Examination of Desire and the Desirous

You want something: a cup of coffee, a person's approval, a new phone. There seems to be someone who wants, and a wanting that this someone has. The wanting comes and goes; the someone stays. The sixth chapter asks how the one who desires and the desire are related. Which comes first? Do they arise together? Are they one thing or two?

So far the chapters have looked at causes, motion, the senses, the aggregates and the elements, the furniture of the world. Chapter 6 turns to the afflictions (kleśa), the states that drive suffering, beginning with desire or passion (rāga). It also gives the most careful working-out yet of the question 'together or apart?', which the chapters ahead will use again and again.

The verses

The translation is new, made from the Sanskrit for this site. The Sanskrit is given above each verse; it follows the GRETIL e-text (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Which comes first?

The chapter begins with order in time (6.1–2). Suppose the desirous person came first, existing before desire and free of it. Then desire could arise in dependence on him. But a person free of desire is not 'the desirous one'. He is just someone. The name 'desirous' needs the desire. So the desirous one cannot come first.

Suppose instead that desire came first. Then where would it be? Desire is always someone's desire, desire of someone for something. A desire floating free, belonging to no one, is never met (6.2). And the same reasoning runs from the other side: whether or not desire exists, the desirous one cannot be established before it, after it, or without it.

Then together?

The natural next move is to say they arise at the same moment (6.3). But two things that arise side by side, each complete, do not depend on each other. A cat and a dog born at the same moment in different towns are simultaneous, not related. If desire and the desirous one each arose with their own nature, at the same time, neither would need the other, and we are back to a desire belonging to no one and a desirous one with no desire.

Look more closely at 'together' (saha). For two things to be together, they must be either one thing or two (6.4). If they are one, they are not together: a thing is not 'with' itself. You do not keep yourself company. If they are two, really separate, each with its own nature, what makes them together? Their being separate gives no reason for it.

Verse 6.5 sharpens this. If togetherness came from oneness, it would not need a partner, since a single thing would be 'together' all by itself. If togetherness came from separateness, it would not need a partner either, since anything separate from anything could be called together with it. Either way, 'together' would hold without the companion it is supposed to be about.

The circle

Verses 6.6–9 describe a trap that the mind falls into, and it is worth seeing clearly. The opponent wants desire and the desirous one to be together. To be together, they must first be two separate things. So the opponent assumes they are separate. But if they were already established as separate, each complete on its own, there would be no need to say they were together (6.7).

Then the opponent turns the other way. Since they cannot be established as separate, he reaches for togetherness to explain them. And to make sense of togetherness, he needs separateness again (6.8). Each answer is propped up by the other, and neither stands on its own (6.9).

This loop is not a fault in the opponent's cleverness. It is what happens whenever we try to relate two things that we have first taken to be self-standing. Self-standing things cannot be related, because relation would compromise their standing alone. And unrelated things cannot be together. The way out is not a better answer inside the loop. It is to drop the assumption that started it.

Neither together nor apart

So desire is established neither together with the desirous one nor apart from him (6.10). And like desire, so with every phenomenon. This is the general lesson of the chapter, and it will return with fire and fuel (Chapter 10), the agent and the action (Chapter 8) and the self and its aggregates (Chapter 18).

'Neither together nor apart' is not a mysterious third relation. It is a non-implicative negation: it refuses both answers without putting a new one in their place. What it leaves is the ordinary fact the opponent was trying to explain. Desire and the desirous one are designated in dependence on each other: someone is called desirous because of a desire, and a desire is called someone's because someone has it. That is all the relation there is, and it is enough.

What is left standing

People still want things, and the wanting still pulls. The chapter does not say desire is unreal or that it does not matter. Buddhist practice takes desire very seriously, because it drives suffering. What the chapter removes is the picture of a fixed desirer who owns a desire as a thing, or of a desire as a thing that seizes a person from outside.

This has a practical edge. If there were a self-standing desirer, desire would be part of what he is, and he could never be free of it. If desire were a self-standing thing, it could only be fought, like an enemy. Since neither is found, desire is seen as it is: an occurrence that arises in dependence on conditions, a body, a history, an object, an interpretation, and that changes when those change. As the bonus article on the logic of dependency puts it, practice is not an attack on fixed defects but a way of arranging conditions.

Next time a strong wanting arises, look at it. Where is the wanter, apart from the wanting? Where is the wanting, apart from someone wanting something? The pull may still be there, vivid. But it is not a thing owned by a thing. It moves, and it can loosen.

In the books

The books do not discuss this chapter by name, but they take up its themes.

• The Logic of Dependency (bonus article), the section 'A Different Path: Conditions and Openness': anger is not a thing with its own nature; it arises in dependence on conditions, and practice changes the conditions rather than fighting a fixed defect.
• Chapter 4, Mutual Dependency and the Non-Hierarchy of Relation (The Logical Necessity of a Substrateless World), the sections 'The Simultaneous Co-Definition of Entities and Relations' and 'Objection: Is Mutual Dependence Circular?': why things defined together are not caught in a vicious circle, and why relation is not a new foundation.
• Chapter 4, the section 'How Things Meet: Neither One Nor Two': whatever arises in dependence on something is neither identical with it nor different from it, the same pattern as 'neither together nor apart'.

Talks on YouTube:

• Dependent Arising: Relation without Relata.
• Core Logic 2: The Identity vs. Difference Paradox, on the 'one or different' test used here and in Chapter 10.

Words to know

• Desire (rāga): passion, attachment; one of the three root afflictions with aversion and confusion.
• The desirous one (rakta): the one who desires; literally 'one who is coloured' by passion.
• Affliction (kleśa): a state that disturbs the mind and drives suffering.
• Together (saha, sahabhāva): being with, existing alongside.
• Separate (pṛthak, pṛthaktva): apart, distinct.
• Oneness (ekatva): being the same thing.