I haven’t read OP yet, just a quick translation note:
The Sanskrit word “tanha” shares an etymology with English words like “tenacious”, “tendency”, and “tenet”. The PIE root means “grip” or “hold”.
I think most folk in my social circles who use “tanha” these days are referencing Romeo’s “(mis)Translating the Buddha”:
Tanha is usually translated as desire or craving but this is wrong and misleading. Tanha is more literally translated as ‘fused to’ or ‘welded to’. It immediately follows the mental moment that you zoom in with the attentional aperture on something. It could be that a flower or an item on the shelf at the supermarket captures your attention, or you turn your head to catch more detail as you pass by an accident on the road. Many hundreds of thousands of such events take place in the course of a single day. With most of them attention then relaxes and makes space for the next thing. But with some small proportion you find the mind doesn’t quite ‘unclench’ from the object or some aspect of the object. This tension aspect is why it is sometimes translated as ‘grasping’ which is closer. Imagine something you aren’t finished with being pulled out of your hand and you tensing your fingers to resist.
I haven’t read OP yet, just a quick translation note:
The Sanskrit word “tanha” shares an etymology with English words like “tenacious”, “tendency”, and “tenet”. The PIE root means “grip” or “hold”.
I think most folk in my social circles who use “tanha” these days are referencing Romeo’s “(mis)Translating the Buddha”:
I also tried to outline a model of tanha in my posts about explaining suffering in Buddhist context [1, 2].