from a buddha or from a disciple, gains pure faith… and toward wholesome states gives rise to such a desire—this is called wholesome desire."

Hearing the true Dharma, pure faith arises; from that faith, a will toward wholesome states is born. It is no impulse out of nowhere; it is the seed of the Dharma sprouting in the heart. The treatise then says that a person is able to set down house and property and formally go forth and receive the precepts precisely by "the augmenting force of this superior wholesome desire"—this desire, as an upward-pushing strength, carries a person over that first threshold of going forth and receiving the precepts.

Even the first step of receiving the precepts is taken on the push of this desire. Without it, the path never gets on the road. So the path was never "wanting no more"; the path runs on a wanting that has been turned in the right direction.

And the Buddha? Does the Buddha still have desire? The Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra draws the line plainly:

"Wanting to gain what is not yet gained, wanting more once gained—the Buddha has no such desire."

The not-yet-gotten wanted, the gotten wanted in greater measure—desire with this structure the Buddha has none of; it is cut clean through. Yet the treatise says in the same breath that the Buddha's desire to liberate beings does not cease. So long as beings are not exhausted, the wish to liberate them does not stop. What the Buddha cut was the structure of grasping—not the facing-toward itself.

One Thing to See Clearly Here

Return to the practitioner at the opening. The whole answer can now be said.

What is to be cut is the kind that "wants more once gained"—the kind that clutches and cannot be filled. The will to recite, to recollect the Buddha, to be liberated, is not on that list. It is the engine—a wholesome force the Buddha owned with His own mouth, and the treatise-masters set down in writing as able to arouse right diligence. To pinch it out along with the rest is to dismantle the engine and still hope to take the road—the cart is quiet now, but it is going nowhere.

What a practitioner owes the "wanting" in his own heart is not silencing but a test of direction. One question is enough: this wanting—once it gets there, does it want more, or does it go out? What heads toward grasping, notice it, release it; what heads toward the wholesome, recognize it, nourish it.

Walking On

Once this wholesome wanting has fixed its direction and gathered itself so that it no longer scatters, it has another name—a vow.

But vows stand high and low. The wish that the family be safe, the wish that an illness pass, the wish for a good rebirth, the wish to realize the first fruit, the wish that every taint be forever exhausted—all these vows of differing heights, how does the Buddha regard them? Does He own only the highest, and dismiss the rest as grasping?

The Buddha's answer is recorded in a discourse named, simply, the Discourse on Wishes. With His own hand He laid these vows out as a ladder. In the next chapter we climb it, rung by rung—and at the top, an unexpected turn is waiting.