Extinction and detachment

If suffering has a locatable cause, it can be removed by addressing that cause: through dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), the second Noble Truth traces suffering back to craving (taṇhā), the grasping thirst that clings to pleasures, to existence, or to non-existence and keeps the wheel of rebirth turning. It follows that liberation requires neither satisfying desire nor forcibly repressing it, but extinguishing its root, the thirst itself: Buddhism thus falls squarely on the side of detachment, not from contempt for pleasure but because craving is the very engine of dis-ease.

Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (the sermon at Benares) · Dhammapada, ch. XXIV (Craving)

The discipline of desire demands desiring only what is up to us and consenting to the rest: desires for external things are to be suspended, even extinguished. Epictetus advises not to ask that things happen as you wish, but to wish them as they happen.

Epictetus, Enchiridion, §8

The path of knowledge presupposes detachment (vairāgya): so long as the subject desires the objects of the empirical world, it remains caught in māyā (appearance) and in identification with body and mind. Advaita prescribes renunciation (saṃnyāsa) and discrimination (viveka) between the eternal and the perishable, so as to turn desire toward liberation alone. Desire for external things is to be extinguished.

Śaṅkara (attributed), Vivekacūḍāmaṇi · Kaṭha Upaniṣad, I, 2-3

Refined desires arise not from need but from the artifice that manufactures them: it is the five colors, the five flavors and the craving for rare goods that blind the eye and lead the heart astray, so that multiplying desirable objects never fills the lack but hollows it. The pursuit of wealth and honors scatters the mind and draws it away from the dao 道 (the Way): the remedy is not to satisfy desire better but to dry it at its source, returning to pu 樸 (simplicity, the uncarved block of wood). Thus no misfortune, for Laozi, is worse than not knowing when one has enough: the contentment of one who desires little is a wealth that nothing external can threaten.

Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 12, 46 · Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 19

The Cynic reduces desire to the strictly natural and detaches himself from all the rest: the less one desires, the freer one is. Askēsis consists precisely in training oneself to want nothing more from external things, so that nothing can be lacking or enslaving.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 105

Platonism orders the soul in three tiers, where reason must govern the appetites with the help of spirit: left to themselves, the desires of the body enslave and trouble. Wisdom consists in mastering them and in sublimating eros, in turning its force away from the sensible toward intelligible Beauty and the Good. A severe sorting of desires, then, leaning toward their transcendence more than their satisfaction.

Plato, Republic, IV and IX · Plato, Symposium; Phaedrus

If all suffering is conditioned, it has a locatable cause, and to remove the cause is to remove the effect: this is the logic of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) applied to dis-ease. Gautama then traces the chain back and names craving (taṇhā) as that link, the grasping thirst that clings to pleasures, to existence, or even to non-existence and sets the wheel of rebirth turning again. The move is original: he neither moralizes desire as a vice nor celebrates it as fullness, but coolly identifies it as the cause to be extinguished, which puts detachment at the centre of the path and guarantees, against any fatalism, that release is possible.

Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, Saṃyutta Nikāya 56.11 (the sermon at Benares) · Dhammapada, ch. XXIV (Craving)

To will is to lack: every desire springs from a painful privation, and its satisfaction, purely negative, falls at once into a new desire or into boredom, which lays bare the emptiness of existence the moment nothing occupies it. The wheel of Ixion stops for an instant only in disinterested contemplation, and is broken only in the denial of the will; to those who cannot renounce, the Aphorisms concede no more than a prudent economy of desire.

The World as Will and Representation, §57

The less one desires, the freer one is: the desire for external things is the very chain by which the world holds us. Askēsis consists in training oneself to need nothing, so that nothing can be lacking or enslaving. Diogenes does not aim at a reasoned sorting of pleasures in the manner of Epicurus, but at a reduction of desire to the strictly natural, detached from all the rest. The tendency is toward the extinction of factitious desires, not their affirmation.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 105

Desire for objects binds one to saṃsāra, the cycle of rebirths: it arises from the ignorance that takes the self for the body and chases after what it lacks. Among the conditions of knowledge, Śaṅkara places renunciation (vairāgya) of the fruits of action, here and hereafter, and the ardent quest for liberation alone. The slope is clearly that of detachment: not because pleasure would be culpable, but because every desire turned toward the manifold misses the one real and the only stable good. A sorting remains in the background, the desire for liberation (mumukṣutva) being itself cultivated, but as a desire meant to extinguish once its end is reached.

Commentary on the Brahma Sūtras, I.1.1 (the fourfold prerequisite) · Commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā

Desire and aversion aim at attaining or avoiding: directed at what is not up to us, they doom us to miss our aim and to suffer what we flee, hence to unhappiness. The first of the three disciplines, that of desire, is to withdraw them from everything external so as to desire only what is in our power, until progress makes desire safe. For the beginner Epictetus goes so far as to recommend suspending desire altogether and using only aversion, and that solely toward what depends on us. A reasoned sorting of the preferred indifferents remains in the background, but the lived tendency is detachment from all that fortune can take back.

Enchiridion, §2 · Enchiridion, §8

It is not needs that trouble us but the desires manufactured by craving: "the five colors blind the eye." Wisdom lies in diminishing desires and being content, for "to know contentment is true wealth" and "no disaster is worse than not knowing what is enough." The detachment aims less at a Buddhist extinction of desire than at a return to the natural: to fill the belly, not the craving eye.

Dao De Jing, ch. 12 and 19 · Dao De Jing, ch. 33, 44 and 46

Desire fixed on what is not up to us tears the soul from its nature and gives it over to disturbance; it must be withdrawn from externals and consent given to the course of things. A reasoned selection of the preferable remains, so that the point is less to extinguish all desire than to redirect it toward the one true good.

Meditations, II, 16 · Meditations, III, 6 · Meditations, XI, 16

Happiness comes from limiting desire to necessary and natural goods. Seneca preaches detachment from fortune and superfluous goods, while granting a reasoned selection of preferred indifferents, which may be welcomed without attachment.

Letters to Lucilius, II (only the one who craves more is poor) · Letters to Lucilius, XVI and CX (natural and necessary desires)

The appetites form the lowest part of the soul and must be mastered and curtailed under reason's guidance, for a soul given over to its desires becomes a "leaky jar" that nothing can fill. Plato preaches not the extinction of desire but its redirection: sublimated erōs becomes the drive that carries the soul toward the Beautiful and the Good.

Gorgias, 493a-494a · Republic, IX, 571a-580a

Inclinations are not evil in themselves, but they cannot ground moral worth: an action has value only when done from duty, independently of any inclination. This moral disinterestedness requires that the will make itself autonomous with regard to desire, acting against it where need be; without preaching the extinction of inclinations, Kant keeps a distance from them that leans toward detachment more than toward their eudaimonist sorting.

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, I-II · Critique of Practical Reason