CRAVING - Tanha
| "Dependent on feeling as a condition craving
arises." With this link we take a major step forward in the movement of the wheel of existence. All the factors we have mentioned so far - consciousness, mentality-materiality, the six sense faculties, contact and feeling - represent the results of past kamma. They arise through the maturation of kamma from our past, from volitional formations. But now with the arising of craving experience moves from the past to the causes operating in the present, those causes which generate a new existence in the future. When we experience pleasant feelings we become attached to them. We enjoy them, relish them, crave for a continuation of them. Thus craving arises. When we experience painful feeling, this pain awakens an aversion, a desire to eradicate its source, or to flee from them. But this pattern, by which feeling leads to craving, does not occur as a necessity. This is a very important point. Between feeling and craving there is a space, a gap which can become a battlefield where the round of existence is brought to an end. The battle fought in this space determines whether bondage will continue indefinitely into the future or whether it will be replaced by enlightenment and liberation. For if, instead of yielding to craving, we contemplate our feeling with mindfulness and awareness and understand them as they really are, then we can prevent craving from arising and from generating renewed existence in the future. |