Introduction

Good evening and welcome to our retreat. It’s always a pleasure to be here with you, and I hope the retreat is helpful for you.

As you probably noticed, the title of the retreat is “Desire.” That’s actually a misnomer. Desire is not a monolithic thing. We have many desires, and during this retreat we’ll be talking about many, not just one.

Now, you may have heard that the Buddha says all desires are bad, but he never said that. He said that desire is basic to all of our experience. In his words, “All phenomena are rooted in desire.” As we’ll find out in the course of the retreat, every moment is composed of desires putting together experiences, either skillfully or unskillfully. We’re not mere passive recipients of sense impressions from outside. With each moment, we’re looking for something, based on desire, and everything that comes into our senses gets filtered through our desires.

Because we have so many different desires, and because each desire is like a little arrow pointing in a certain direction—up or down, right of left—we often find that our desires are working at cross-purposes, pulling us apart inside. The Buddha found, however, that we can make our desires more coherent, and that there are actually desires so skillful that they can help lead to the end of suffering.

So the question is not one of putting away or abolishing our desires. And it’s not one of simply learning to live peacefully with them. It’s more a matter of figuring out which desires are skillful and which ones are not, and of giving more energy and power to our skillful desires, so as to make them even more skillful, while at the same time starving our unskillful ones.

The Buddha’s recommendation for dealing with all of our scattered desires is to find the best possible desire, which is to put an end to suffering, and to give it precedence. Then we make all our other desires conform to it.

This overarching desire is not really foreign to us. It implicitly underlies all of our other desires. Every desire aims at happiness of one sort or another. The problem is that each desire is informed by different ideas about what happiness is and how it can be found, and some of those ideas can be very wrong.

So basically we’ve got to learn how to train our desires.

This training has to focus first on the fact that our ideas of happiness often promise quick but short-lived results with little thought for the long term. As the Buddha said, the beginning of wisdom is when you start thinking about the long term and ask the question: “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” That question is wise because you realize,

• one, that your happiness depends on your actions;

• two, that long-term happiness is possible; and

• three, that long-term happiness is better than short-term.

This sounds very simple—in fact, almost too simple. A British translator once translated a verse out of the Dhammapada that focuses on this point: “If you see that a long-term happiness comes from giving up a short-term happiness, the wise person chooses the long term over the short term.” This translator added a footnote, saying, “This could not possibly be the meaning of this verse. It’s too simple.” Well, yes, it’s simple, but the question is, how many of us actually live by that principle? All too often, we go for the short term and say, “Let the long term take care of itself.”

So the purpose of this retreat is to teach you some wisdom to prioritizing your desires and giving precedence to the long term.

One of the reasons we don’t think about the long term is because our society wants us to focus on the short term. They can sell us more of their goods that way. How many advertisements have you ever seen that promise: “Long-term happiness”? The focus instead is basically on the instant gratification you can get right now by buying their products. Human society has been this way for a long time, but one of the things special about the Buddha was he didn’t give in to social pressure.

The common reaction is to think, “Long-term happiness is impossible, so I might as well focus on the short term.” But the Buddha made up his mind to focus consistently on the long term and see how successful he could be. He was willing to give up anything that got in the way of his quest for long-term happiness. He tried many different paths until he actually found a path that leads to total happiness and puts a total end to suffering. And it is something human beings can do. He found this not because he was a special divine being. Basically, he was taking qualities that we all have in potential form and devoting himself to developing them as far as they can go: qualities like resolution, ardency, and heedfulness. These are the three qualities, he said, that brought about his awakening.

So the path begins with giving priority to your desire to put an end to suffering and it gives you information on how you can do that. In other words, it gives you a set of values—which is that the end of suffering is possible and it’s eminently worthwhile—and it tells you the steps and techniques needed to get there.

To accept the values and follow the steps will mean that you’re going to have to give up some old, cherished habits. So the Buddha’s teachings are not just about information. When the texts describe how he would teach others, they use four verbs: He would instruct, urge, rouse, and encourage—one part information; three parts encouragement. When I was translating the teachings of the forest masters, I found that with them it’s pretty much the same proportion. A little bit of information, a lot of pep talks.

What does it mean to give priority to the end of suffering? It means that you have to sort through your other desires to see which ones are in line with that objective and which ones are not. This may sound a little bit too cerebral, but actually, we’re engaging in a selective process like this all the time. As I said, the Buddha saw that every moment is rooted in desire. And because our desires aim in different directions, we’re constantly judging which ones are worth the effort to follow and which ones aren’t. Often we pass judgment emotionally, subconsciously. The Buddha is simply asking us to do it more consciously and to bring a little more wisdom and a larger perspective to our judgments.

He recommends a course of training for prioritizing our desires, in several stages. At every stage, you’ll find that all the desires you’re being asked to cultivate are noble and honorable: desiring to develop qualities like discernment, truth, virtue, relinquishment, universal goodwill, and calm. As the Buddha said, the path is admirable in the beginning, admirable in the middle, admirable in the end. So it’s a good path to be on even if you don’t get all the way to the end.

This is a point we’ll emhasize several times in the course of the retreat. You may decide that the total end of suffering is a little bit too far away for you, but remember that every step you take in that direction will lead to greater happiness and well-being. I’m not asking you all to gain awakening by the end of the retreat, but every step you make in the right direction will be well worth the effort.

However, you also have to keep in mind that some desires may be helpful on one stage of the path and obstacles on another. In other words, on some stages of the path you have to focus on developing certain qualities that you will then have to abandon on a later stage. So you have to think strategically. In fact, the whole path is strategic. It’s a fabricated path that leads to an unfabricated goal—a path nurtured through desire leading to a goal that’s so satisfactory that it puts an end to any need for any further desires.

Now, the state of no desire cannot be cloned. In other words, you can’t say, “Okay, I’ll accept everything as it is, won’t want it to be different, and that’ll be the end of suffering.” That doesn’t work. The Buddha is not asking you to pretend that you don’t have desires. He’s offering something so satisfactory that when you attain it, you won’t need desire. You may have heard the path referred to as “the path of being awakened,” in which you imitate the qualities of an awakened person as you understand them. But the true path is not a path of imitation or pretense. It requires honesty and truthfulness, really getting to know yourself to see how deep your desires go. In fact, you’ll be surprised to find how deeply desires run everything that goes on in your mind.

So the actual path is one of admitting that you have desires and learning how to use them strategically.

What I’m saying here may differ from what you have heard to the effect that we can’t have any desire on the path, that we have to let the path unfold on its own, that the desire to have things different from what they are is the cause of suffering. And it is true that the Buddha said there are three types of craving that cause suffering. But when you want to learn from the Buddha’s teachings, you have to listen carefully to his words and attentively watch his actions. Even though he says that the three types of craving cause suffering, he also says that there are types of desire that are part of the path. The desire to develop skillful qualities and the desire to abandon unskillful qualities, for example, is part of right effort.

As for his actions, the Buddha didn’t spend his life simply accepting things. If he had simply accepted things, he would have stayed in the palace. He realized he needed to make a change in his actions and a change in his behavior if he wanted to find true happiness. Having found that happiness, he didn’t stop with making a change in himself. He also made a change in the world. After gaining awakening, he didn’t just sit there under the Bodhi tree. He spent 45 years going all over northern India on foot, finding anyone who could benefit from his teachings and trying to express the teaching in such a way that they would be willing to put it into practice.

Not only that, he wanted to establish a religion that would last for many centuries. Look, for example, at the rules he set down for the monks and the nuns. You have to read the origin stories for these rules to get a sense of how many problems he had to deal with: everything from brahmans who didn’t want to wipe their rear, all the way to nuns who tried to kill a monk. There are thousands of these rules. Can you imagine having to spend your time dealing with that kind of thing? Here he is, trying to teach the Dhamma so that people could gain awakening, and the nuns take stones and try to crush a monk’s hut. As for the monks, some of them exposed themselves to nuns.

He said he was going to establish the religion for many centuries. You don’t do that without having a strong determination. So both in his words and his actions, the Buddha is endorsing the principle that some desires, even very strong ones, are skillful, the important thing being that he learned how to use desires strategically so as to get the best possible results.

This strategy of using desire to overcome desire is found in many parts of the Canon. I’ll give you two examples.

The first is the image of trying to get milk out of a cow. Some people try to get milk out of the cow by twisting the horn. They twist and they don’t get any milk. They twist harder, they still don’t get any milk. Some of them will say, “Let’s stop twisting the horn.” Then they just sit there, giving up on the idea of getting milk, and finding satisfaction in simply being aware of the cow. Now, cow-awareness does stop harassing the cow, and it’s much easier on you. But cow-awareness is not going to get you the milk that’s actually there in the cow. You simply have to pull the right part of the cow. So the question is not a matter of having no effort and no desire. The question is a matter of focusing your efforts and desires at the right place.

The second example comes from a passage where Ven. Sāriputta is talking to a group of monks who are about to go to a place where Buddhism has never been taught before. He asks them, “If wise people there ask you, ‘What does the Buddha teach?’ what are you doing to say?” They respond, “We’d come a long way to hear what you would have to say.” He replies that the first thing he would say would be, “Our teacher teaches the subduing of desire and passion.” Then he goes on to explain why the subduing of desire and passion a good thing. And in the course of his explanation, he’s actually explaining why someone would want to do that. He’s showing the monks how to give rise in their listeners to a desire to follow the teaching.

So, even though we’re trying to aim at the end of desire, we use desire to get there. After all, the path is something you have to do, and to do it, you have to want to do it. It’s not a mushroom that sprouts in the forest on its own.

An important part of this retreat will involve mastering the skills of right concentration, one of the important factors of the path, and that will require cultivating the desire to want to get the mind into that state of concentration and keep it there. We do this partly to put ourselves in the right mood to follow the path, and partly to put the mind in a good position to observe itself clearly. To progress on the path will depend on your ability to observe your own actions, to see what works and what doesn’t work in the direction of putting an end to the causes of suffering. That will require being alert, mindful, and focused, along with a strong sense of well-being. The well-being is needed so that you won’t be so hungry to go after immediate pleasures. These are the qualities fostered by concentration when it’s right.

The organization of the retreat will be as follows: meditation during most of the day, talks on the topic of skillful desire in the evening, and talks on meditation in the morning. There will be a session of questions and answers in the afternoon. We’ll provide pieces of paper on which you can write down your questions and put them here in the bowl. I can’t guarantee that we’ll get to all the questions—during the last retreat there were days when the bowl contained an enormous pile—but we’ll try to answer all the questions that are relevant to the topic of the retreat.

So. Rather than cluttering your mind with more information tonight, I’d like us to sit in meditation for a while, focused on the breath. That will get you in the best position to benefit the most from this retreat.

(Guided meditation)