2

Does the Buddha explain anywhere why the mind is capable to be unskillful and cause suffering for itself in the first place?

Specifically, why do we become attached, and why do we crave things?

Does the Buddha ever acknowledge that these mechanisms can be helpful?

Does he ever describe our ability to become attached or to crave things as mere design errors?

Or are these things just left unjudged and taken as axiomatic starting points, without ever trying to describe their origin or their larger place in the world?

Improve this question

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
3

Craving and attachment is what occurs to one caught in Mara's dominion, Mara's domain, Mara's lair and Mara's range. Mara is out there trying to entrap you.

“Mendicants, sensual pleasures are impermanent, hollow, false, and deceptive. This is made by illusion, mendicants, lamented by fools. Sensual pleasures in this life and in lives to come, sensual perceptions in this life and in lives to come; both of these are Māra’s dominion, Māra’s domain, Māra’s lair, and Māra’s range. They conduce to bad, unskillful qualities such as desire, ill will, and aggression.
MN 106

Mara the Wicked is the foremost of rulers, blazing with power and glory (AN 4.15). He is the one who tries to harm you, while the Buddha is the one who is trying to save you.

Suppose that in a forested wilderness there was an expanse of low-lying marshes, and a large herd of deer lived nearby. Then along comes a person who wants to harm, injure, and threaten them. They close off the safe, secure path that leads to happiness, and open the wrong path. There they plant domesticated male and female deer as decoys so that, in due course, that herd of deer would fall to ruin and disaster. Then along comes a person who wants to help keep the herd of deer safe. They open up the safe, secure path that leads to happiness, and close off the wrong path. They get rid of the decoys so that, in due course, that herd of deer would grow, increase, and mature.

I’ve made up this simile to make a point. And this is what it means. ‘An expanse of low-lying marshes’ is a term for sensual pleasures.‘A large herd of deer’ is a term for sentient beings. ‘A person who wants to harm, injure, and threaten them’ is a term for Māra the Wicked. ‘The wrong path’ is a term for the wrong eightfold path, that is, wrong view, wrong thought, wrong speech, wrong action, wrong livelihood, wrong effort, wrong mindfulness, and wrong immersion. ‘A domesticated male deer’ is a term for greed and relishing. ‘A domesticated female deer’ is a term for ignorance. ‘A person who wants to help keep the herd of deer safe’ is a term for the Realized One, the perfected one, the fully awakened Buddha. ‘The safe, secure path that leads to happiness’ is a term for the noble eightfold path, that is: right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right immersion.
MN 19

Comments by Ven. Sujato in DN 16:

Māra is the Buddhist deity of death, sex, and delusion; his aim is to trap beings in transmigration. He appears in many guises, both real and metaphorical, throughout the canon.

When one is in the state of the first jhana absorption, he would be out of the reach of Mara. From other suttas, we know that he would be temporarily free from the five hindrances in jhana absorption.

In the same way, there’s a time when a mendicant, quite secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unskillful qualities, enters and remains in the first absorption, which has the rapture and bliss born of seclusion, while placing the mind and keeping it connected. At that time the mendicant thinks, ‘Now I’m in a secure location and Māra can’t do anything to me.’ And Māra the Wicked also thinks, ‘Now the mendicant is in a secure location and we can’t do anything to them.
AN 9.39

To escape from Mara's dominion, one has to cut off all underlying tendencies (from DN 33 - sensual desire, repulsion, views, doubt, conceit, desire to be born, and ignorance).

Having cut off all underlying tendencies
that follow those drifting in Māra’s dominion,
they’re the ones in this world
who’ve truly crossed over,
having reached the ending of defilements.”
AN 8.29

We also hear of the "house builder". The traditional commentary says it is craving. I would have said it is ignorance.

Through many a birth in samsara have I wandered in vain, seeking the builder of this house (of life). Repeated birth is indeed suffering!

O house-builder, you are seen! You will not build this house again. For your rafters are broken and your ridgepole shattered. My mind has reached the Unconditioned; I have attained the destruction of craving.
Dhp 153-154

Comments by Ven. Acharya Buddharakkhita:

According to the commentary, these verses are the Buddha's "Song of Victory," his first utterance after his Enlightenment. The house is individualized existence in samsara, the house-builder craving, the rafters the passions and the ridge-pole ignorance.

Ignorance or avijja is the force of nature that gives rise to the mind-body phenomena, and also gives rise to the underlying tendencies that drive us towards craving. It's the natural or evolutionary instinct that drives us towards survival, sensual enjoyment and individual existence. And, according to the second noble truth, the cause of suffering is craving.

Mara is the personification of ignorance as a force of nature, a natural or evolutionary instinct, and not to be taken as a literal person.

Improve this answer
2

As I see it, this is all wrapped up in the concept of dukkha. Being alive implies an ongoing opposition to entropy. Living beings seek out food, cope with the elements, detect and deal with predators and competitors, even strive to reproduce (offsetting the inevitable losses to entropy). Social beings create networks of dependency to aid in this ongoing opposition, but these networks complicate and convolute the problem, they don't solve it. In human beings (at the least) this opposition to entropy is experienced as dukkha (in the sense of 'discontentment'). in other words:

  • We feel hunger, which makes us discontent, so we seek out food
  • We feel cold, which makes us discontent, so we seek out a fire or a covering
  • We feel hot, which makes us discontent, so we seek out shade or water
  • We feel a sexual desire, which makes us discontent, so we seek out partners
  • We feel lonely, which makes us discontent, so we seek out friends

'Discontentment' is the generic way of talking about how the way the world is doesn't quite match the way we would like the world to be, and of the urge we have to change things so that the world-as-it-is and the world-as-we-would-like-it come a bit closer together. We cannot avoid discontentment in the same sense that we cannot avoid hunger and thirst; we recurrently and incessantly have to do things to keep entropy at bay. We can't avoid it, but we can try to forestall it.

This is where we start getting into cravings and attachments. For an animal, dukkha is dealt with hand-to-mouth. An animal gets hungry, it goes and finds whatever to eat, it stops being hungry and stops looking for food. But humans can get fixations. One person might have a craving for a particular food, and walk past countless other edibles that would satisfy her hunger to get that sought-after thing. Another person might have no hunger at all, but might be worried about feeling hungry later, and thus go out and stock up on all sorts of edibles that he has no direct or immediate intention of eating. People take jobs they dislike, with bosses they despise, and stick with them because they feel a social duty to be responsible citizens or to fulfill a work ethic. Various competing discontentments — physical and practical discontentments, social discontentments, self-image discontentments — get tangled up together like a kind of knot. Each individual strand of discontentment could have been resolved (the way eating resolves hunger), but that 'knot' won't allow them to resolve. So we develop quasi-permanent cravings and attachments.

Dukkha is an arising: something that appears and can disappear. We don't have to seek food when we feel hunger; we can allow that discontentment with the world to fade on its own. But if we (say) convince ourselves that we must eat when we feel hunger, then we begin knotting discontentments together (the simple discontentment of hunger with the complex discontentment of a rule that we must follow), and then we have developed a craving (for the satisfaction of our rule) and an attachment (to the importance of the feeling of hunger). And that is where we start causing ourselves problems.

Improve this answer
1

The Buddha explained every person (life form) is born with natural underlying tendencies (called 'anusaya'; MN 64; AN 7.11). These underlying tendencies flow out of the mind in what are called 'asava' ('outflows'; 'fermentations'; 'taints'). These underlying tendencies & asava both include sensual desire & ignorance and both maintain/nourish ('ahara') the ignorance (MN 9).

Exemplified most simply, most life forms are born with mechanisms for the reproduction of the species. Particularly life forms reach a certain age of physical maturation and they automatically develop an interest in having sexual intercourse. This is where craving & attachment comes from. Craving is required by nature for the performance of sexual intercourse while attachment is required to look after & protect offspring. While craving & attachment are 'mental phenomena', for ease of perspective, its best said they are related to the biology of reproduction.

The weakness of the Buddha's teachings is not enough linkage between biology, chemicals & the mental defilements. For example, in modern science, if a person has too much sexual lust, it will be attributed to "hormones" (chemical messengers).

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.