Mark Epstein
Editor’s Note: Buddhist psychiatrist Mark Epstein brilliantly blends Western psychology and Buddhism in his writing. Open to Desire, a bold and much-needed plunge into the realm of wanting from a Buddhist perspective, explores relationships, sexuality, lust, and longing.
In setting up a Middle Way that fell between the two extremes of sensory indulgence and renunciation, the Buddha left plenty of room for the exploration of desire. His teachings on the subject can be roughly divided into two categories: the right-handed path of renunciation and monasticism in which sensory desires are avoided and the left-handed path of passion and relationship in which sensory desires are not avoided but are made into objects of meditation. This latter path is traditionally the one that is kept secret and hidden. Its points are thought to be too open to misinterpretation and confusion to be talked about directly, and as a secret language, had to be developed to communicate its insights. While his early exhortations encouraged his disciples to follow in his footsteps and renounce the householder life, as the Buddha’s teachings spread and took root, their relevance, even for the everyday life of passion and relationship, began to be revealed.
What the Buddha actually suggested is that it is the avoidance of the elusiveness of the object of desire that is the origin of suffering. The problem is not desire: it is clinging to, or craving, a particular outcome, one in which there is no remainder, in which the object is completely under our power. As my Buddhist teacher, Joseph Goldstein, always makes clear, as an object of desire, that which we long for causes suffering, but as an object of mindfulness it can lead to awakening. The trick, as far as Buddhism is concerned, is to accept the fact that no experience can ever be as complete as we would wish, that no object can ever satisfy us completely. In the right-handed path, the Buddha’s followers turned away from the pursuit of sensory pleasure, but in the left-handed path, they allowed themselves to come face-to-face with the gap that desire always comes up against, as well as any pleasure that it might bring.
Allowing ourselves into desire’s abyss turns out to be the key to a more complete enjoyment of its fruits. By experiencing desire in its totality: gratifying and frustrating, sweet and bitter, pleasant and painful, successful and yet coming up short, we can use it to awaken our minds. The dualities that desire seems to take for granted can be resolved through a willingness to drop into the gap between them. Even living in the world of the senses, we can be free.
