The Crucial Importance of Desire and Intention

Namo tassa bhagavato arahato samma-sambuddhassa Namo tassa bhagavato arahato samma-sambuddhassa Namo tassa bhagavato arahato samma-sambuddhassa — Homage to the Buddha, the blessed, noble and fully self-awakened one.

I thought this evening we'd tackle this crucial role of desire and intention. There are three words that we have to be clear about: tanhā, chanda and cetanā.

This word tanhā originally means a drought. From that you get the idea of thirst and it's used only for unwholesome desires. It always is included in dependent origination, in the five middle factors, which are the ones that are a process. First of all, you have a contact with one of your sense bases. Remember the mind, heart is a sense base. Something has to come up into that base of consciousness: moods, emotions, thoughts, images. Then there's a relationship to what we are experiencing.

We give it first of all a name, a concept, and then we have a feeling arises with it. Dependent on those we have that reaction that we call a desire. That desire, remember, is coming from a conditioning of wanting and not wanting. In this case it's always unwholesome in dependent origination because it describes how we create suffering for ourselves. After that you have an identity: I want. Then there's the empowerment.

That's where we make a distinction between the desire and an intention. If I take an example, you see an apple. The first is just a seeing an object. It's round, etc. Then it's given a name: apple. With the word apple comes a nice feeling usually and then you might feel hungry so there's a desire for the apple which may come from just ordinary appetite but in this case with tanhā it becomes because we're greedy.

Then you identify with that. I want that apple. You can see there how the language confuses us. It creates a delusion, gives you the idea that the I comes first. I want the apple, but actually it comes towards the end of that process. Once you have that identity, then you empower that desire. That's when you become an apple eater. So that's the first word, tanhā.

The second word is chanda. Actually, in the discourses, chanda can either be wholesome or unwholesome. But in later Buddhism, the more Abhidhamma commentarial side, the chanda tended to be used only for what was a wholesome desire. We do need desire, but we need those desires that lead to liberation, that lead to happiness in this very life. So that's chanda. We can translate it as a desire. You've got to be careful. These words are so confusing. A resolution is the energy of wanting something. I'll tell you where the confusion comes in a minute.

The third word is cetanā. Cetanā is connected to the word citta, which means mind. Here we're talking about intention or purpose. There are these two things. There's a desire, which can be wholesome and unwholesome, and there's the purpose.

The importance of that is that the desire itself, the actual energy, the wanting, is neutral. What makes it wholesome and unwholesome is the cetanā, your purpose for doing something. To get a feel for what that desire is as opposed to purpose you might say one thing you can do is if you're very hungry, just sit with the food in front of you and just feel the desire. The purpose is obvious you want to eat the food but by sitting there just looking at the food and smelling the aromas and all that and you can get that feel for what desire is as an energy.

If you want to really experience it, this is what I used to say, but it's been ruined now. I used to say, turn on the TV when it's your favorite program. Sorry, sit in front of the TV when it's your favorite program and don't turn it on. But unfortunately, iPlayer has ruined all that. You can always catch up with it. Never mind.

If we take an example from physics of throwing a stone, the energy within the arm is transferred into the stone and you cannot separate the force from the stone. You can't stop it in mid-air and say, well, look, this is the force and this is the stone. They're all one. But the purpose of throwing the stone can be various. When I'm walking around the property here, some of the stones from the car park have come onto the path where they shouldn't be. So I might just pick one up and flick it back onto the car park. I might find a flat stone, we have a little pond, and I might throw it on the pond to see it skim just for the joy of it.

But then we also have rabbits. Most of you or some of you will remember my experience with moles and how we had to get rid of the lawns and create a garden. So now we have rabbits who come in and dig little holes. So I might be tempted to pick up a stone not to harm the rabbit you understand but to give it the impression that it shouldn't actually be digging a hole in the garden and they've got a whole meadow to go and do it in. These are my intentions but the actual energy or the desire to throw the stone is neutral. There's a distinction there.

The Buddha makes it quite clear. He says, I say to you that it is the cetanā that creates a kamma. Kamma here is not the same as karma, which has come into our language as comeuppance and what you deserve. Kamma here just means an action. Remember that when you repeat an action, you create a habit. As we know, a collection of habits is your personality, your character. Once you've got that, then your destiny is assured. Something is driving us to our destiny and it's these habits that we've collected throughout life. Our purpose, of course, is to discern those habits that lead us to perdition and those habits that lead to liberation.

I'll give you another example, which comes from the Vinaya, the rule of the monks. If, for instance, I see somebody's mobile and I'm very attracted to it, and I think to myself, I'd like that mobile, because they've left it unguarded on a piece of furniture or something. If I just allow the thoughts to process, in a sense, I'm building up a wrong intention. It might be that this intention becomes so strong that I actually move towards the mobile with the intention at the back of my mind to slip it in my pocket. And then I stop myself. I stop myself in that process. What the heck's going on? This is called a dukkaṭa. This is already a small offense. It's not serious.

However, the desire for this mobile overtakes me and I again approach the mobile and I just put my hand on it and then, in a sort of horror, I take it back. Now, this is what's called a thullaccaya. It's a serious offense. I've actually gone and touched the object that I'm wanting.

But again the desire for this mobile completely overtakes me. I go to it, I touch it and I move it a nanometer. That's all. Just a nanometer. I suddenly realize what I've done. I drop it and I walk away. It's too late as far as the Vinaya is concerned. I've committed an act of stealing even if I don't get it. It's an act of stealing and in the Vinaya this is a very serious offense. It's called a pārājika.

Pārājika translates as end of life, which means that you have to leave the order and you can't join it again in this lifetime. This is an example to show the process of how we can unwittingly be developing a desire which then suddenly grabs us and we do something that we ought not to have done. The moral there is don't become a monastic.

Just as a reflection: When we have a negative desire, so this is to do with a sense of self. When we have a negative desire, when we're doing something or saying something, there's always a separation. You create a duality between the person who doesn't want to do something and what you're actually doing.

A simple example might be washing pots. You're fed up with washing pots, especially if you've got a family and all these pots and pans everywhere and you're fed up with it and you're washing the pots. Your sense of self is: I don't, I shouldn't be doing this. Somebody else should be doing this and I'm fed up with doing this. And you're washing the pots at the same time. There's a split there between the sense of self and what you're actually doing and that's why sometimes you lose your attention and you drop a pot and break it and then you're really mad.

If you have a positive craving, if you have something that you really want an indulging thing, then here you can immerse completely into that experience. So it might be that you're very fond of horror movies or something like that and you're knowing yourself that perhaps you shouldn't be watching these. I'm not saying you shouldn't, you're saying it to yourself. And then you absorb into the film. You lose yourself into the film.

The problem with going into something from a position of indulgence is that you go in with prejudice and it's selective. For instance, supposing now you go to a restaurant and there's a pizza. You've had all these pizzas. So you've got this idea of what a proper pizza ought to be. You walk into the restaurant, you ask for a pizza and it just doesn't live up to what you expect a pizza to be. So you're very disappointed and you eat it, of course, grumbling. And you won't go back, of course. But if this was the first pizza you'd ever eaten, you'd be delighted by it.

Another thing is when you are eating something like sticky toffee pudding. If you eat sticky toffee pudding and what you really want is the sweetness of it, you're prejudiced towards, you're biased towards tasting the sweetness of the sticky toffee pudding. It might have all sorts of different subtle flavors but you're unaware of those. You've brushed them out as it were because all you're interested in is sweetness and that's what indulgence does. It just looks for what will gratify it.

For instance, another distinction would be wine tasters or tea tasters better. They have to put the tea or the wine on the tongue and roll it round and really be aware of all the tastes that come out from that whereas when we drink tea normally we just have this one taste in mind and if there isn't enough milk we don't like it, there's not enough sugar, if it's not strong enough and so on and so forth. It's a case of recognizing that whenever we're doing something from a position of indulgence, it's always going to crimp our experience. It's going to limit it. Apart from, of course, creating a further, greater dependency on it. They become addictions at various levels or other. Because you're always trying to satisfy this indulgence.

The fact of the matter is, it can't be satisfied. Because that's not where the suffering is coming from. The suffering is coming from some sense of lack within us, some sense of neediness within us. The object that we're using to fulfill it can never cure that sense of neediness. It just gratifies it for a little while. The only way we can cure the neediness is by staying with it until it evaporates. And the energy of that habit is slowly undermined and disappears. Looking to indulge ourselves, hoping to get rid of the sense, hoping to get rid of that craving is a non-starter. It just gets worse.

Going back to cetanā, remember that that's your conditioning factor. The purpose for which we are doing something is actually reinforcing a habit that we already have. So it's really important to catch that purpose. Sometimes in the discourses, remember that the word chanda, desire, will be used in a sense of wholesome and unwholesome. But don't be confused by that if you come across it, because it's always the purpose for which we're doing something which is conditioning us.

Just one little example, which comes from the Visuddhimagga, the path of purification, which was written by a monk called Buddhaghosa in the fifth century. It's got to be one of the great spiritual manuals of the world. In that book, which is a big tome, and it's as dry as you could imagine. It has a whole section on the Dhamma, a whole section on how to develop beautiful mental states, such as the use of love and mettā and things like that, and a whole section on how to develop insight. It's a really beautiful book.

In it, he gives this example of a teacher who's with his students. While he's talking, his hand lifts up and he stops and very slowly puts his hand down. All the students want to know what happened there. They said, what happened? He said, I didn't note my intention. In other words, his mindfulness is so acute, is so in the present moment that even the smallest intention would normally be acknowledged. In this case, he hadn't. But he recognized that his hand shouldn't be there. And he very slowly put it back. He intended to put his hand back where it ought to be. That's how awake we can become in daily life. It's especially important to be awake whenever we're making decisions that are of an ethical nature.

Finally, this chanda is a desire which grows with the habit of doing something until it becomes a zeal and it becomes part of the four bases of power or success. I've covered that in an earlier presentation and that's your zeal and with it there comes the energy to support that aspiration. Then there's the commitment, the devotion of the heart to what you're doing. Finally, in terms of anything that needs an investigation, the path of insight, there comes that discrimination, that investigation of what we're experiencing. This chanda moves from being the slightest little desire, good desire in this case, to a real zeal, a real desire to achieve something. That's your chanda.

Just to sum up very quickly, we got these three words. This tanhā which is any desire which we can perceive or realize is unwholesome. Chanda which is a desire which is wholesome. What we have to be careful of is this cetanā, the purpose for which we're doing something. That sometimes takes a little reflection, because it can get a bit dodgy.

On the surface of things, we might be doing something for good purpose. I'm helping somebody just out of the goodness of my heart. But when they don't thank me, I'm very upset. That shows that underneath there I'm expecting some sort of praise. Trying to get all that stuff into consciousness really demands an ability to just stop every so often and recognize what's going on inside us.

I hope my words have not caused any confusion and that by your careful observation of desire, you will drive yourself relentlessly to your liberation from all suffering.