“mindfulness is a means for overcoming craving.“
Below are highlights of a recent Tricycle article on Cutting the Roots of Craving. I have three of Gunaratana’s books now and the provocative excerpt below comes from his latest book co-written by Veronique Ziegler.
May the words below offer some helpful advice to overcome our addiction for “more.”
Cutting the Roots of Craving
Desire is beginningless. Yet through right mindfulness we can learn to abandon it. By Bhante Henepola Gunaratana and Veronique Ziegler Jul 18, 2024
Everything we do pivots around craving and Its insatiability is such that it yields more craving
whenever we ask ourselves the question “Am I satisfied?” we always get the same answer: “Not yet.”
There is no point in time before which a state of desirelessness can be found.
in dependence upon feeling, there is craving.
Everything happens in your mind. When you talk, write, perform any deed whatsoever, watch your mind at all times in order to guard it against defilements and prevent craving from invading it.
Look at your own mind to see the invisible greed, anger, jealousy, and all the other defilements that are the real cause of your suffering.
If you end greed now, you attain liberation now. If you end greed one minute later, you attain liberation one minute later. If you end greed tomorrow, you attain liberation tomorrow.
Craving can be found in our very own mind. Understanding it is a personal exploration that must be undertaken individually, for the solution to abandon it is also in our own minds.
How to Abandon Craving
there is a great danger in sensual pleasures—not that they cause immediate harm or risk to one’s life (although some sensory pleasures can definitely be lethal) but that sense enjoyments are impermanent. And because they are impermanent they can never be satisfactory.
to live a happy and healthy life. We must use our senses, but we must do so with wisdom,
Mindfulness is a means for overcoming craving.
© 2024 by Bhante Gunaratana and Veronique Ziegler, Dependent Origination in Plain English. Reprinted by arrangement with Wisdom Publications.
Bhante Henepola Gunaratana is a Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka and the author of Mindfulness in Plain English. He is president of the Bhavana Society in High View, West Virginia, an organization that promotes meditation and monastic life.
Veronique Ziegler earned her doctorate degree in experimental high-energy physics from the University of Iowa working on the BaBar experiment at SLAC National Laboratory in Menlo Park, California. She then took a research assistant position at the same lab and later a staff scientist position at Jefferson National Laboratory in Newport News, Virginia, where she currently works full time and is involved in the lab particle spectroscopy experimental program. In 2018, she started attending Bhante Gunaratana’s dhamma classes. She has been an avid dhamma student ever since.
Life Matters 