Non Attachment

 Shakyamuni was pleasure-loving young prince in a palace so luxurious that it was even air-conditioned with perfumed winds fanned through cool fountains, to banish the heat of summer from those delightful halls. He never thought about the nature of life; he merely enjoyed all the sense pleasures life could offer, day after day, throughout his youth. His father, anxious about an astrologer's prediction that his son would either become a world ruler or a monk, tried to keep him from knowing the existence of sorrow, and never let him leave those pleasure-charmed confines of the palace.

But one day, Shakyamuni left the palace without telling his father, and drove into the town in his chariot. .On the way, he passed an old man, footless and bent double, hobbling along on his cane. The prince asked his charioteer who this strange creature was. The charioteer answered, "That is an old man, my Lord." "Will I also become like this." "Yes Master, old age comes to all people."

After some distance, they passed a leper lying beside the road, his sores oozing with pus. The prince was shocked and asked, "Might I become like that someday?" The charioteer replied, "Disease is the lot of all who dwell in the physical body." The prince was silent.

Some time later, they passed a corpse being carried to the burial ground, and the prince asked, "Will this come to me also?" The charioteer answered, "No one who is born can escape death." The prince was plunged into deep reflection upon hearing the words of his charioteer, until suddenly they passed a monk walking beside the road. His face was radiant with an inner light. The prince asked, "Who is that?" The charioteer replied, "He has dedicated his life to realizing the truth, beyond all pleasure and pain." At that moment, true discrimination awakened in the prince's mind and he knew that he, too, must transcend the pleasures of his youth. He took off his royal garments and set forth alone, without any possessions, to journey alone the difficult road to Perfection. He became, ultimately, the Enlightened One - the Buddha.

From discrimination, non-attachment naturally unfolds. To realize the infinite, we have to surrender all attachment to the finite. Like the monkey with his fist inside a bottle, tightly clasped about a cherry, who could not withdraw his fist because he would not let go of the cherry, we can only attain higher levels of being when we relinquish our grasping hold on the lower ones.

Those who are established in nor-attachment realize that everything we cling to in this universe of change, we must one day lose. In profit or loss, honor or dishonor, their minds remain undisturbed. A husband and wife were taking care of their sick child when one morning, they woke up and found the child had died. The wife became distraught with grief, but the husband remained calm. The wife cried, "Have you a heart of stone? The husband replied, "Last night I had a dream, in that dream I was a king and married to a beautiful queen, and I had seven children. Then I woke up, it all vanished. Now my son has died, and I am wondering whether I should bemoan the loss of one in this dram when I was a king in the dream or the loss of one in this waking state. I am unable to decide, so I am keeping quite and at peace."

But not-attachment does not mean to forego all pleasure and remain in a state of dry indifference to the world. Many religious traditions have distorted non-attachment to mean painful renunciation, and their followers have mortified their flesh to resist the transitory pleasures of their bodies, or created aversions in their minds to the natural instincts of eating, sleeping, and sexuality, or fled from the world to dwell in distant jungles or mountain caves, far from the temptations of the senses. By trying to avoid pleasures, they rejected life.

Those who are truly non-attached do not deny life; they embrace it, for they feel the touch of the eternal hidden within all the changing forms of their lives. They become like the child who is overjoyed to receive a new dress from her mother; one minute she caresses and hugs it to her, and the next, when she finds a beautiful toy, she leaves the dress and embraces the toy. Later, she drops the toy to run after a flower - she is attached to nothing. So those who see all objects and creatures of the world as radiant waves in the ocean of universal consciousness, and deal with them without attachment or aversion, enjoy inexhaustible bliss, for they are in love with the Infinite.