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42 EASTERN HORIZON | FACE TO FACE

The Buddha tells us to investigate the truth. How do attachment should be. Delusion and dissociation are
we maintain an inquisitive mind without becoming neither healthy nor conducive to freedom.
skeptical of everything we do not know?
I remember teaching a weekend retreat right after the
Curiosity and skepticism don’t coexist. One is an antidote 9/11 twin towers fell in the USA. Everyone was deeply
to the other. The problem isn’t that we do not know disturbed by what happened and felt frightened and
things, the problem is that we feel uncomfortable not anxious. I guided students to imagine being a May fly
knowing. In the midst of the discomfort, we shut down with a month to live. What would your priorities be if
our curiosity about our discomfort. If, instead we were to you only lived a month? Then I asked them to imagine
investigate the discomfort, curiosity would continue. being a 2500-year old Redwood tree. What might it
be like to have roots in the ground and have so many
A key teaching in Buddhism is compassion for generations of people come and go, animals come and
all living beings; yet we are told to practice non- go and to be present for all of the different storms,
attachment. How can a compassionate mind be non- droughts, fires and floods?
attached?

Then I asked them to imagine being the Earth - born 6
One of the ways that compassion arises is from feeling billion years ago. Emerging out of gas and fire. Imagine
the impact of suffering. You see a child fall, ouch. You watching continents come and go, mountain ranges
see a mother mourning the loss of her child, you can come and go. I asked them to imagine witnessing the
sense the magnitude of what it might be to conceive, birth and death of every living thing from the beginning.
carry a child to term, give birth, care for them and then
not be able to help; to stand by and watch as this child When their perspective got big enough, they
dies. Feeling loss and grief is a natural expression of experienced more even mindedness with the ups and
our connection. Attachment is what happens when we downs that come with life. They emerged out of this
mistakenly take ownership of our view, anger, desire, meditation a lot more calm and steady than when they
or our joy, happiness and love. We can recognise that a started. This is a healthy expression of equanimity.
child isn’t really our “own”, we can know that everything
In 2000 you took Bodhisattva vows with His
is subject to aging sickness and death, and yet there can
Holiness the Dalai Lama. How does practicing the
still be grief, feeling the impact of loss of connection.
Bodhisattva vows support all your years of practice
Really the only way to be truly compassionate is to be
in the Theravada lineage where the focus has been
non-attached. If for example a meditation practitioner
more on self-deliverance rather than “saving all
was attached to an outcome, it might limit their ability
sentient beings”?
to respond compassionately to the mourning mother.
Would you say non-attachment is a form of That year a bus load of Theravada Buddhist monks and
equanimity? nuns received the Bodhisattva vows from His Holiness

the Dalai Lama. Each of us had our own reasons why
Non-attachment can be a form of equanimity. When that we did it and what it meant. I remember discussing
is the case, a person is able to feel the whole of their the impact of the Bodhisattva vows on practice. When
body as well as a whole range of emotions, yet they see you take the Bodhisattva Vows it accentuates the
things from a much bigger perspective. Sometimes I see importance of realizing non self. When you realize
students who think they are non-attached and in reality non-self, you fulfil both the Bodhisattva ideal and the
they are in a mild disassociated state where they can’t Theravada aspiration to realize the end of suffering.
fully feel their body or their emotions. As we study non
attachment, it is good to know the near and far enemy For myself, right after taking the Bodhisattva vows,
of it so that we are not deluded by what we think non I went to Australia and lived in the outback/bush. I