But I couldn't let this go without mentioning it. The February 25, 2009 post on my teacher Gudo Nishijima's blog has some nice comments about my new book, Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate
. The post is called "Master Dogen's Thoughts on Desire." The blog itself has been very good lately (much better than my drivel here) and I urge you to take a look.This way of looking at desire is a really key point. The common translation of Buddha's Four Noble Truths has it that the cause of suffering is desire and the elimination of desire ends suffering. This dovetails nicely with Judeo-Christian-Islamic revulsion towards desires of the flesh. The idea sounds remarkably like the church's teaching that we must deny the desires of the body to experience the Heavenly bliss of the soul. I think much of what's taught by Westerners who follow Eastern religious paths, including Buddhism, proceeds from this idea.
But Dogen's point of view was totally different. He states that the suppression of desire and desire itself are one and the same. You might also say that one element of desire itself is our revulsion towards that desire. By fixating on that one aspect of desire, the desire to suppress desire, we only increase desire.
This doesn't mean we should simply give in to whatever lurid cravings cross our minds. That won't help us either. The only thing I've found that works is to be very, very quiet and see desire for what it really is. And the only way to do that is to do zazen every damn day. Seeing desire for what it is, is the first step. Doing what needs doing is another matter.
It kind of reminds me of this riff I heard by one of my favorite local comedians Eddie Pepitone. He talks about how there are world leaders out there torturing babies and he feels like a bad person when he has a pudding at three in the morning (he gets to it towards the end of this video). It's a funny bit that shows how we humans work. Some of us don't have it together to see that the most heinous things we do are wrong while others are sensitive to the most innocuous of offenses. That sensitivity is a generally good thing. But it can be taken too far.
Religious leader types are very much aware that "spiritual" people tend to be very sensitive to the notion of being a "bad person" for even the most minor transgressions. And many of these religious leaders prey upon that, knowing that feelings of guilt among their followers ultimately increase their own power over those followers. Since each member of the congregation has his or her own secret transgressions, it's not even necessary to spell them out. But sometimes it helps to goose the crowd by defining even the most universal of human cravings or transgressions as "evil" in the eyes of the deity, or, in the case of wanna-be Buddhists, as desires that need to be stamped out.
Desire and the desire to be free of desire arise simultaneously. Try as you might you can't fight desire with itself. The only way out is to see what's going on from a completely different angle.
