Desire

Didn’t I already talk about desire? Maybe I just thought about it! Well, I don’t feel like talking much about desire today, so I’ll focus on something else. If you really want to think about desire, the quote alone should be sufficient.

“Thirty-six streams are rushing toward you!
Desire and pleasure and lust…
Play in your imagination with them
And they will sweep you away.

Powerful streams!
They flow everywhere.”
- Dhammapada

As a professional in the computer science field, numbers are important to me. The specificity which numbers provide are tremendous. One misplaced zero can have a tremendous impact on meaning. I remember studying binary code back in my mainframe days and truly loving being able to sift through the sequence of zeros and ones to assemble what they represent. Later on, I maintained a healthy adoration for hex code – #FF0000 and #0000FF sound so much more elegant than plain old red and blue.

Given my appreciation for numbers, I have always struggled with the often very specific numbers cited in Buddhism. Why thirty-six streams? Why a thousand petals on the lotus? Why twenty layers? Why fifty petals per layer? Why thirty paramis… or is it ten (still working on that one!)?

Given my “free-spirit” nature, however, I don’t really care that much. Yes, I am inquisitive, but I often just translate numbers to one of the following: “a couple”, “some”, or “lots”. Sometimes I feel that delving too deeply into numbers like this is a blend of over-zealous dogma and missing the forest for the trees. Do you care, at this point, if the Sahasrara Chakra has one thousand or one thousand and one petals? If I could give you the choice of either lighting up the crown chakra or counting the petals, which would you choose? Hint: the petals of the lotus eventually fall off, the jewel in the lotus is eternal.

At this point, you may be wondering ‘what are you talking about?’ The pontification of numbers and their meaning seems to have nothing to do with desire (in numerology I think it’s 11), and this is exactly my point. Read today’s quote from the Dhammapada and notice the first word is a number. Too often, we will get caught up in this number and spend our time contemplating and arguing ‘thirty-six’ and never get to the real issue at hand: Powerful streams! They flow everywhere.

It doesn’t matter, really, how many streams. It doesn’t matter how many disciples. It doesn’t matter how many of anything. What does matter, is that we concentrate on getting ourselves down the road.

Think of it this way: Enlightenment is a big supermarket near your house. On a typical day, you can pull out of your driveway, head south on the main road and in 5 minutes, you have arrived at the supermarket. But on a non-typical day, there may be a traffic jam, or some construction blocking you easy path to shopping. This doesn’t mean that you can not go to the supermarket. It simply means you might have to take more than one road. You may have to drive 10 miles instead of six. You may have to put an extra litre of fuel in your tank. Consider which is more important, how many roads, miles, litres or arriving at the supermarket? In aisle 6, they are having a two-for-one special on spiritual achievement… or was it aisle 16?