Buddhist Romanticism

foods will assuage them; it has to fabricate raw experiences into a form that
can be consumed as food; and it has to be conscious of all these activities for
them to succeed.
Because these activities are so essential to feeding, the mind tends to
feed on them as well (§19). This second level of feeding is called upādāna, a
word that can mean both “sustenance” and “clinging.” Clinging can take
four forms: clinging to sensual passion, clinging to habits and practices,
clinging to views, and clinging to doctrines on the topic of the self.
The act of clinging to the five aggregates is the Buddha’s definition of the
suffering of fabrication (§3), and for two reasons: the act of clinging itself is
stressful, and the things clung-to are constantly changing—alternating
between pleasant and painful—so that the mind can find no rest.
The Buddha identified the cause of this clinging as the craving that leads
to becoming (§3). “Becoming” (bhava) is another word with a technical
meaning. It refers to the act of taking on an identity in a particular world of
experience for the sake of satisfying a desire—“world,” here, meaning
either a physical world or a mental world, on a large or small scale.
Examples of large-scale becoming would include your sense of your place
in human society or of your place in the universe at large. A small-scale
becoming would arise in response to a particular desire. For instance, if a
person desires an ice cream cone, the relevant world consists of whatever
might enable him to get the ice cream or stand in the way of his getting it.
Other aspects of the physical world would be irrelevant to that particular
craving. His identity here would take two forms: identifying with a sense of
self that will enjoy the pleasure once it’s obtained (the consumer), and with
the sense of self composed of one’s range of skills or possessions that will
either facilitate one’s desire or get in the way of its satisfaction (the
producer). Other skills or possessions are, for that particular becoming,
irrelevant.
What this means is that becomings can change frequently, even from
moment to moment, depending on the desires on which the mind focuses.
Even large-scale becomings are fleeting, in that the mind is not always
concerned with its larger place in the universe—as when chocolate gelato
becomes an all-consuming desire.
However, becoming does not occur only on the internal, psychological
level, because what starts as a psychological process can lead to rebirth on
any of the many external worlds found in the cosmos. In fact, if the
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