The fundamentalspiritualprobl em that Buddhism identifies and that it intends to solve is the problem of suffering (duhkha). 3 Buddhism is concerned with the eradi- cation of suffering by means of the elimination of its cause. Suffering is often said to be caused by craving (trs ˙ n a ), a mentalstate that l eads to attachment (upadana), attachment being the naturalconsequence of the acquisition of the object that one craves. Craving and attachment take many forms. There is craving for one's own continued existence and attachment to one's own self. And there is also craving for and attachment to various other internaland externalentities. One can be attached to one's opinions, and one can crave and be attached to particular emotions or mentalstates, one's car, tasty foods, one's famil y and friends, and so forth. The Buddhist seeks to eliminate suffering by cutting off craving (and the resulting at- tachment) in all its manifold forms. Why, though, does craving cause suffering? A common Buddhist explanation is that craving causes suffering because the objects that one craves are impermanent (anitya). Things have no permanent abiding essence, and in this sense are without self (anatman). Here the world is envisaged to be a vast complex of transient physi- cal and mental events. This is thought to be the way things really are. Buddhism can thus be viewed as a form of process philosophy, which depicts the universe in terms of becoming and transformation rather than stasis. The truth about entities is that they do not stay the same and that they must eventually cease to exist. Things come into existence, undergo many alterations, and inevitably pass away. All phenomena are subject to the law of impermanence. 4 Craving is essentially an attitude of possessiveness, an emotion of clinging. When one craves, one sticks, so to speak, to entities and does not accept the reality of change. Under the sway of craving, one attempts to make the coveted entity one's own, and one is unwilling to let go of the thing once it is in one's possession. Fur- thermore, one is unable to accept undesirable changes in the entity. So, craving is bound to lead to frustration, as the entity that one craves and to which one gets