SELFISH DESIRE, LUST, AND GREED

Desire for material possessions or pleasure of the flesh for selfish reason can cause the soul all sorts of trouble. Greed and lust can lead to other serious sins. Almost every organized religion has something to say about greed, lust, and desire. But is desire for oneness with God evil? Is it the same as the desire for a person of the opposite sex?

What do the sacred texts say about greed, lust, and desire?

Buddhism

The Noble Truth of the Origin of suffering is this: It is craving that leads back to birth, bound up with passionate greed. It finds fresh delight now here and now there, namely, craving for sense pleasures, craving for existence and becoming, and craving for non-existence.

The man who gathers flowers [of sensual pleasure], whose mind is distracted and who is insatiate in desires, the Destroyer brings under his sway.

Clinging, in bondage to desires, not seeing
in bondage any fault, thus bound and fettered,
never can they cross the flood so wide and mighty.

Blinded are beings by their sense desires
spread over them like a net; covered are they
by cloak of craving; by their heedless ways
caught as a fish in the mouth of a funnel-net.
Decrepitude and death they journey to,
just as a sucking calf goes to its mother.

Islam

Have you seen him who makes his desire his god, and God sends him astray purposely, and seals up his hearing and his heart, and sets on his sight a covering? Who, then, will lead him after God [has condemned him]? Will you not then heed?

Christianity

What causes wars, and what causes fighting among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.

Let no one say when he is tempted, "I am tempted by God;" for God cannot be tempted with evil and he himself tempts no one; but each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin; and sin when it is full-grown brings forth death.

Sikhism

In desire is man born;
From desire he consumes objects of various tastes;
By desire is he led away bound,
Buffeted across the face.
Bound by evil qualities is he chastised--

The fish that is excessively attached to water, without water dies.
For love of the lotus is the humming-bee destroyed,
Finding not the way of escape...
Subdued by lust is the elephant caught,
Helpless under others' power.

For the love of sound the deer bows his head,
Thereby torn to pieces.
Beholding his family, by greed is man attracted,
With wealth involved:
Deeply in wealth involved, regarding it as his own,
Which inevitably he must leave behind.

Whoever with other than the Lord forms love,
Know him to be eternally the sufferer.

Judaism

Envy and desire and ambition drive a man out of the world.

Hinduism

There are three gates to self-destructive hell: lust, anger, and greed.

Arjuna:
What is the force that binds us to selfish deeds, O Krishna? What power moves us, even against our will, as if forcing us?

Krishna:
It is selfish desire and anger, arising from the state of being known as passion; these are the appetites and evils which threaten a person in this life.

Just as a fire is covered by smoke and a mirror is obscured by dust, just as an embryo is enveloped deep within the womb, knowledge is hidden by selfish desire--hidden, Arjuna, by this unquenchable fire for self-satisfaction, the inveterate enemy of the wise.

Selfish desire is found in the senses, mind, and intellect, misleading them and burying wisdom in delusion. Fight with all your strength, Arjuna! Controlling your senses, conquer your enemy, the destroyer of knowledge and realization.

Confucianism

Confucius said, "I have never seen anyone whose desire to build up his moral power was as strong as sexual desire."

Taoism

There is no crime greater than having too many desires;
There is no disaster greater than not being content;
There is no misfortune greater than being covetous.

Jainism

The ignorant one craves for a life of luxury and repeatedly hankers after pleasures. Haunted by his own desires he gets benumbed and is rewarded only with suffering.

The benighted one is incompetent to assuage sufferings, because he is attached to desires and is lecherous. Oppressed by physical and mental pain, he keeps rotating in a whirlpool of agony. I say so.

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