Craving To Be, Or Not - A Talk On Tanha

A lot of the time, discussion of craving and its relationship to suffering revolves around craving for sense pleasures or aversion toward sense displeasures - and rightfully so. But, in the Buddhist tradition, there are two other types of craving that contribute to our discomfort in the world: craving for becoming and craving for non-becoming. In this talk, Matthew talks about these other two cravings, known as bhava-tanha and vibhava-tanha in Pali, and their subtle pervasiveness.

Content warning: with regards to craving for non-becoming, there is some discussion of suicidal ideation.

This talk was originally offered at San Jose Insight Meditation on January 21, 2026.

Transcript

Yeah,

So I'm going to begin tonight with a reading,

A familiar reading for many probably.

This is from the Samyutta Nikaya and it is the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta,

So the first turning of the wheel,

The first sermon that the Buddha gave.

Now this is the noble truth of suffering.

Birth is suffering,

Aging is suffering,

Illness is suffering,

Death is suffering,

Union with what is displeasing is suffering,

Separation from what is pleasing is suffering,

Not to get what one wants is suffering,

And breathe the five aggregates subject to clinging or suffering.

Now this is the noble truth of the origin of suffering.

It is this craving which leads to renewed existence,

Accompanied by delight and lust,

Seeking delight here and there,

That is,

Craving for sensual pleasure,

Craving for existence,

And craving for extermination.

And,

As most of us probably know,

Those are the first two of the four noble truths,

Right?

The truth of suffering,

The truth of the origin of suffering.

And tonight,

I wanted to talk a little bit about the second noble truth,

But specifically I wanted to talk about craving,

And so often when we talk about craving I feel like we're actually talking about the first type of craving in that list of three types of craving that's in the sutta.

So the sutta talks about craving for sensual pleasure,

Which we call kama tanha,

And that's k-a-m-a,

So it's not spelled like kama that we typically use.

So kama tanha,

Craving for sensual pleasure,

And then it's followed with this craving for existence,

Which is bhava tanha,

And this craving for non-existence,

Or vibhava tanha.

And so I'm going to call those the other two cravings,

Because I think a lot of the time when we talk about craving,

We're talking about,

You know,

Overconsumption,

We're talking about things that are meeting the sense doors and they're either pleasant or kind of the flip side of it,

Like avoiding the unpleasant things that meet the sense door,

Which is still in a way a type of craving for pleasure or sense pleasure.

So what we're going to focus on tonight is these other two types of craving.

And so let's begin with the first one,

Bhava tanha.

Now bhava is sometimes translated as being,

And it's the root,

Kind of the root word of,

Some of you may have heard the word bhavana,

Which we translate as cultivation.

And so that's what we do with our practice,

Is bhavana,

And so you could argue that cultivation is to make come into being,

So it's a related word.

But obviously in the context of craving,

It's not,

It's probably not something we're trying to do.

If anything,

We're trying to cultivate away from the bhava tanha.

And so it has this translation of craving for existence,

Craving for being,

But if you go into some of the spaces online and look at the Wisdom Library,

For example,

It'll sometimes say craving for,

And then in parentheses,

Eternal,

In parentheses,

Existence.

And so even though we translate it as craving for being,

Built into it is kind of this insinuation that the craving relates to being that is sustained,

Permanent,

Reliable,

Something like that.

To our conversation we were having before we sat tonight,

To a certain extent,

You could argue it's a craving for the selfing of ourselves and things in the world,

The craving for things to continue.

And it's kind of a subtle and not so subtle form of craving.

In one sense,

It might be the most dominant form of craving that we engage in,

And in another sense,

It's so normalized that we don't think about it.

We can typically tell when we're craving Netflix or craving food or craving all these other things,

But we don't typically think of,

Say,

The desire to have wealth in the spectrum of craving.

We don't think of the desire to be a good Buddhist in the spectrum of craving.

We don't think of all of these things that we want to be in life as somewhere along the continuum of a craving.

And those are the types of things that this bhava tanha is pointing towards.

The most noticeable way we might notice it in life is actually in what it's rubbing up against,

Which is the fear of death.

When our experience meets what the terror management theorists might call mortality salience,

When something in our experience,

Some cracking open or obviousness of impermanence,

Of mortality,

Of death,

Of the precarity of life presents itself to us,

And we may engage in more severe projects related to this type of craving for becoming or craving for being.

The monk Ajahn Jitendriya calls this bhava tanha a searching force.

He says that it's always looking to be something out of this sense of insecurity.

In all of its desperation,

Searching for security or affirmation or approval,

Needing something concrete,

Something firm,

Something,

And I'll say anything to identify with.

This is the force of bhava tanha.

And so there's many ways we are trying to be or being.

We might want to be,

As I mentioned,

Wealthy.

We might want to be athletic.

We might want to be sexually attractive.

We might want to be young again or stay young,

Whatever the thing is,

You know.

And at root of some of these are perhaps healthy drives,

Right?

Like maybe there's the desire to be healthy itself,

Right?

Physically healthy,

Right?

Maybe there's desire to be able to pay the bills and have a roofer of your head and food on the table.

These are all kind of natural.

And what you would think of as is probably wholesome,

Healthy drives,

You know.

But in the context of our social environment,

A lot of the times these become drives for achievement.

Or they become drives to accumulate.

They can be,

Might start out as healthy goals and they might become what might be termed an obsession or a compulsion or something that our entire like sense of happiness depends upon or hinges on.

So yes,

We might want to become an awakened being,

But is there a point at which craving for practice becomes harmful and produces a certain degree of suffering?

Sure,

Maybe we want to be a supportive parent.

But is there like a line we cross when we're helicoptering or something?

And we're actually creating more suffering in the world than we might realize.

The philosopher Thomas Metzinger says that,

And he talks specifically,

Interestingly in a typical philosophy books,

He talks specifically about this bhava tantra.

And with regard to it,

He comments that our deepest cognitive bias is existence bias.

Which means we will simply do almost anything to prolong our own existence.

The default goal,

It is the default goal in nearly every single case of,

Excuse me,

Tongue-tied of uncertainty,

The default goal whenever we meet uncertainty.

And so the way it presents itself,

Perhaps like when we're sitting on the cushion,

But in day-to-day life as well,

It presents itself as kind of this perpetual tumbling forward.

Now the way the mind always wants to ensure that the next moment is comfortable,

The next moment is safe.

And if it cascades a little bit more,

It turns into kind of obsessive planning,

Obsessive strategizing.

How can I avoid this danger and that danger?

And this isn't to say that avoiding certain degrees of danger isn't useful.

Yes,

Put your seatbelt on.

Yes,

Drive the speed limit,

Follow the laws of traffic and things like that.

But we've all probably done it ourself.

And I know people in my life who turn like trying to stay safe into a mild obsession,

Such that it creates more suffering than anything else.

My teacher,

Matthew Brinsilver,

Says that if we hinge our peace of heart and mind on ensuring security,

We are in a very precarious position.

Under this,

Of course,

This points towards the fact that everything that we cling to in life is danger.

The Buddha tells us that everything is danger.

Everything is,

In fact,

Uncertain.

Everything is not on solid footing.

You know,

I used to read this philosopher named Ken Wilber.

He kind of went off the deep end a little bit later in his philosophical career,

But he did a lot of pretty impressive things,

At least in my view,

Early on.

And he had this phrase that he called Atman Project.

And we use the word non-self here,

Right?

And that's Pali.

But in Sanskrit,

That's An-Atman.

And so this word Atman is the Sanskrit for the word self that we use.

And he had this name,

Atman Project,

To kind of point towards the multifarious ways that we engage in projects of being and becoming in order to avoid really coming to terms with our mortality.

And certain ways we do it is by trying to insert ourselves in a particular cultural paradigm and find acceptance there.

Maybe we want to write a book that people read and remember after you're dead.

Maybe we want our children to believe the same thing we do so that our ideas and our traditions are passed on.

Maybe we buy clothing and get haircuts and dye hair and things like that to appear a little bit younger.

Maybe we have an obsession with celebrity.

And these all could be substitutes.

Projects,

You could argue,

That we engage with to substitute for immortality.

And Ken Wilber would call these Atman Projects.

How many do you have?

The thing is,

Is we can engage with these all the time.

And at some point,

We're going to realize,

At least with a few of them,

The futility in the whole project,

Right?

Sometimes at some point,

We're going to run up against the fact that this craving for for concreteness and predictability is going to eventually fail.

And that kind of can lead us to pivot in the opposite direction.

We can pivot away from this Bhavatana and instead move in the direction of Vibhavatana.

We can move in this direction of no longer craving for being,

But actually craving for non-being.

Craving for non-existence.

As the text says,

Craving for extermination.

I like it as craving for annihilation.

Maybe craving for oblivion.

Something like that.

And it sounds really dramatic,

Right?

It sounds dramatic.

But this is kind of like that word dukkha,

Right?

We translate it as suffering,

But we also mean,

You know,

It's not really fun standing in line.

Suffering can mean people die,

Terrible tragedies happen,

But it can also mean,

You know,

I'm having a cramp right now.

So there's this huge spectrum.

And the same thing happens with Vibhavatana.

In its most extreme form,

We tend to think of it as actual suicidal thoughts.

The desire to die.

That's one manifestation of it.

And that would be what we might call a materialist manifestation of Vibhavatana.

But there's also a spiritual manifestation of it,

Which is people who might engage in a spiritual practice with the express purpose of oblivion.

With the express purpose of disappearing.

I think it's obvious when we talk about craving for being,

That there's some selfing going on there.

Right?

I want to be this,

I want to be that.

Maybe if I'm this person,

People will like me.

All these little forms of being we can engage in.

But maybe it's not as obvious that Vibhavatana has some sort of presumption of self as well.

Because the selfing that's happening is the presumption that whatever pain or suffering or futility is going to be endless and is permanent.

And thus the craving is for a permanent end to that.

And so this is from someone who most of you might be familiar with.

Analyo,

Bhikkhu Analyo.

And he's talking specifically about these different spectrums of craving for non-being in terms of materialist or spiritualist forms.

The decisive factor that these different modes of craving share in common is the assumed sense of a self that lurks behind them.

From a Buddhist perspective,

All these forms of craving are but manifestations of ignorance.

Since however refined the experience they aim at may be,

The truth of the matter is,

Is that there was never a self to be annihilated in the first place.

Now we're talking again about like kind of the more extreme forms of this.

In its lesser forms,

It might show up as a desire to hide,

A desire to disappear,

A desire to not engage and withdraw from the world.

Extreme forms of humiliation or embarrassment might initiate stuff like this.

And I'm sure we have personality types where some people just don't engage with this kind of craving quite as much as maybe the Bhavatana type.

Personally,

I have a history with the Bhavatana.

I don't know how much detail I want to go to with this.

But,

You know,

There was a period in my life,

You know,

Really around the beginning of my practice when I was in a very,

Very profound depth of suffering.

Most of you know,

At the time that I'm speaking of,

I was facing life in prison.

My best friend was dead at his own hands.

My then wife was leaving me.

And yeah,

It hurt.

It hurt a lot.

And I started to form this habit of mind,

You know,

Because not only had a close friend of mine had commit suicide,

I started to see it happen regularly where I was,

Where I was living at the time.

And what previously I hadn't really thought much about,

Suddenly this idea of the end of my own life felt like an option.

And so when things got overwhelming,

When I was facing this stuff,

When things got overwhelming,

I would imagine how I wouldn't actually have to serve the rest of my life in prison.

I strategized ways that I would never have to actually serve the rest of my life in prison.

I came up with plans,

I had dates,

I had ways,

Like the conditions that would allow this particular way of taking myself out happen.

And I did this for a year,

Year and a half as I was facing that court case.

And what happened is that eventually the pain of the loss of my friend,

The pain of my then wife leaving me,

And then the fact that I did not get life in prison,

Allowed me to kind of pull myself out of some of the depths of that profound suffering.

And as the years went on and my life got better,

I still thought and I still responded to suffering in my life in the same way.

And so you can fast forward eight,

Nine years,

I was home,

I graduated college,

I'd been sober eight or nine years,

I had a relatively long term Buddhist practice,

I had a career,

I met my now wife.

Externally,

The conditions were such that it wouldn't make sense for me to regularly engage with what we might term suicidal ideation,

But nonetheless,

There it was.

We have this word in Buddhism called Sankara,

Which means kind of habit,

I think it's directly translated as groove.

And I had worn a groove,

I had worn a habit in my mind with this type of craving,

This type of thinking,

This type of fantasy,

And eventually found myself with a therapist who named it as a coping mechanism.

She basically told me,

Look,

Life gets rough,

You comfort yourself with the fact that this is your brain's way of saying,

Don't worry,

It doesn't have to last forever.

Don't worry.

You can find an exit route if you need to.

And in some degree,

In some way,

This was helpful.

This was helpful in the sense that I gave myself permission to have some degree of compassion for myself.

I gave myself permission to see this function of my mind as some way of self-soothing.

But there's lots of ways that humans self-soothe that aren't necessarily like,

What's the word,

Wholesome behaviors.

There's people who engage with self-harm.

People who engage with self-harm,

That is self-soothing,

But I don't know if we would call it adaptive.

And so even though I could have compassion for this element,

This part of my mind,

This part of my history,

Really,

I still felt broken because it was still there.

And I thought that because I had this practice and that I had this dharma,

That somehow knowledge is power,

And somehow it was supposed to just go away.

It was around that time that I sent an email to Matthew Brinsilver and explained the whole situation to him,

What my mind was really like,

What it was going through.

I'd encountered vibhāvatāna in the teachings,

I never connected the two.

And he responded,

He replied in his email,

Perhaps it's an expression of vibhāvatāna.

And this is what was key for me,

He said,

That's universal and it's blameless.

Maybe it's like a wound that's healing slowly.

Whatever the case,

The moralism around the thought is extra.

The moralism around the thought is extra.

It's interesting how maybe I saw heads nodding,

But different parts where people were nodding for different things,

It's interesting how something like that can land different for different people.

And the part that landed for me was universal and blameless.

And so,

Of course,

I turned back to this sutta right here.

I turned back to this sutta and this idea that I'd already come to terms with and accepted the fact that suffering,

Dukkha,

Was universal.

I could look at the ways that I suffer and go,

That's part of the human condition.

It's not a glitch,

It's a feature.

But somehow,

Despite the fact that suffering is universal,

I could not,

For the life of me up to that point,

See the causes of suffering as universal.

I personalized my causes of suffering,

Even if I didn't personalize the suffering itself.

Does that make sense?

So we have these causes of suffering,

Craving for sense pleasures,

Craving for being,

Craving for non-being.

And I was engaging in a universal function,

If you want to call it that,

A universal activity of the human mind,

And I was personalizing it.

And so the problem became less about the content of the thoughts,

Because I was doing a lot of comparing insides to other people's outsides.

And I was feeling broken because I'm socialized to believe that you are broken if you think about or wish for your own death.

But if you think about things like this.

And so that's why I assumed I was broken,

Because the content of my thoughts was such that it probably wasn't socially acceptable to share it in a room with people.

But the content of the thoughts wasn't the problem.

It was my narrative about the fact that I wasn't supposed to have them in the first place.

And so the fact of the matter is,

Though I don't engage with the bhavatana in the same way that I used to,

It still comes up for me.

I can wake up in the morning,

I do not feel like going to work,

The CPAP came off in the middle of the night,

I didn't sleep well,

My throat hurts or something,

And it's like,

I could just drive off the freeway.

Like this is what the mind does.

It doesn't make sense.

It's not rational.

It's ridiculous.

I see it for what it is,

But it's like this habit is there.

And I think what's different is I kind of have this list of ways,

I have this kind of little internal task force for this bhavatana.

And if it happens during meditation,

I can note it as fantasy,

I can note it as craving.

I can thank these silly thoughts for trying to comfort me.

I appreciate you.

You've totally worked for like a year and a half at least.

I appreciate you.

I don't know why you're still hanging out,

But thank you.

And then we have to sometimes talk to ourself this way,

Right?

Sometimes I just compare how ridiculous that response is.

Like,

Oh,

Traffic,

Really?

You know,

Like not going to work,

Not having to go to work,

Really?

Like that's your response to it?

I consider the impermanence of the craving itself because it's always gone in moments.

And then I consider the roots in my life history.

I consider the fact that aversion to the unpleasant is universal.

I consider my own conditions of like where I came from and why I built that particular habit in my mind.

I consider the self-loathing I have around it and the contexts,

The social conditions that give rise to that.

And the more often I share this with people,

The more often somebody eventually sends me a message or comes up to me and says like,

Yeah,

I do that too.

And so I can see clearly the collective arising of this,

This thing that I'd been personalizing for a really long time.

And so the invitation tonight,

It's kind of like the New Year's Eve thing,

But we're not going to do any one-on-one chats or breakout groups or anything like that.

It's just,

I'm just going to ask a bunch of questions that you don't have to answer here in our sharing period or anything like that.

Just things to ponder,

You know,

Just things to think about.

And I'll start simple.

In what ways do I crave or cling to being something or someone?

In what situations do I feel embarrassment or shame simply for making a mistake?

When do I excessively plan or strategize?

What type of comfort is absolutely necessary for me?

How might I avoid the notion of my own mortality?

In other words,

What are my Atman projects?

When do I wish I could disappear?

What situations?

When do I want to withdraw?

When do I want to become invisible?

Back to the earlier question,

Which was more related to bhava tanha,

About feeling embarrassment or shame for making mistakes.

When does that spiral into immobility and then the desire to withdraw?

Because sometimes bhava tanha,

The craving for being,

Can flip really quickly into the craving for non-existence when the goal isn't met.

When we want to be something,

The being thing doesn't happen,

And I just might resort to,

Well,

Heck with it all,

Right?

I don't want to be at all.

And this one could be a curious one for some folks.

What are my ultimate goals for spiritual practice?

What am I actually after?

And how might my wishes for invisibility or disappearing or annihilation be my own method of self-soothing?

And so I'm going to close with a quote from Hermann Hesche.

Anybody ever read the book Siddhartha?

He says,

I have had to experience so much stupidity,

So many vices,

So much error,

So much nausea,

Disillusionment,

Sorrow,

Just in order to become a child again and begin anew.

I had to experience despair.

I had to sink to the greatest mental depths,

To thoughts of suicide,

In order to experience grace.

And so it is my hope that we might plumb the depths and experience such grace.

Yeah.

Now for this for your reflection.