13.8 Of Lust for the Unpleasant (KV13.8)

Controverted Point: That there is such a thing as lusting for what is disagreeable.

Theravādin: Do you go so far as to maintain that of the beings who delight in the painful, some wish for it, long for it, seek, search, hunt for it, and persist in cleaving to it? Is not rather the opposite your genuine belief? You assent. Then how do you maintain your proposition?

Can anyone have at once a latent bias of lust for painful feeling and a latent bias of aversion from pleasant feeling? Will not these two forms of bias be really directed inversely, the former craving pleasure, the latter hating pain?

Uttarāpathaka: But if I am wrong, was it not said by the Exalted One:

“He, thus, expert in complacency and antipathy, delights in and commends whatsoever feeling he feels, pleasant, painful, or neutral, and persists in cleaving to it”?

Hence surely there is such a thing as lusting for the unpleasant?

The Points of Controversy, an English translation of the Pali Abhidhamma Kathāvatthu. Translated by Shwe Zan Aung and C.A.F. Rhys Davids. First published by Pali Text Society, 1915.

This SuttaCentral edition was prepared by Manfred Wierich and Ven. Vimala and proofread by Josephine Tobin. Some changes were introduced:

Abbreviations, i.e., those of cited works and the participants in the controversies, were expanded.

Cross-references were linked.

Some typographic changes were introduced, among others, i.e.: the phonetic symbol “ŋ” was changed to the Pāli diacritical letter “ṃ”, “ô” to “o”, single quotes to double quotes, and “:—” to “:”.

Letter-spacing with fixed spaces was replaced with bold font.

The corrigenda were merged into the text. Some could not be resolved, though.

This electronic version is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 licence (CC BY-NC 3.0) as found here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

All copyright is owned by the Pali Text Society. See also the statement under http://www.palitext.com/ → Publications → Copyright Announcement. For non-commercial use only.