Desire is one of those human propensities which is clearly a long stick with two ends, a continuum that can encompass both vice and virtue, with various intermediate stages. This is evident from its varied negative, neutral, and positive connotations ranging from base craving through hankering, urge, ambition, wish, passion, and yearning to lofty aspiration and the heart’s desire.
Within religion, desire is often associated with a disposition towards sin or separation from God. In Roman Catholic theology, for example, the seven cardinal or deadly sins, first enumerated by Pope Gregory I in the sixth century and elaborated by St Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, include greed or covetousness, lust or inordinate sexual desire, and gluttony. According to Al-Ghazali, ‘desires make slaves out of kings.’ In Book XXIII of his Ihya ‘ulum al-din (Revival of the Religious Sciences) – the Kitab Kasr al-shahwatayn, ‘On Breaking the Two Desires’ – he stigmatises lust and gluttony as the ‘greatest of mortal vices’, and in condemning ‘satiety’ he affirms the need to subjugate the greed of the belly and control sexual desire through the restoration of a state of equilibrium. He equated this with the centrality of the Middle Way in Islamic ethics, the ideal of the golden mean between excess and defect, although this necessarily entails the disciplining of the nafs al-ammara, the commanding or compulsive self, also known as the carnal or animal self, entirely governed by its desires, passions, and instincts. The Second Noble Truth of Buddhism identifies the cause of dukkha (suffering) as attachment to deep-rooted craving for sense pleasures (kama-tanha), including greed and sensual desire as well as desire for material gain and achievement. It is this deep-rooted craving that results in our continued existence in the cycle of birth, death, and re-birth (samsara). Buddhists and Taoists alike often speak of the sage as one who has no desires, although such a state can only come about through reflection and enlightenment, never through belief, whether inherited or acquired. In Vedanta, the jivanmukta, or liberated human being, is also totally free of all desires.
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