Tanha

Categories: Four Noble Truths | Dependent Origination

From Buddhist Encyclopedia

• Chinese :  tan
• Pali:   taṇhā
• Thai :  ตัณหา
• Sanskrit :  tṛṣṇā
• Tibetan: sred.pa

Tanha means thirst, desire, craving, wanting more, longing, or yearning. Tanha leads to unsatisfactoriness which arises when we did not get what we want. This lead to jealousy. Jealousy lead to hatred. Hatred lead to dispute. Inflicting suffering on fellow human being is the out come of tanha.

Tanha is the eighth link in the Twelve Nidanas of Dependent Origination. Taṇhā is also the fundamental constituent of Samudaya - the Noble Truth of the Origination of Suffering, the second of the Four Noble Truths. Buddhist teachings describe the craving for sense objects which provide pleasant feeling, or craving for sensory pleasures. Tanha is a term for wanting to have or wanting to obtain. It also encompasses the negative as in wanting not to have. We can crave for pleasant feelings to be present, and for unpleasant feelings not to be present (ie get rid of unpleasant feelings).

According to Buddhist teachings, craving, or desire, springs from the notion that if one's desires are fulfilled it will, of itself, lead to one's lasting happiness or well-being. Such beliefs normally result in further craving/desire and the repeated enactment of activities to bring about the desired results. This is graphically depicted in the Bhavacakra. The repeated cycling through states driven by craving and its concomitant clinging Upadana.

The meaning of Tanha extends beyond the desire for material objects or sense pleasures. It also includes the desire for life (or death, in the case of someone wishing to commit suicide), desire for fame (or infamy, its opposite), desire for sleep, desire for mental or emotional states (happiness, joy, rapture, love) if they are not present and would like them to be. If we experience, say depression or sorrow, we can desire its opposite. The meaning of Tanha is far-reaching and covers all desire, all wanting, all craving, irrespective of its intensity.

Tanha is sometimes taken as interchangeable with the term addiction, except that would be too narrow a view. Tanha tends to include a far broader range of human experience and feeling than medical discussions of addiction tend to include.

Further analysis of tanha reveals that desire for conditioned things cannot be fully satiated or satisfied, due to their impermanent nature. This is expounded in Anicca (impermanence).

The solution to the problem of tanha is the next of the four noble truths, Nirodha, the cessation of suffering which is Noble Eightfold Path and the Six Paramita. The cessation of suffering comes from the quenching (Pali: nibbuta) of tanha, which is not the destruction of tanha as much as the natural cessation of it that follows its true and real satisfaction. The problem is not that we desire, but rather that we desire unsatisfactory (dukkha) things, namely sensual pleasures, existence and non-existence. When we have Right Effort, when we desire that which yields satisfaction, then tanha is not the obstacle to enlightenment but the vehicle for its realization.