The question arrives as a caption on a dark screen: how can you love if you don't have desire? For anyone raised on the idea that Buddhism asks us to let go of wanting, it sounds like a trap, a set-up in which love is either selfish or impossible. In a short Dharma Q&A published by Buddhistdoor Global in October 2026, the Korean Seon master Ven. Pomnyun Sunim refuses the trap. He begins by asking the questioner to define the terms, sorts desire into three distinct kinds, and argues that the real trouble was never desire itself. It was the habit of comparing ourselves to others, and the centuries-old habit of treating all wanting as the enemy. The clip runs under five minutes, but the framework it lays out is one of the more usable maps of desire you can carry into an ordinary day.
Pomnyun's first move is linguistic. Whether desire belongs in love, he says, "depends on how you define making love." If the phrase means any act of love between two people, then desire is fine. The reasoning is simple and worth sitting with: the word "desire" is carrying several meanings at once, and most arguments about it go in circles because the speakers mean different things. Before you can judge whether wanting is good or bad, you have to know which wanting is on the table.
That is exactly the work the rest of the clip performs. He does not say desire is good or bad. He says there are three types, and each one calls for a different response.
The first is essential basic desire, which he also calls survival desire. Hunger, shelter, rest, safety: these are not a moral failing, and he is direct that they must be satisfied. A teaching that tells a person to ignore the body's need for food is not a teaching he is defending.
The second is relative desire, and this is the one the clip spends the most time on. Relative desire, he explains, is the constant comparing of ourselves with others, the wish to be "a little bit better than the others." The defining feature is that it has no floor. "There's no end to that type of desires," he says, "and it gets bigger and bigger." A survival need has a natural point of completion: you eat, you are no longer hungry. A comparative need never completes, because the reference point keeps moving. Whatever you have, someone else has a little more, and the target shifts.
The third is greed, which he defines by its consequences rather than its object. Greed is a desire that "is going to bring about negative consequences to yourself if you engage in it." His examples are plain: drink too much and you suffer a hangover, take drugs and suffering follows, eat too much and you become obese and unhealthy. The test is not whether the wanting feels intense. The test is what the wanting does to the person who acts on it.
Put together, the three categories give a clear set of instructions. Survival desire is to be satisfied. Relative desire needs what he calls a regime of self-discipline. Greed needs to be stopped or restricted.
Survival desire announces itself. Relative desire disguises itself as ambition, taste, or a reasonable wish for a better life, which is why it can run for decades unexamined. Pomnyun's description of it as something that "gets bigger and bigger" points to its dynamic rather than its content. The question to ask is not "Do I want this?" but "Would I still want it if nobody else had it, or if nobody were comparing?"
He also draws a broader picture. "Since we, as humanity, are amplifying and pursuing the relative desire," he says, "it brings a lot of issues for us." The word "humanity" is doing real work in that sentence. He is describing a collective pattern, one that shows up in economies, status games and the constant sense of not having enough, not only in individual failings.
This is the most striking turn in the clip, and it cuts against a common Western assumption that Buddhism is simply about renouncing desire. Pomnyun says that traditionally, sages taught people to discipline their relative desires. The problem came with the overcorrection. Locating the shift in the Middle Ages, he says people "tried to suppress them too much," treated them in a negative light, and pushed asceticism too far.
The result, in his words, was that "we were denying what was natural within us." He adds that this "created a lot of unintended consequences." He does not spell out those consequences in this clip, and it would be unfair to invent them here. But the logic he is pointing to is clear. A desire that is condemned outright does not disappear. It goes underground, distorts, and returns in less manageable forms. Suppression and discipline look similar from the outside, but they are opposite strategies.
That distinction is the heart of the teaching. Discipline, as he uses the word, is something you do with a faculty you have not disowned.
Pomnyun gives the answer in a single sentence: "Because it is controlled by oneself, we call it self-discipline." The emphasis falls on who holds the reins. Suppression is an external or moralized rejection of a part of yourself. Self-discipline is the ongoing, internal modulation of a desire you acknowledge and understand. You are not asked to stop wanting to be respected or to feel the pull of comparison. You are asked to notice that pull and to regulate what you do with it.
In practice, that can look very ordinary. Someone who feels the familiar sting of seeing a colleague promoted does not need to pretend the feeling is absent. They can name it as relative desire, see that it has no natural end, and decide not to let it set their next choice. The desire is still there. Its authority over them has been reduced.
The clip closes on its clearest principle: "It's not the desire itself that's the problem." The distinction is about outcomes. Pomnyun says that if you know a desire brings suffering to yourself, you need to be able to stop it. The skill he is describing is less about willpower than about honest observation over time. Greed is recognized by what follows it, the hangover, the damage, the slow decline.
"It's not the desire itself that's the problem. If you know that the desire brings suffering to yourself, you need to be able to stop it."
— Ven. Pomnyun Sunim, Buddhistdoor Global Dharma Q&A (published October 2026), approx. 4:30
This is what makes the framework usable. It does not ask you to classify your wanting in the abstract. It asks three concrete questions. Is this a survival need that deserves to be met? Is this a comparison that has no end? Is this a craving whose consequences, which you can observe, are harming me? Each category gets a different answer, and none of them requires pretending you have no desires at all.
Take a single week and, each time you notice yourself reaching for something, run the three questions. Eating when hungry is survival. Feeling the pull to be a little better than the people around you is relative desire, and the useful move is to notice its endlessness rather than fight it. Reaching for a third drink when you already know the next morning will be miserable is greed, and the useful move is to stop, as Pomnyun says.
This is interpretation rather than quotation. Pomnyun does not give a step-by-step method in this clip, and the reader should not assume he does. But the three categories are specific enough to test against real behavior, and that is the clip's quiet strength. It treats the reader as capable of honest self-observation.
Honesty requires saying what the four minutes do not do. The original question asks about love, and the answer, as transcribed, establishes that desire can exist within love, but the clip does not explore romantic desire, intimacy or attachment in depth. Viewers looking for a full treatment of love will need the longer Dharma Q&A, or Pomnyun's broader writing. The auto-generated English subtitles also contain some errors, so direct quotations here are limited to the lines that read clearly. Anyone citing this material should check the original video.
What the clip does offer is a clean distinction that many people have never been given. Desire is not one thing. Some of it keeps us alive, some of it keeps us running on a treadmill, and some of it harms us. Once you can tell them apart, the question "how can you love without desire?" begins to look like the wrong question. The more useful one is which desires you are living from, and whether you have the self-discipline to choose among them.
Watch the full Dharma Q&A on the Buddhistdoor Global channel for the complete exchange this clip excerpts. Pomnyun's own writing and teaching are available at pomnyun.com. The video was published with permission from Jungto Society, the organization he founded and leads, which describes its work as centered on sharing and simple, sustainable living; its materials are at jungtosociety.org. Start with the three-part map, use it for one week, and see which of your desires turn out to be survival, which comparison, and which the kind that asks you to stop.
