You’ll have to imagine me saying this from a wicker planter’s chair in a hotel in Sri Lanka, the kind of place where the ceiling fans paddle the air lazily, like old men in a swimming pool, and the walls are the colour of weak tea.
There’s a distant gong from the temple up the road, a polite ding rather than the Hollywood “BONNNNG” you’re imagining, and a monk is walking past the veranda, saffron robes flapping like the skirts of a flamenco dancer in a breeze.
I’m here to talk about the Buddhist notion of non-attachment. Which is, to put it in English, the art of not giving a monkey’s, though, of course, the Buddha would have put it more poetically.
Non-attachment is not what you think. It’s not apathy, or nihilism, or pretending you don’t care about your dog or your lover or your perfectly chilled gin and tonic.
It is, in fact, the opposite of not caring. It’s about caring without chaining yourself to the thing.
About loving without clinging like a toddler to its mother’s skirt in a supermarket. The idea is simple to say, excruciating to do, like a cartwheel, or apologising to your ex.
Buddhism, being both a religion and a philosophy and a self-help guide long before airports had shelves for self-help guides, begins with the First Noble Truth: life is suffering.
This isn’t the cheerful icebreaker it sounds like, but it’s true in the way that the English weather is true, a baseline fact from which all conversation springs.
The Second Noble Truth says that this suffering comes from craving and clinging, from wanting things to be permanent in a world that is, frankly, allergic to permanence. Everything changes.
Your friends, your health, your waistline. Even your conviction that you hate coriander can turn on a sixpence.
The Third Noble Truth says, logically enough, that if you stop the craving, you stop the suffering.
And the Fourth tells you how, though that’s a longer story involving right speech, right action, right livelihood, and probably a few right turns down dusty roads to monasteries.
But non-attachment is the daily practice bit. It’s where you stop clutching at things as though you could hold them forever. You can still enjoy them. You’re not expected to give up good food or romance or Netflix, but you enjoy them knowing they’ll end, and without making their ending a tragedy. The monk drinks the tea, tastes the bitterness, puts the cup down, and doesn’t check his phone to see if the tea is texting back.
The problem, of course, is that we’re not wired for this. We are magpies of the heart. We pick up glittering people and possessions and experiences, and then we sit on them, muttering, “Mine, mine, mine,” until they fly off or rust or disappoint us.
Modern life supercharges this instinct. Your phone is essentially a craving vending machine. You refresh, you swipe, you scroll, and each action is a tiny act of attachment to the next hit. If Buddha had had Instagram, he’d have smashed the phone with a stick and gone back to meditating under his Bodhi tree.
Practising non-attachment doesn’t mean giving up passion. It means not being mugged by it. It’s the difference between dancing with someone because you love the music, and chaining them to the dance floor because you’re afraid they’ll leave.
You might still get your toes stepped on, but you won’t lose your balance entirely when the song ends.
It is a deeply countercultural idea, especially for the West, where we are taught from birth to want, to acquire, to achieve, and then to plaster our achievements on social media like hunting trophies. In Buddhism, the trophies aren’t the point. The point is to be present with what is, rather than enslaved to what you wish was.
In the end, non-attachment is a practice, not a possession. Which is deliciously ironic. You can’t have non-attachment, only do it.
It’s a lifelong negotiation with your own sticky fingers. And if you fail, which you will, you simply notice the stickiness, laugh at yourself, and let go again.
Like watching the monk pass by, robe flaring, knowing you’ll never see him again, and finding that this, too, is enough.
Graeme Dinnen
ResourcesForLife.net
PS Although geared more to Taoism than Buddhism, not being attached to a particular outcome this a subject covered in my book “The Tao Of Putting: Tha Dance of Balance”. This isn’t a book only for golfers. Golf here is a red herring, a Trojan horse, a convenient metaphor.
This is really about Taoism, or at least, about how the ancient whispers of its wisdom can be heard in the most unlikely places: on the putting green, yes, but also in traffic jams, supermarket queues, and conversations with your mother.
If you’re intrigued, offended, or simply curious, you’ll find The Tao of Putting:The Dance Of Balance” on your local Amazon site. Type in the title and keep an open mind.
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