Chanda and Tanha

Duff your system is great, especially for people wanting to bolster their observational skills in the ending of craving. Observing and recognising is a massive part of the battle. And despite the fact that you say only to sit there and observe it come and go, I know you’re just letting people work out their own active routine for bringing mindfulness through this practice. I think behaviourist interventions are great for ending craving. But I am also interested in the cognitive aspect of things — what sort of thoughts can/should we conjure up in your system to help us remain steadfast and resolute?

These are some principles I have when it comes to doing the craving discussion. Craving, being in the mundane sense rather than the “tanha” of Buddhist doctrines.

How the western mindset thinks you should end craving.

How we really should end craving:

• Taking it one moment at a time.
• Setting up a practice or techniques that play into our strengths.
• Enjoying ourselves as we learn: if you’re not enjoying yourself, you need to first clarify why you want to end this craving. This will stop the internal conflict and “seesaw” behaviours.
• Seeing every instance of craving arising as an opportunity to learn. Being patient with ourselves as we’re learning. Ending craving is a skill. Mindfulnes is a skill. Skills take time, require some mistakes, lapses, and need some skin in the game to generate genuine insight. Skin in the game means knowing and being okay with the fact that you’re a fallible meatbag automaton powered by neurotransmitters that create meaning in the world it observes. You got into this mess of craving, you most definitely can get out! It’s just a matter of training.
• Remembering to stay calm, be friendly to ourselves, and not fight against things. Letting go is about easing things off. We think it’s like hitting the brakes on a car when really, it’s more like taking your foot off the gas. Knuckle-down, bruteforce willpower is not required.

If you wanna have a more Buddhist-y inspired practice, I think it’s worthwhile learning the difference between Chanda and Tanha. Tanha is the craving, the urge, the emotional pull towards wanting more of something or less of something. It happens instantly after we encounter pleasurable or unpleasurable feeling after contact with a sensation. If we remember to keep in mind the Four Noble Truths (i.e., dispel ignorance with wisdom) we can be confident that we see suffering, this source of suffering has a cause, an end, and a means to that end via the Noble Eightfold Path. Just remembering the Four Noble Truths can be a big booster because you know that it is possible to end this thing, it’s totally doable.

A very simple technique I used to use was simply seeing how the process of me craving a thing was a totally impersonal process (i.e., mindfulness of Dependent Origination), a type of mental habit like Pavlov’s Dog that I had acquired through my actions in the past. The present moment sits on the cusp of both cause and effect; the present moment is the effect of the past and the cause of the future. I could ease myself into not seeing my craving as something naughty, sinful, or bad. But a joyful occurrence as I now had an opportunity to address the craving with proper wisdom to cause future positive results. Each millisecond of mindfulness of these truths erodes the foundations of craving. Milliseconds turn into seconds. Seconds turn into minutes. Minutes turn into hours. And so on it goes… It’s not about willpower at all. It’s about remembering to see the truth of the matter as it is occurring and then making a decision to either fall in or sit out this round of samsara. “Nah, I’d like to sit this ride on the merry-go-round out this time, it just sends me in a circle and I end up where I left off anyways without being better for it.”

Another mindfulness technique I used was as craving arose I would conjure up thoughts of the impermanent pleasure that the craving object would cause. I’d have a little hit of pleasure and then it’d be gone. I’d be back where I started, but now a little worse off because I’d tasted the object of craving and would want more in the future. In this case, I saw the spiral nature of how craving words. Craving begets craving. Ending craving begets ending craving. But these aren’t really passive things I’m doing here. I’m actively remembering things. Because learning to let go of craving is a skill. Imagine you get a booger on your finger, you wouldn’t just wait there for it to slide off. You flick it off! You don’t shake your body violently. You don’t just wiggle your finger a little, you flick. It’s the right amount of effort to get the booger off. Same with the mind and these unwholesome thoughts of craving. You flick them off by remembering some teachings that work for you, but you don’t turn your mind upside down wracking it with guilt or shame. You don’t just sit there and observe craving. You hit that sweet middle.

A really cool thing about working with one source of craving is that once you’re good at one thing, you naturally get better at others. This is because craving works exactly the same for all the objects, just through different sense doors.

Chanda is the result of us training the mind away from seeking more or less than what is. Chanda is what results when we can enjoy this moment or that moment without craving more or less from it. Chanda is when we see craving and go, “not today pal” and joyfully go about our day. We now have an eagerness just for practising the Noble Truths, no more ignorantly going from this or that whim or desire seeking more, no more trying to run away from unpleasantness. It’s when we’re practising and actually applying the teachings. We look for pleasure in wholesome activities. People have the mistaken impression that Buddhist teachings (at least in Therevada) are about ending pleasure or pain or whatever and being this kind of life-denying enterprise that’s totally un-fun and un-cool. But the joy of freedom is a reward in itself. Not having conditions for your happiness means that things like pain and mundane pleasure become irrelevant. I like talking about Chanda whenever talking about Tanha because it is important to know where we’re heading; we’re not just ending craving, we’re producing sustainable non-conditional happiness.