Buddhism for Today, p239The desires of the five sense organs are innate and are not wrong in themselves, but they are harmful because illusions arise from being influenced by the pleasures of the senses. They are also dangerous because the urge to seek the Way is disturbed and sullied by them.
This is such an important point that Śākyamuni Buddha taught it on many occasions. It was for this reason that he gave up the practice of asceticism and drank the milk-gruel given to him by a village girl and that he preached the teaching of the Middle Path. The Buddha states clearly that man’s instincts are morally neutral (muki, literally meaning something existing before the decision of right or wrong, that is, something that we cannot call either good or bad). If our natural appetites and instincts were wrong, we should refrain entirely from eating and starve to death. We should become deaf in order to abandon the desires that come through our ears, and we should put our eyes out in order to deny the desires that come through the sense of vision. The Buddha nowhere preaches such extremes but teaches us that though instincts are not wrong in themselves, the fire of illusion that is produced by a burning attachment to them is not good. Our instincts are morally neutral, but it is not good for us to be greedily attached to them. If we misunderstand this point, we fall into the extreme of either asceticism or hedonism and thus violate the teaching of the Middle Path.
