Understanding Craving and Suffering in Buddhism : หน้า 97/263

practices will lead them to an end of suffering — but with­out realizing that it is only adding to their suffering. Thus it is compared to a dog who seizes whatever it likes from the owner without taking any interest in what the owner may throw at it. Buddhists who practise properly, with earnest and perseverance, will eventually be able to remove craving by its roots. In this respect, it can be compared to a gardener who must remove weeds in his garden, not just picking the stems and leaves but pulling the weeds up by their roots so that they cannot regenerate. In this parable, the gardener can be compared to practitioners who strive in Buddhist practice. The garden can be compared to the six senses and their sense objects [āyatana] which are the breeding ground of craving. Thus the Lord Buddha taught that craving is the root of all suffering — if craving can be extinguished then all forms of suffering (from the suffering of birth onwards) can be extinguished too. How can Craving be extinguished? The Lord Buddha taught that if we can overcome our greedy attachments to the things we love in the world, craving can be overcome too. Thus we can see that the target for our practice is to uproot the state of attachment — if we can succeed in uprooting attachment, we can uproot craving too. Craving is engrained at all levels of the sensory processing of our mind. There are a total of ten stages in the sensory process and six sensory channels — giving a total of sixty places (a group of mental phenomena known as the ‘Objects of Sensual Delight and Pleasure’ [pīyarūpa sātarūpa] (see Table II overleaf) where craving can lurk!