Dependent Arising, Craving and Clinging

• Craving and clinging are two aspects of one process; you cannot really divorce them.

• Craving.  Tanha, thirst. A felt a sense of pleasant or unpleasant urgency. Has to do with compulsive desire; Driven by pleasant feeling tone. 

• Clinging: Magnetic attraction or repulsion, has to do with an emerging narrative. the mind clings/attaches to the craving and the object of craving. More about perception and thought. Clinging is mostly narrative. 

• It is literally built into our cognitive process. We are, if you will, born with the pathology of desire.

• From the Dīgha Nikāya: “Desire is threefold: namely, desire for sense pleasures,
  desire for becoming and desire for non-being.”

• The Buddha’s practical advice is to train ourselves to observe the process of desire, and with that observation we can let it go. 

• Often not about the craving of the object, more about the satisfaction of the craving.   

• Contemplative questions: what is the craving about? What need is not being met? If I do not satisfy the craving, then what would I need to deal with? 

• Cow Dung story (see below)

• Craving is one of the most basic and commonplace experiences for people. We concoct a self around craving and clinging. “I” crave to have, and that which “I” crave to avoid.

• Craving from sensual desire, This refers primarily to the ultimately endless un-quenchable craving for sensory stimulation. Including thoughts. It is often likened in the texts to a torrent of water, gushing out from us all the time, this desire for sensual things.

• This insight into taṅhā shows us how craving give birth to self. The whole notion of craving is productive of self: that which “I” crave to have, and that which “I” crave to avoid.

• We appear to be most ourselves when we want something or do not want something: when we are salivating over something in the window of a shop, for example, or desperately trying to avoid something. Yet, in times of repose and relaxation, in times of genuine absorption into a task, there might be very little self there. 
• There is no great self emerging all the time. I can be doing a task and all of the sudden say “I do not like this; this is boring.” Then, there “I” am.

• The craving of becoming, it is you on a good day, in that you want to be you, perhaps forever, or wish some state to continue. In its most extreme form, in religious and philosophical thinking, it can pan out in terms of the idea of immortality. So it is actually linking to the craving or grasping after something immutable within us, which we feel constitutes our reality, or our self—it is this that you desire to go on forever.

• It is also the craving for novelty, innovation, new phenomena. You are craving to become this and that, in a round of endless stimulation.We are always looking for the new thing that is going on. “Where’s the new teaching going on?”

• The desire not-to-be, is seen as further down the chain. One of the main and tragic aspects of is the drive toward suicidality. This is an important dimension of that gives rise to the desire to “annihilate” both self and other and manifests as aggressive and self-destructive impulses.

• Craving has a soul-mate clinging that goes under the name upadana. This means to cling to grasp, to attach. This word has to do with Brahmins, ritualistically keeping a fire going in their home as a  source of  propitiatory rites, gaining favor from gods and goddesses. 

• The Buddha turns this into a metaphor. There are three fires, says the Buddha: greed, aversion and delusion. What do we do to keep our “three fires” burning? We feed them by the continual act of grasping.

• You can be clinging to the desire to get something you want, or to the idea that you can avoid something, or to grasping after views.

•  They are usually contrasted with “cooling”, which is a synonym for nibbāna. So one who has been awakened is cooled; it does not mean they’re cold, it just means that the fires of greed, aversion and delusion are no longer operative.

• Upādāna, this whole notion of clinging, leads to the question as to what, exactly, we are clinging to? It appears as if we are attempting to cling to some “essential” element of the object or the person—that which constitutes the “reality” of thing, person, situation, idea etc.

• Film https://chicagomeditation.org/form-is-emptiness/

• It is, however, actually almost the instinctive feeling that whatever quality, that you think the object or the person etc., possesses, is possessed intrinsically.

 

 

 

Resources

Carlson, P.  “Dependent Origination Review” https://orlandoinsightmeditation.org/2023/11/2023-deerhaven-fall-retreat-contingent-origination-review/  November 20, 2023

Bhikkhu Bodhi. SN 12.1, Dependnet Origination. https://suttacentral.net/sn12.1/en/bodhi?lang=en&reference=none&highlight=false Sutta Central

Chicago Insight Mediation Group. Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form.  https://chicagomeditation.org/form-is-emptiness/ June 2021

Peacock, John. Mindfulness and the Cognitive Process. https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/article/mindfulness-the-cognitive-process/ Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. September 2011.

with kindness

Andy