Difficulties With Attachment and Desire

Difficulties With Attachment and Desire

Date Posted:
October 2005

Rinpoche gave the following advice to a monk who was having difficulties dealing with problems of attachment and desire.

The first method is to keep your distance when your mind is weak. Otherwise, if you do anything physically, this can cause you to damage your vows and your liberation. In such a situation, any action can bring danger.

After separating yourself from the object, continue with this next method, using psychology to give the mind some support and strength. Otherwise, if you have only separated yourself physically, the mind will still suffer. Therefore, strengthen your mind and encourage yourself. Think like this:

1) It is only this one time that I have this precious human rebirth. It is only this one time that I can achieve enlightenment, a good rebirth, and be able to enlighten so many sentient beings.

2) My attachment wants to destroy this opportunity. It wants to prevent me from enlightening sentient beings, from achieving all realizations, from achieving liberation from samsara, and even from achieving a good rebirth in my next life. It is destroying my happiness.

3) Reflect on this quotation from the Vinaya:

Craving for small pleasure
Cannot achieve great pleasure.
Craving for small pleasure makes it impossible to achieve great pleasure.
Renounce the happiness that produces suffering; cherish the happiness that comes from suffering.

Make a strong determination, thinking, “I will bear these hardships now in order to actualize good morality; then later I will be able to achieve enlightenment.”

4) Attachment obscures the mind and blocks our realization of emptiness. Not only does it create negative karma, such as the ten non-virtuous actions, it leads us to break the three sets of vows, beginning with the Pratimoksha vows, which are the foundation, the ground, the earth from which liberation comes. It leads to breaking of the bodhisattva and tantric vows, which allow us to achieve enlightenment quickly.

Attachment cannot cut the root of samsara. Due to attachment, we will abide in samsara, suffering endlessly. Therefore, we must win over our delusions and defeat our enemy, which is attachment.

Attachment keeps us in samsara and has kept us in it from time without beginning. Attachment leaves us suffering in the six realms of suffering.

Meditating on renunciation may not be enough for you to completely let go. But it does help you keep some distance mentally. With renunciation, even when you are physically close together with an object of attachment, you don’t let your mind be attached. You keep some mental distance.

Reflect on impermanence. Think, “If I die now with this mind, due to my negative karma, I will be reborn in a lower realm. Death can happen any time, therefore this attachment doesn’t make any sense. It is torturing me.”

5) Attachment is like a cannibal, like honey on a sword. It looks as if it will help you but, in fact, it only cheats and destroys you. If you see an object of attachment, such as a beautiful person, who you feel attracted to, you believe that he or she is there, but actually they are not there. It is your own mind. It looks as if the person is there, but he or she is not. Due to your own hallucination, as in a dream or a movie, you project a real person, but there is no such thing there. You are attached to that projection, believing 100 percent that there is something real there that you can have. But this doesn’t exist. It’s merely a projection of our ignorant minds, believing in the inherently existing body and person.

Even what is called “man” or “woman”—a merely-labeled beautiful body—even that is projected and merely labeled by our minds. We project that it is there on that base, but it is not there on that base. The person, the beautiful body, is not existing from there, from its own side. What we are attached to is our own view, the hallucination that comes from our own mind. Beyond the skin that is cheating us, there is nothing to be attached to, nothing interesting. There is no essence, no meaning whatsoever. The skin is also a collection of cells. When you look through a magnifying glass or microscope, you see it is just pieces put together.

The person is like a cannibal, at first acting nicely, but later there is no escape from them. He or she completely captures you, then eats you up. Think of the person as a poisonous snake or honey on a sword, as the enemy who brings you down to the hell realms, who causes you to engage in actions which displease all the holy beings.

Always keep in mind that your enemy is the one who smiles at you, praises you, who shows affection to you. Your real enemy is that person. However, you can still remain friends with that person, and don’t get angry at him or her.