Buddhism counts six sense bases: eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind, together with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, and mental objects. Consciousness arises dependent on a sense base and object; their meeting is contact; contact conditions feeling. This is the lived field in which dependent origination becomes observable.
Sense restraint does not require destroying the senses or refusing beauty. A practitioner sees a form but does not grasp its signs and features in a way that gives greed or grief an unguarded entrance. The same applies to sound and thought. Restraint notices the movement from simple contact toward fascination, hostility, comparison, and possession.
The Honeycake Sutta (MN 18) traces how contact conditions feeling, perception, thinking, and mental proliferation (papañca), after which proliferated perceptions beset a person regarding past, future, and present. The discourse remains distinctly Buddhist: the problem is not merely inaccurate thinking but the appropriation that builds conflict around "I am" and "mine."
Craving becomes clinging in four broad forms: clinging to sensuality, views, rules and observances as ends in themselves, and doctrines of self. Clinging conditions becoming—the active construction of a mode of existence—and becoming conditions birth. The path interrupts this not by hatred of experience but by insight into feeling, craving, and appropriation.
In the Fire Sermon (SN 35.28), the Buddha says the senses, their objects, consciousness, contact, and resulting feelings are burning with greed, hatred, and delusion, and with birth, aging, and death. Seeing this leads to disenchantment and release. The fire is not physical sensation itself; it is the burning of defilement throughout the field of experience.
Bāhiya urgently asks for a teaching. The Buddha tells him to train so that in the seen there is only the seen, in the heard only the heard, and likewise for sensed and cognized experience, without constructing a self in relation to it. Bāhiya realizes liberation.
To a thousand former fire-worshiping ascetics, the Buddha describes the entire sixfold sense field as burning with greed, hatred, delusion, and the suffering of saṃsāra. Hearing it, their minds are freed through non-clinging.