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I have seen lay-followers, experts in the doctrine, saying "Sensual pleasures are impermanent."... Truly they do not know the doctrine as it really is, even though they say "Sensual pleasures are impermanent." They have no power to cut their desire, therefore they are attached to children, wives, and wealth.
Extract from Theragatha 187-188(1)
Those people are disgraceful who say, adhering to the Buddha's path, that all is impermanent and yet remain attached to entities through their disputes.
Yuktisastikikarika 41(2)
The fundamental spiritual problem that Buddhism identifies and that it intends to solve is the problem of suffering (duhkha).3 Buddhism is concerned with the eradication of suffering by means of the elimination of its cause. Suffering is often said to be caused by craving (trsna), a mental state that leads to attachment (upadana), attachment being the natural consequence of the acquisition of the object that one craves. Craving and attachment take many forms. There is craving for one's own continued existence and attachment to one's own self. And there is also craving for and attachment to various other internal and external entities. One can be attached to one's opinions, and one can crave and be attached to particular emotions or mental states, one's car, tasty foods, one's family and friends, and so forth. The Buddhist seeks to eliminate suffering by cutting off craving (and the resulting attachment) in all its manifold forms.
Why, though, does craving cause suffering? A common Buddhist explanation is that craving causes suffering because the objects that one craves are impermanent (anitya). Things have no permanent abiding essence, and in this sense are without self (anatman). Here the world is envisaged to be a vast complex of transient physical and mental events. This is thought to be the way things really are. Buddhism can thus be viewed as a form of process philosophy, which depicts the universe in terms of becoming and transformation rather than stasis. The truth about entities is that they do not stay the same and that they must eventually cease to exist. Things come into existence, undergo many alterations, and inevitably pass away. All phenomena are subject to the law of impermanence.4
Craving is essentially an attitude of possessiveness, an emotion of clinging. When one craves, one...