Mon, 18 Aug 2008
Nonattachment
It's often said that Buddhism teaches nonattachment. This is so, but the point is often misunderstood. Nonattachment is often confused with being emotionally cold, not being affected by any situation. This is a misunderstanding. Seikan Hasegawa came and gave a talk when I was in college. I don't remember anything he said except this:
"Some people say Zen is not being affected even if your house burns down and family dies. But that is wrong. In that case Zen should cry."
So where is the mistake? We confuse enjoyment with attachment. The reason is simple. There's not a single thing we enjoy that we're not attached to. The point of Buddhist practice is to be able to distinguish between the two. This is not easy, it's a difficult distinction to make. Most often we fall to one extreme or another, either accepting both the enjoyment and attachment, or rejecting both. Both extremes have problems. If we accept both, we make no progress on the path. If we reject both, we set up a rigid mindset that is false to waht we really feel. So it seems to me that the best approach to put sensible limits on our enjoyments. Use our reason to decide if some enjoyment is for the good of ourselves and others. Attachment will want to overstep these limits. When this happens, we can watch the struggle within ourselves and find out a little about what attachment is.
To sum up, nonattachment is not giving up what you enjoy. It's seeing the attachment that's bound up with your enjoyment and rejecting the attachment by understanding its faults.
