Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c10.s3.19

c10.s3.19

Thirst is born of feeling, but only in the case of the unenlightened man whose ignorance renders his feeling a danger; the saint has feelings but not thirst. Thirst in its turn nourishes ignorance, for it produces the delusive conception of being. It is of six kinds, according to the sense organs and objects; triple as thirst for union with pleasant feeling, for severance from painful feeling, and as desire not to be parted from that neutral feeling which marks states of meditation in which there is no pleasure or pain but which tend to Nirvāṇa. In the formula of the second noble truth it is thirst for the things of sense, for existence, or even for non-existence, also a mistaken craving, since it implies the reality of existence. Thirst is characterized by attachment, and thus forms the starting-point for grasping, though according to the scholastic it arises simultaneously with it.