What's the Difference Between Buddhist Non-Attachment and Mental Detachment?

Working towards non-attachment is the heart of the Buddhist path. But it may seem to you, it may seem to some of us, that working towards non-attachment involves sort of caring less about worldly concerns, about being more aloof from the world. And that's something, this relation between non-attachment on the one hand and detachment on the other, is going to be the subject of today's video, coming right up. I'm Doug Smith of the Online Dharma Institute, that's OnlineDharma.org. If you're new to the channel and interested in living a wiser and a kinder and a calmer life, consider subscribing to the channel. And click the bell down below if you want to receive notifications of future videos that I post here on YouTube. And if you'd like a deeper dive into the Dharma of early Buddhism, check out my courses over on the Online Dharma Institute. Non-attachment is perhaps the heart of the Buddhist path. This is something that Bhikkhu Bodhi and others have said. But what is non-attachment? I think it's really important to get a clear idea of what it is that we're aiming towards, so that we don't aim in the wrong direction. Now, in what follows in this video, I'm going to be following to an extent an essay, an online essay by Elizabeth Harris. I'll leave a quote, or I should say a link, to that essay in the information box down below if you want to go and read the essay. But anyway, that's going to be some of the background here. And there's some other things as well down there if you're interested in reading more. So there are various related concepts in early Buddhism. I'm going to be discussing early Buddhism in particular here in this video. There are several related concepts in early Buddhism that are relevant to the idea of non-attachment. There isn't really a single word that easily translates to non-attachment in early Buddhism. There are several words that are sort of related. One of these is nikama, or renunciation. Now, renunciation is a part of what right intention is. Right intention is the second part of the eightfold path. And it involves, we make certain kinds of intentions, good intentions for our lives to make our lives better. One of those, at least traditionally, is renunciation. And this involves our decision to renounce certain aspects of our lives, to count less, let's say, on certain aspects than others. Now, we have to understand this a middle path. Right intention is a middle path between various options. And in particular, renunciation is going to be a middle path between sense indulgence on the one hand, that is to say, overdoing certain things with our senses, and extreme asceticism on the other, which also the Buddha was opposed to because he didn't feel that that really led towards wisdom. Now, we might consider a renunciation to be similar to the contemporary idea of minimalism in our lives. Some of us may be familiar with the more contemporary modern idea of living a minimal life, minimalist lifestyle. There have been books and videos about this. I did a video about it myself a while back. I'll put a link up here on the screen in case you're interested in what minimalism is all about. But minimalism is essentially a kind of renunciation, renouncing those parts of our lives that are less important. In other words, being wise about paring down our lives to what really is important and spending less of our time worried about possessions and things that simply clutter up our lives. Now, another aspect that's similar to non-attachment in the broad sense has to do with seclusion or withdrawal from life. And in early Buddhism, there are various aspects to this seclusion or withdrawal. Three in particular. The first aspect of seclusion or withdrawal involves physical seclusion. So, we may go on retreat for periods of time. That is to say, we may seclude ourselves from normal life to go off independently, perhaps by ourselves, or at least preserving what's called noble silence. Which is to say that we're not going to necessarily speak with people around us. In many Buddhist retreat centers, you may pass a period of time, of days or whatever it might be, however long the retreat is, without speaking to other people, except in particular, perhaps important parts. Like, you may spend time speaking to, let's say, the person who's leading the retreat in order to have a sort of a conversation or a dialogue with them about how your practice is going. But in general, you practice seclusion, physical seclusion. We can also seclude ourselves by, let's say, being off in a more rural atmosphere rather than being in the center of a city, which is one thing that the Buddha seems to have been in favor of. Because being off in a more quiet atmosphere lends itself more to meditation. It lends itself more to contemplation rather than being caught up in the hurly-burly of, say, social life. Now, another aspect that's related, the second aspect of this kind of withdrawal or seclusion, is mental withdrawal. And this involves trying to withdraw ourselves from the unskillful or unhealthy kinds of mental states that obsess us. In particular, these are known as, or the most famous ones anyhow, as the hindrances. There are five hindrances. And these are hindrances that make meditation more difficult. Their attachment or interest in pleasures, various kinds of sense pleasures. They are aspects of ill will, of anger, of hatred, that comes up in our minds. They are involved being tired or sleepy. They can involve also having an overactive mind, a mind that is always worried or concerned, that's always flitting from the future to the past to try to figure out how to undertake ways of solving worries and concerns. These are all hindrances to effective meditation. And also doubt, doubt being the fifth. These are hindrances. And so, insofar as we practice mental seclusion, we're trying to practice ways to get ourselves out of those hindrances and other similar kinds of states, mental states, that are not very healthy for us. And the ultimate aim, at least, of this kind of mental seclusion is to get into deep kinds of meditative absorptions, which are called the jhanas. Now the jhanas are a series of absorptive meditative states which are pleasant in various respects. So that as we seclude ourselves from the world, and as we spend more and more time in deep meditation, we can reach deeper and deeper states which become pleasurable on their own. The third form of seclusion involves what's called seclusion from all, basically from all difficult states, from all sort of poisoned states of mind. And that is, of course, the ultimate goal of the path, which is awakening. And that may be a kind of seclusion from all that's bad, as it were, all that's wrong in life. That can be a kind of seclusion which is really very far off for all of us, but at least it's a kind of seclusion that we can keep in mind. Now there's another aspect of non-attachment, which goes by the word viraga in Pali, which basically means a fading away of desires, a desirelessness, a lack of desires. And this is the kind of thing that we're sort of aiming towards, a lack of desire in particular for rebirth, sort of a drying up of our desire to be reborn in some future life. That is part of the aim of practice. And indeed, in one early sutta, it talks about how the practice that allows us to get towards desirelessness is the practice of mindfulness itself, which is really quite interesting. So by being mindful, by being in a state where we become more and more openly aware of the state of our mind and our body, we become more desireless. The desires that we saw, that we thought we were so invested in, if you like, begin to dry up. They begin to become less forceful as time goes on, because we begin to see that those desires, when they're fulfilled within our ordinary life, they don't seem to actually be so important. The fulfilling of these desires isn't so important. Another early Buddhist concept that is related to a non-attachment is anupadana, or non-grasping, the sort of drying up of our grasping for things, which is a very similar, very, very closely related concept in early Buddhism to non-attachment, the sort of modern, I should say, English term non-attachment. So as our grasping dries up, we of course become less attached to things, we become less invested in things. And there are traditionally four attachments that we have in ordinary life. The first and perhaps most important for many of us is attachment to sense pleasures, attachment to objects, to beautiful things, to beautiful or fantastic experiences that we have in life. We become very attached to our houses, to our cars, to particular objects that we have, that we own, to particular pieces of land, let's say, or particular parts of the world. This is in essence an attachment to sense pleasures. We can also have an attachment to views, and this is an extremely important one for many of us who are more, shall we say, intellectual. For intellectual people, they tend, and even those of us who are not so intellectual, we can be very attached to particular viewpoints, to particular things that we think are correct, and other things that we therefore think are incorrect. And we can have such a belief without attachment. In other words, we can say, oh, okay, it's right to do this, or wrong to do that, or this is a correct viewpoint, without being thereby attached to it. Because attachment involves a kind of an emotional welcoming, an emotional sort of flutter of the heart when we hear something. And just as it might happen with sense pleasures, where we welcome these pleasures and relish them, and so as a result, when they're taken away from us, we become despondent, or depressed, or angry, so too with views. We can be so welcoming of a particular view, that when somebody comes along who disagrees with us, we can become angry, we can become very averse to them, because we have a different view. And this is called attachment to views, and it's just as problematic as our attachment to sense pleasures. There's also our grasping at what's called rules and rituals. That is to say, we may become so invested in a particular set of rituals that we undertake, or rules, let's say, most famously, perhaps, the five precepts in Buddhism. We become so attached to doing those properly, that we become sort of holier than thou. We look down on other people, we think of them as part of who we are, as a solid self. And that kind of attachment is equally problematic and pernicious, really. Because it ends up that we sort of think that the aim of practice, the aim of the path, is to do certain kinds of rituals, to undertake certain kinds of physical practices, or not to undertake certain kinds of physical actions, such as killing or stealing. And we sort of come to a feeling that by doing that, we are thereby expressing the sense in which we're And that also can be a form of attachment. And finally, there is what we might say is the basic attachment, which is attachment to ourself. An attachment to a permanent self, an attachment to a sort of a perfected self, an attachment towards a view of ourself as being a certain way. So we may think of ourselves as being better than others, or perhaps as even being worse than others. There's ways of doing these kinds of invidious comparisons where all of these kind of reify a notion of ourself. And the central aim of practice, or one central aim of practice, is to begin to relax around this fundamental attachment to ourselves, which gets bound up in our viewpoints, and in who we think we are, and in our practices that we may think are better or worse And I have an earlier video on five ways that we can construct an idea of self, which you might find interesting in case you're not really quite grasping how it is that we can attach ourselves to a self. Well, I have, again, this video talks about five different ways, among many others, that we can do this, that we can do just this. Now, so what I've gone through here are a number of ways, a number of concepts in early Buddhism that are related in closer or more distant ways to the ideal of non-attachment. Now, there's a very, Bhikkhu Bodhi, who is a wonderful translator and philosopher, thinker, monastic, who talks about early Buddhism, translates the texts from early Buddhism. He said a while back that the supreme goal of Buddhism is the liberation of mind by non-clinging, the supreme goal of Buddhism. Now, probably my guess would be that Bhante Bodhi says this because of the third noble truth, the third noble truth saying that the cessation of suffering, of dukkha, this existential kind of suffering, or this feeling that life is not quite right, life is not quite adequate, that this comes from the cessation of clinging, of atanha, which is the Pali word, which means thirst or craving, basically. Now, we can talk about either craving or clinging being the important concept here, but they're very closely related. Bhante Bodhi talks about clinging, we can talk about craving, but the point is clear, which is that the central goal is to release or relax around this kind of craving and clinging, to relax or release this kind of attachment that we have to parts of the world, or to views, or to ourself. So we see that non-attachment, this modern term, this English term, is related to various ideas from early Buddhism about renunciation, about seclusion or withdrawal, about dispassion, about non-clinging and non-craving and non-identification of ourselves with other things. So it's a term that encompasses, I think, a number of related ideas from early Buddhism, from the early practices, that are absolutely central to the Buddhist path. Now, here I want to get a little bit to detachment, because some people will use the word detachment for what I've just been discussing. Instead of saying non-attachment, they'll say detachment, that the supreme goal or some way of understanding the supreme goal of Buddhism is to become detached. And I think there is a very deep problem with this term in English, because it has certain connotations. When we talk about being detached, we really, at least part of the connotation of that word is that we're kind of aloof, that we're separating ourselves off from worldly concerns. We're just sort of not caring about the world. We're not caring about other people. We're keeping ourselves, again, the word would be aloof from the world. And this is not an accurate reflection of early Buddhist belief or practice. In particular, we can think of early Buddhist practices of the Brahma-Viharas. Brahma-Viharas are four practices, related practices, around fostering and increasing our sense of kindness towards others, our compassion for the world, our sympathetic joy, our ability to have joy in the success of others. And our equanimity, our ability to hold the world without preferences for certain people over others, but to hold everyone in this kind of generalized kindness and compassion and sympathetic joy. This is a very fundamental practice in the early tradition, indeed all of Buddhism. There are other practices, such as I mentioned earlier, the five precepts, where we undertake these precepts of not killing, of not stealing, not lying, and so on. We undertake these precepts out of compassion for others, because we don't want to harm others as much as possible. We want to minimize our tendency to harm out of compassion for others. There also is a famous sutta in the Digha Nikaya that talks about a wheel-turning monarch, that is to say, that gives us a picture of what life would be like under a sort of an idealized kind of Buddhist monarch. And we have to understand that this is quite a long time ago, many millennia in the past, so it's not going to be an idea of a government that may necessarily be to our modern standards. But nevertheless, the idea is that this perfect monarch, this perfect ruler, is going to be somebody who undertakes to minimize the amount of injustice in their state or country where they rule. The idea of injustice being a problem, and so if the monarch is not undertaking a proper ruling, that they are therefore going to be creating more injustice, and that's a bad thing. So what this implies is that a rulership under a kind of a perfected kind of Buddhist ruler would be one where injustices are minimized. And I would submit that all of these kind of concepts from early Buddhism are concepts that are not compatible with an ideal of detachment, that somehow if we aim towards a kind of perfected state that we're going to become more and more detached from the world and care less and less about the world. That simply isn't compatible with these kinds of practices. There's also a very wonderful and somewhat famous early sutta where, I believe it's in the Vinaya actually, where the Buddha confronts a number of monks who are in the same hut. The monks would stay in a hut together, several in the same hut, and there's one of the monastics in that hut, one of the monks, who is very ill. And in fact, the Buddha finds this monastic lying in a pool of his own excrement because he is so ill, and the Buddha confronts the other monastics who are in that hut with him, who are cohabiting, and asks how it is that they have allowed this to happen. And the other monastics are basically detached. They're aloof. They say, well, he has no interest for us and he's not able to help us. We're not able to practice together, so we just left him be. And the Buddha gets really quite angry and stern with them, at least stern, saying that basically whoever would attend me, whoever of you would attend me if I were in that situation, you should also attend the other monastics. You should attend this other person. So the Buddha undertakes to clean the monastic off, to put him in a much more comfortable position and state, so as to be an example, to say, you know, this is the way you should behave with your brothers and sisters, with your brother and sister monastics, because there's nobody else around here to be compassionate towards you. We live together in a community, so we must do that for each other. And again, this is exactly an example where the Buddha is, in fact, against this kind of aloofness, or detachment from the world, in the word detachment. Also it's said in another sutta, in the early texts, that an arahant, that is an awakened person, is simply incapable of violating the precepts. They're incapable of killing another person or another being. They're incapable of lying or of stealing or committing sexual misconduct. They're simply incapable of these things, because the ethical strictures, the ethical reasoning, the wish to be kind and compassionate to others is so ingrained in them that they are simply unable to do otherwise. And this again is an example of where detachment is the wrong concept. So when we say that the Buddha was interested in, or the final goal, the ultimate goal of Buddhism is a goal of non-attachment, we have to be very careful that non-attachment, of course it has a far enemy in attachment, we don't want that, we're trying to get away from attachment, but it also has what's called a near enemy. And the near enemy, this concept that's somewhat close but actually an enemy, is the concept of detachment. Detachment is also something that we want to get away from. And we'll find in the early suttas that the Buddha actually was very, I think, interested in arguing against detachment, in arguing against being aloof, in saying in certain situations that people should, let's say, stand up against harassment that's occurring in front of them. They shouldn't simply be aloof, that they should stand up and criticize those who are worthy of criticism. And also, of course, praise those who are worthy of praise, rather than standing back aloof in some kind of misguided understanding of what it is to be equanimous, thinking that that's being equanimous in the Buddha's understanding. It's not. And I actually did an earlier video about just this point, which I'll put up a link here on the screen in case you're interested in hearing more about the ways that we should strive to be less aloof. So I hope that this has been useful. I hope we'll catch you on the next one of these videos. And meanwhile, all of you be well.