What is the best way to gain control over our desires and addictions?

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bcol01
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What is the best way to gain control over our desires and addictions?

Post by bcol01 »

What is the best way to gain control over our desires and addictions?
In his writing, Hokkemongu (Words and Phrases of the Lotus Sutra), The Great Master Nichiren said, “If the practitioners of the Lotus Sutra wholeheartedly devote their life to the Lotus Sutra and practice according to its golden words, it is certainly needless to say that not only in the next life, but also in this lifetime they will overcome severe difficulty, prolong their life, receive the great, good fortune of unsurpassed enlightenment, and accomplish the great vow of the widespread, propagation of True Buddhism.”
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Queequeg
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Re: What is the best way to gain control over our desires and addictions?

Post by Queequeg »

This is the wrong question.

Here is why:

Who gains control? Underlying the question is a notion that there is an agent who gains control, and fundamentally, that is an untenable proposition from the Buddhist perspective. People commonly think this, but its also why they suffer.

From the Buddhist perspective, there is actually no discrete agent who can gain control. Instead, the agent is actually a sort of meta-effect of desire. To suppose that the desires can be controlled is to presume a distinction between the agent and the desire. Instead, they are aspects of a agglomeration of mistakes.

Usually, this process by which the agent arises is explained through the 12 fold chain of causation. This is a very dumbed down explanation:
Ignorance leads to activity leads to sensuality leads to objects leads to six-fold senses leads to contact leads to feeling leads to craving leads to clinging leads to becoming leads to birth leads to aging and death, and back to the top.

Although that process is broken down into linearly arranged steps, keep in mind this is a pedagogical device, and these steps are also in a way instantaneous, arising together. One observation about this is that the agent arises mutually with the object of desire. To suppose that the agent can control desire makes no sense from this perspective. To suppose that its possible inevitably leads to failure.

One approach is to break the cycle of the 12 links at the feeling/craving juncture. From ignorance to feeling, there is really nothing we can do to stop that process. However, we can, according to some schools of thought, suppress craving, and thereby break the cycle. The effect of stopping the cycle there is that no new karma is created and the residual karma sooner or later exhausts itself. This ends in a final blowing out.

Another approach is to see through this process as without substance from the beginning, that each step is empty of reality, and the whole process is really just an apparition. This also ends the creation of karma because the one who sees this is no longer blindly grasping for things that they know are insubstantial. This also ends in a final blowing out.

Yet another approach involves a rejection of the sort of end described in the above two approaches and instead involves insights of the above coupled with a determination to put off the blowing out and to instead help others gain this insight. One then purposefully engages in activities aimed to help others.

Another approach adds a further insight that the blowing out itself is a false constructed distinction and that the only perfection is the perfection of helping others.

Long story short... determine to help others and take real action to do so and you'll forget about your desires.

Addictions are a slightly different phenomena and involve some sort of compulsive behavior. There is nothing to do with addictions except kick.
There is no suffering to be severed. Ignorance and klesas are indivisible from bodhi. There is no cause of suffering to be abandoned. Since extremes and the false are the Middle and genuine, there is no path to be practiced. Samsara is nirvana. No severance achieved. No suffering nor its cause. No path, no end. There is no transcendent realm; there is only the one true aspect. There is nothing separate from the true aspect.
-Guanding, Perfect and Sudden Contemplation,
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Karma Dondrup Tashi
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Re: What is the best way to gain control over our desires and addictions?

Post by Karma Dondrup Tashi »

[removed - apologies did not see I was in Nichiren forum]
It has been the misfortune (not, as these gentlemen think it, the glory) of this age that everything is to be discussed. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France.
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