Although talking about enlightenment is a bit excessive on such pathway.
Why? Seems the most sensible way to go, and would that not constitute enlightenment??
Spark of desire nourishes tension of longing, or struggle. By creating desire to attain abstract, unfeasible, nonsense thing you rob yourself of all satisfaction.
Had some Zen quotes such as "raising waves where no wind blows" as stated by Mumon Ekai.
Easiest is to look at first chapter of Tao te ching or how is it called in English.
My theory is a bit fierce, examining how Taoists of China developed wu-wei and some silent fluidity to the whole thing.
Seriously though, look at Buddhist, Christian and Taoist monks.
Christian and Buddhist are basicly beggars with suppressed sexuality. Christian one longing for 'external God's' approval, Buddhist longing for 'enlightenment'. Dying at normal age mostly on cancer since aggression is usually suppressed.
Taoist monks live in mountains and are slim for they eat little food that they grow and similar, doing the energy conduct to flow the sexual energy through the whole body and perhaps even having spiritual lovers they don't talk about. Living up to 150 years... ever maintaining the silent fluidity.
Lao Tzu stated at beginning of that book "defined is the mother of Sky and Earth, undefined is the origin... both, although bearing different names come from the same... thus the sameness being the mystery and the gateway.
You can see that this was never surpassed by Buddhists and there are some Chinese scripts claiming he left the country and was actually a teacher of Buddha, Buddhists being outraged by those scriptures.
He was never found dead, sometimes rumoured to have lived 800 years and more... very uncommon for famous people to just vanish like that.
.
gee, I was just talking about architecture.