I've been thinking about attachment partly because I'm teaching in Vallejo an Introduction to Buddhism, Introduction to Zen class and we started out with the life of the Buddha and the major source that I used this time was this wonderful book by Bhikkhu Jnanamoli. What he did was he went through the Pali Canon, the scriptures that are represented to actually be Buddha's words and excerpted all of the references to Buddha's life and it's a basic section on the teaching but a lot about his life and his teaching in general, you know, so there's not a huge amount about the Four Noble Truths or something like that, but there's a lot about how he interacted with people and it's a wonderful book and so I taught The Life of the Buddha, I don't know, I was about three weeks ago or something, but it stays with me.

[01:05]

and he did have something to say about clinging. And then more immediately it's come up for me because of a couple of experiences with people dying, not people that I was close to or even had I had virtually nothing to do with either one of them. One was Maile Scott's mother who died about two weeks ago, which I imagine a lot of you know that. She was in her 90s and was completely ready to die for years. She's been saying, I want to die, I want it to be over. And she just kind of slowly declined. and then died, and Meili's daughter, Cassie, was taking care of her, and the last thing she said was, I love you, Cassie, and she was not in a lot of pain. She did it just right. The other one was somebody I know not at all.

[02:21]

I was very touched when, I thought I saw him, Doug Greiner dedicated service to a friend of his the other morning. Somebody who died very recently at, I guess she was either 54, 55, something like that. And I was struck by the contrast, you know, in some sense, Maile's mother was okay with me. And Doug's friend, it was not okay. Just not okay for somebody that age to die. I'm 56, which I'm sure has something to do with it. But I kept thinking about it. You know, when it's your own mother, it's kind of never okay. there's just all the archetypes that arise that have to do with, you know, then you're kind of, you don't have a mommy anymore, now what? But still, there's this, we do have these notions that it's kind of okay when you're over, oh, I don't know, 75 or something, or you've lived a life, and if you're in your 50s, it's not okay, and it's really not okay for a child to die.

[03:35]

so what you know we don't have uh... we don't have much control over that we're going to die uh... even though we don't believe it but we're going to die and we're going to die when it happens and it could happen anytime so what do we do with that how do we practice how do how do I practice with it is what I've been asking myself uh... how do I work with what comes up. And so I've been thinking about attachment. I certainly am attached to being alive, and I'm attached to all of my friends being alive, and to the idea of people not dying before they're, oh, I don't know, I guess my, I would say 80, 80's okay, sort of. which is another example of my having ideas about things and being attached to them.

[04:45]

But we make it harder on ourselves because we are clinging and Buddha spoke with man who was very, very upset because his son had died and the man was just crazed out of his mind and he came to the Buddha and the Buddha said, gee, he didn't say gee probably, he said, you look as if you've lost your senses. And the A man said, how should my faculty seem in their normal state? My dearly beloved son is dead and that I go to the charnel ground, the place where they cremated people and I say, my son, my son, where are you? My only child, where are you? And Buddha responded, so it is, householder, so it is. Dear ones who endear themselves bring sorrow and lamentation.

[05:52]

pain, grief, and despair. And the man was very upset to hear that, and he said, who would ever think that, Lord? Dear ones, Lord, who endear themselves bring happiness and joy. and he got up and he walked away and he ran into some other people nearby and he indignantly told them what the Buddha had said and they said no no you're right and he's wrong and the word got to the king's palace and the king thought that was terrible also and his wife Queen Malika said, I trust the Buddha. And the king got mad at her too. You can see there's also, you can see the attachment working here. The Buddha said something and the king was so angry, he told his wife to leave the room. just ordered her away. And she was interested in this and she sent a courtier to talk to the Buddha and ask him, well, what is this?

[06:56]

What is this about? What did you mean by that? And so the Buddha addressed him and said, uh... he started he told a number of stories about people one woman whose mother died and the woman lost her mind uh... wandering around saying where's my mother have you seen my mother and he told a large number of stories of people just completely uh... losing it losing their minds when someone close to them died and the courtier went back and told the queen and she uh... talked to her husband and he still didn't buy it. And then she said, well, our daughter, what if something happened to her? How would that be for you? And he said, that would be terrible. I would be filled with grief. She said, well, that's what the Buddha is talking about. And then she gave other examples about herself and other people in the family. And finally, the king began to see that there was a way in which that was true.

[07:57]

So this clinging that we do can create problems. Of course we love people. Of course we have dear ones who endear themselves to us. And of course they bring joy and happiness. But it's also true that we can love in a way that includes a great deal of desire, a great deal of attachment in the sense of holding on too tight. And then when there is a loss, we can suffer extra, more than we need to. Because of this clinging, because of these ideas that we may have, I think all of us have them various times, we can create suffering for ourselves.

[09:02]

And I'm going to come back to that but I wanted to talk a little bit about clinging in this sense is a kind of desire or greed. It's a holding on to our experience or getting entangled in it because it also includes a kind of aversion. It's a non-accepting, a non-allowing, a non-letting be. It's a trying to interrupt the fluidity of the Dharma of our experience. And Buddha spoke of it in that there were four kinds of clinging. Ah, and he defined them all in terms of habits.

[10:14]

And I think that's a useful way to think about it, because part of what happens is we have habitual patterns, and if we're not paying attention, then those habits take over. And then we wake up in a lot of pain. So he spoke of clinging as a habit of sensual desire, which seems pretty clear to me. It's just plain old greed or lusting after things and people. I thought about it when someone dies, there may be actual physical desire that's frustrated that somebody that you're actually, if you were your spouse, that you no longer are able to make love with that person. But in a much more general sense, I think we have a kind of a physical longing for contact, physical contact with a person.

[11:17]

And that can get prolonged. There's clinging as the habit of what he calls wrong view. These notions that we have, for example, we tend to think that we're going to go on forever, that we're not going to die, and we don't really think that our loved ones are going to die either, though it's a little more conceivable that other people are going to die than that I am. but our habitual pattern of thinking is that what's going on right now is just going to go on forever. And it's a big surprise when it changes because we deny to ourselves, we're in denial about impermanence, we're in denial about change if we're following our habitual thinking, most of us. a practice and an effort to remember impermanence.

[12:20]

I suppose that's one of the kind of good things about death or it's a useful thing that it kind of rubs our nose in impermanence. You can't deny it when somebody has died. There's no question that they did not, they exhaled and they didn't inhale and that's it. so whatever you may think about what happens afterwards something definitely changed so there's impermanence there's impermanence right in your face it's kind of a when someone dies too it's kind of a hint maybe a big hint that we're going to die to, that I'm going to die. It makes it more believable that I'm going to die and it helps me with this belief that I have, this habitual belief that I have that I'm not going to.

[13:23]

And I might add, you know, one major problem with having that habit is that we let things go so that we don't, for example, if we had a fight with someone we love, we don't deal with it, because we just think, well, I mean, we don't think about, these aren't things we actually, you know, you don't consciously think about, well, you know, there's forever and don't worry about it, but that's how we live our lives. So if we can be reminded that, oh, you mean me, I'm gonna die, me, then we might live our lives a little differently, or a lot differently. if we can remember that it could happen anytime. I know Yvonne Rand spoke once about how she and her husband try to live that way and remember so that if they had a fight the night before, that by the morning when he went off to work in San Francisco, they would try to deal with it because who knew if they were going to ever see each other again. So to remember that is really a useful thing.

[14:30]

Then the other, the next one is, it's called a habit of misapprehension, misunderstanding, whatever, of virtue and duty. And the footnote says that has to do with ritual and so on, but it seems to me that it's also about, that one struck me as being also about having, about this is where one has ideas. a misapprehension of duty. We have these ideas about how people should die. I have an idea how I think the right way to die is to find out about three months before you're going to die and then kind of slowly decline, not in a lot of pain, and say goodbye to everybody and have people come to you and have a time to practice with it and awake to this amazing, awesome experience and so on.

[15:37]

That's the way to do it. There's a book called How We Die by a doctor named Sheldon Newland, and it's a difficult and a wonderful book. And he confesses at the beginning, in the introduction, that he has this idea. And he says, a lot of us do, or most of us do, that we have some idea about what's the right way to do it. Some people just want to have a heart attack and go like that. Some people want this kind of a little more lingering, whatever. We have ideas about it. And forget it. You don't know. There's no way. So we have this habit of misapprehension of what's virtuous or what's the right way to do it. We also sometimes impose it on the person who's dying, right?

[16:38]

They're not doing it right. They're in denial. They're not willing to talk to us about it. You know, they won't admit they're frightened and so on. It's not helpful. And I wanted to tell you a story of my own experience with one of these ideas, which was My parents both died in 1989, a few months apart. My father died second, and about a month or six weeks after he died, I went off to Green Gulch Farm to do a summer practice period. And Yvonne offered to do a memorial for my parents with me the morning of the 4th of July. So I said thank you and I was very grateful and I think that was exactly 100 days after my father had died or something. It was really great. So on the 3rd of July, I was sitting mourning Zazen and many thoughts were coming up and physical experiences of anger and irritation and general bad feeling about my parents.

[17:53]

And I was struggling with them because I kept thinking, well, I should be having loving and appreciative feelings about my parents because I'm going to do this memorial. And I went and did doksan with Norman Fisher and he said, well, you might look at how you have this mind and how much suffering you're causing yourself because you want this other mind. And I understood that on a really gut level, but what I said to him was, yeah, but then I might feel better. I just wanted to hold on to this. Then I was just in a lousy mood that morning and I stomped off. I went and got a cup of tea. It was a Sunday. We were supposed to go to 930 Zazen and I went and got a cup of tea and I was heading for the garden and I walked right through the ante room to the zendo where the zendo manager was standing.

[19:03]

She was about to go in and open the zendo And for those who know her, it was Barbara Cohn. And I stomped right across with my cup of tea and I said, I'm not going to, I was not laughing at the time, but I have to laugh now. Anyway, I said, I'm not going to the Zendo. I'm not going to Zazen. She just looked at me and she said, I can see that. I mean, I didn't understand it, but I wanted a fight, but I wasn't getting one. And I went off down to the garden, into the herb circle, and the beautiful circular space where all the flowers are and so on, and there are benches, and it was a beautiful day. just like a spring day and I was sitting on the bench and drinking my tea and some people walked by on the path just outside that circle and they were just, I didn't hear what they said, but they were just talking pleasantly to one another and the thought arose in my mind, I bet your parents didn't die.

[20:06]

And then I had to kind of laugh. Who knows? Maybe they did just yesterday. I don't know. And so I went off back to my room and I put my tea down and I just sobbed. And then I could be with the other kinds of feelings about my parents. that just seems like I just I had I had to hold on to that idea about how I should feel and not allow myself to be with what was going on I guess until I was ready and you know now in hindsight of course it was also because I didn't want to be with how much it hurt and that was clearly up. And I caused myself a not insignificant amount of suffering because I was holding on so tight.

[21:09]

Actually, I think the lousy feeling started the day before. Not on the third, but on the second or something. Anyway, it just seemed like for about 48 hours I was living in the hell realm until I was willing to be with what my experience was right then and do it. do the experience, allow it to surface and then I could let it go and then I could be present for the rest of my experience which I had been holding off. I was working very hard, very hard to hold it off and we do that, we do it. And the fourth and the last of Buddha's descriptions of the origin of clinging or how it operates is a habit, he calls it a habit of self-theories. And I looked it up in the index, there was nothing else. I have a notion about what that means, and it may well be right.

[22:13]

I called Michael Wenger, who's the Dean of Buddhist Studies at San Francisco Zen Center, and he agreed, so here goes. Anyway, I think that basically the habit of self-theories is the habit of putting oneself in the middle, the habit of thinking that I have a separate, solid, eternal, concrete existence. That there is an I here. This habit of thinking I am. And it isn't even something one thinks. It's just there. That's the ground. And that's the habit that we all have. And it's the right in the middle of our troubles, this ego that thinks I am. And then one's experience is in reference to this, you know, how is it for me?

[23:17]

And denying it creates much worse problems. Acknowledging that habit of self-referent thinking is a big step, and seeing it is a big step, and remembering it is the difficulty. And having that kind of belief in a self, that kind of holding I am right here, and seeing with reference to that instead of simply being able to just be here and let the dharmas experience themselves. That is clinging and that is right in the middle of how difficult it is for us to acknowledge impermanence, to acknowledge that things change because it threatens this idea that we have of being a permanent solid self.

[24:37]

And it is, you know, one's not always in touch with it but occasionally one gets in touch with just how frightening it is. And it is scary. I think that... in the Buddhist teaching at any rate, that notion, that little, that sense of I am, even if you can see that there's not really a separate self and you could understand the Buddhist notion of how the makeup of what we call a person is just a bunch of kind of shifting qualities and substances, you can see that there's still the subtle notion, I am. And I think one of the things that's useful about death is the I am not of it. It helps us to remember that things do change.

[25:42]

So I talked about dearness leads to lamentation and the Buddhas having said that. You know what, I think what people found difficult about it was that it seemed to be that he was saying it's better not to care. And I don't think he meant people shouldn't care. And at any rate, we're human beings and we do. What he was, I believe, advocating as an ideal was some kind of disinterested love, love without the desire, without the holding on, the kind of love that's talked about in the Metta Sutta, which we recite here during morning service sometimes. He talks about how one should love everyone as a mother loves an only child. Can we just give that, allow that to arise with all of us?

[26:49]

No. But it's really important to try. It's really important to try. I'm just sure, without knowing, that all of us, I know about myself and some other people, when we do cling to ones we love, we create problems for them and for ourselves. And I'm reminded of a wonderful story that Maureen Stewart told. She was a teacher at the Cambridge Buddhist Association and she died a couple of years ago. No, a couple of years ago. She died 10 years ago. Did she die? Wow. Anyway, she died 10 years ago. Anyway, she spoke about her son. He loved climbing up and down stairs and he was very little and so he couldn't do it by himself and he was always after her and so they spent a lot of their time going up and down the stairs and she worried about him because he was so little and she would hold his hand really tight.

[28:02]

And her theory was that he didn't complain because he loved it so much and he kind of thought that was the price of going up and down the stairs. But finally one day he said, ouch, you're holding my hand so tight. And she realized that she'd been really gripping it. And so she loosened her grip and a hand appeared. So that's what I'm talking about. Loosen your grip. So making that kind of effort to loosen our grip on people we love is a useful, very useful thing. And it's just like we vow to save all beings. Well, seems an impossibility, but we do it anyway. So we make that effort to loosen our grip with ones that we love. And I'm talking about, I guess in a sense, allowing that grip to loosen.

[29:12]

You see, I'm not talking about repressing one's desire. I'm not talking about denying that you're attached. I'm actually exactly talking about acknowledging that you're attached, that one is attached. And then work with that. The same kind of thing, you know, confess it. let it arise, experience it, let it go. And then do it again and again and again and again. And sometimes we need help and sometimes people die and that's a place to get help. Because we can see them. we can see the I AM habit. So I think I'll stop there, so there's a few minutes for questions or if this brings up something for you I'd be interested to hear it, so thank you.

[30:21]

Of course, I'm sure none of you have ever experienced clinging. found a wonderful human need to come together. That in the name of not clinging, that it's so important to me to not deny our need to love each other in a very deep way. Our meaning all of us. And the other thing was I just offer this little image that somebody gave me years ago when their second parent died.

[31:35]

because he felt like without both parents that he was in this tiny little rowboat in the middle of the ocean and there weren't any oars for a while. I never forgot that image of how hard it is when the second one goes. Somebody said to me after my father died, well, you're an orphan now. And my first thought was, oh, give me a break. I'm, I don't know, 40-some years old. But it is like that. But also, thank you for mentioning about being in a couple, because that's our way. Buddha was talking to monks, and that's one way, but there are other ways. And Norman Fisher has a poem about, I will love all women through this woman, about his wife. Can I add one quick thing? Which is, and we need, me, I need to always look at my attachment, a decent and wonderful human being to love.

[32:47]

Yes? I'm sorry, I didn't catch the title of that book. The Life of the Buddha. There are a lot of terms. I'm sorry? Oh, well it's Bhikkhunyanamoli, N-A-N-A-M-O-L-I and It's by the Buddhist Publication Society Kandy, K-A-N-D-Y, Sri Lanka. It's the life of the Buddha according to the Pali Canon. I'm sure it's in the library. I guess you didn't mention it, but I know that you had some experience too with death of a beloved pet.

[34:00]

So I suppose this talk also applies to all sentient beings. And the second thing was that I wondered what your feeling was when you heard about Alaska Air 261, how did you respond? You know, I was shocked and there was something, I What I've been noticing is my turning away from it, that it was overwhelming, but also the way the press covers this kind of thing really offends me because it just seems almost a prurient interest in it. I find myself not quite able to look, and I'm watching that.

[35:02]

I mean, I acknowledge that. I find it hard to conceive of so many people, and it feels close, you know? It's not halfway around the world, it's here. How about you? Well, certainly some of those feelings, and I guess the feeling that somehow I think there's a certain power in the media so one might take this on personally and so the question becomes like one has to engage somehow and process the feelings like it's impossible to turn away Thank you for mentioning Evelyn. Because I had meant to say something about her and I forgot. That was my dog, probably a number of you knew. She was just such a great example of not clinging. She was a golden retriever, so she always was going to people and giving love and wanting it.

[36:07]

But if somebody didn't respond and didn't want to pet her, she'd just go on to somebody else. And she gave completely, I mean, people, she was at Tassajara with me, and people in the summer, especially guests, would come up to me and say, she really likes me, doesn't she? And I would just say, yes, I didn't want to say she's that way with everybody, but that was largely true. And I felt that she was a wonderful example for me. And it's funny, you know, what we do, you know, if you tell the person, yeah, she also really likes a thousand other people, you know, there's a little machine in our head that's kind of a funny thing. Well, it's putting oneself in the middle. I mean, it's really, you know, we don't want to think that we're just like everybody else, just another jerk in the world.

[37:14]

You and then Marianne, and then maybe we should stop. I'm not sure. It's a very, very beautiful, beautiful book. And it's, and he keeps his brother certainly alive still, very much for, it's everything's Well, I can't say.

[38:22]

I mean, remembering someone with love is not clinging in my view, but we do cling. There is clinging about such things and obsessing about some relationship or something that you should have said or you wish you hadn't said or that they said to you and whatever. But it just depends entirely on the circumstance. So I could imagine it being wonderful. Yeah. Yeah, he said something about our attachment to I am. And then he followed that up by saying, instead of being attached to that, he said something about we should just go ahead and let the Dharma flow. So could you say a little bit more about this letting the Dharma flow? It's the notion, you know, when we try to carry ourselves forward and experience the world that creates problems and when we allow the myriad things to come forward and experience themselves that's enlightenment.

[39:37]

That's what I mean, that kind of thing is what I mean. It's like when I am acting from an I am place from a place where I'm in the middle and thinking about, you know, how does it affect me, instead of simply responding to circumstances, then I'm often creating difficulties for myself and or other people. You're talking about controlling the way you want things to be. Trying to. Instead of letting it be how it is. And I think of that as a flow. I think we should stop. I'll be available in the community room. The dawn has been signaling me for a while.

[40:35]

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