The post titled Craving for Sensual Pleasure is now up on Buddhism for All. Angela from the Buddhism.net team reflected on it, and invites you to do so too.
🌕 Angela’s Reflections:
Craving for sensual pleasure is suffering. The tonality of this kind of suffering has a deep sense of unease, grasping, desperation, compulsion and overall deep dissatisfaction with everything. Two teachings stand out from this post about suffering.
First, Buddha’s teaching on suffering caused by craving for sensual pleasure, comparing it to a leper “with sores and blisters on his limbs, being devoured by worms, scratching the scabs off the openings of his wounds with his nails, cauterizing his body over a burning charcoal pit.”
Second, Moggallāna’s teaching on sensory experience without suffering. “How, friends, is one uncorrupted [by the senses]? Here, having seen a form with the eye, a monk is not intent upon a pleasing form and not repelled by a displeasing form. He dwells having set up mindfulness of the body, with a limitless mind, he fully understands liberation of mind and liberation by wisdom, wherein unwholesome states cease without remainder. He is then uncorrupted amidst form cognized by the eye. When a monk dwells thus, forms do not overwhelm him, he overwhelms them.”
🌱 Journal Reflection Prompts for You:
- 📝 Read the post and reflect on Buddha’s teaching on suffering with the leper simile. Have you experienced craving for sensual pleasure as described? Can you relate to this teaching? Why or why not?
- 📝 Read the post and reflect on Moggallāna’s teaching on sensory experience without craving or repelling. To what extent have you experienced seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling without attachment or aversion? Moggallāna described the mind as being limitless, liberated by wisdom, with cessation of unwholesome states.
Featured image, an AI-generated artwork, by Angela Ho.
