Korean Journal of Buddhist Studies ISSN:1598-0642(Print) 불교학연구

This study begins from the two faces that desire (chanda) wears in the early canon. On one side it is an obstacle to be abandoned — the sensual desire (kāmacchanda) heading the five hindrances and the desire-and-lust (chandarāga) that fetters at the six sense-spheres; on the other it is a quality to be cultivated, the first of the four bases of spiritual power (iddhipāda). Because desire (chanda) and craving (taṇhā) have long been read as interchangeable, this paper clarifies the source of that conflation and argues that the decomposition of chandarāga — the falling away of lust (rāga) and the remaining of desire — is itself the driving force of practice. The taṇhā-expansion sequence of the Mahānidāna-sutta places chandarāga on one causal chain between craving and clinging (upādāna), the root of their conflation; yet the Nettippakaraṇa distinguishes two cravings by object, and the Abhidhamma marks chanda as ethically variable by root, so that craving is fixed as unwholesome while desire can be either wholesome or unwholesome. Lust-tinged desire is kindled at contact (phassa) and becomes the very fetter binding faculty and object — neither of which, as the Koṭṭhika-sutta shows, is the fetter — so that what practice governs is not the object but this chandarāga: its outward aspect. Lust-freed desire, by contrast, stands as the first base of spiritual power, grounds concentration and striving, and dissolves craving: its inward aspect. The Uṇṇābhabrāhmaṇa-sutta teaches that one abandons desire in dependence on desire, and that this desire, once arahantship is attained, subsides of itself — a stilling that is self-completion, not self-destruction. The task of practice is thus not to abolish desire but to strip its lust, so that desire, having accomplished its aim, comes to rest of itself: the recursive self-dissolution of desire.