Last year I said that if I was asked to come here again, I would talk about non-attachment. That was not a sensible thing to do. But then, being sensible has never been one of my strong points.

I could perhaps demonstrate my non-attachment to all my efforts in writing this talk by simply standing before you in silence, then quietly walking away, as wise Zen masters are said to have done after promising to make speeches.

But there is a snag.

Unfortunately for me, the only result would be to prove my attachment to being thought wise and, worse still, my attachment to non-attachment.

So, all I can stupidly do is give you the talk that I said I would give.

As I intend to use the term, and indeed as I think it should be used, non-attachment is not the same thing as detachment, which, in its normal usage, implies a moving away, a separation from something.

Non-attachment implies no such active element, either positive or negative, no moving away from anything.

It is a continuous, ideal state, relating to no particular object or action, but to all objects, including oneself, and to all actions.

However, like most ideals, it is something that we can only approach as best we can, and never achieve in full.

For as long as we eat and breathe to maintain the body, we are, by definition, attached to it, and all that we can do, at best, is reduce our attachment to objects and actions, and to ourselves, to a minimum.

However, as Shakyamuni Buddha is said to have found in the course of his lifetime's journey, his long years of extreme self-mortification, self-abnegation, were not the road to enlightenment.

Non-attachment to the self, insofar as we can achieve it, does not imply an attack on the self, for if we are not at peace with ourselves we will not, however we try, be at peace with others.

It is this which underlies the Christian “Love thy neighbour as thyself” and the Buddhist “Love others and love oneself”.

Nevertheless, for each of us, attachment to the self, the instinctive, and seemingly basic, separation of self from not self, is the most insidious and all pervading source of the endless distinctions and polarities with which we cocoon ourselves, and which we enshrine in our very language and in the words that we use all the time to label and to distinguish one from the other, and from ourselves, the things that surround us.

And yet, as I said to you on another occasion, it is the forgetting of self that is the foundation of any true encounter.

The avoidance of distinctions and separations, the absolute unity of all that is, is a constant theme in the sutras.

It takes, perhaps, its most dramatic form in repeated passages in the Diamond Cutter, or Vagrakkhedika, such as the one which I quoted at greater length on a previous occasion in which the Bhagavad declares to Subhuti, his disciple, that no beings have been delivered by him because " then the Tathagata would believe in self, believe in a being, believe in a living being, and believe in a person!'

Indeed, what we perceive as individual beings and things are emanations from the seamless, underlying unity of the whole.

In an insignificant, milder, derivative form, it underlies one of the garden poems that I wrote some years ago, and which is translated by Taira, my friend, in The Breath in the Flute and goes like this:

This

Is the garden

of being and not being,

of rocks and no rocks.

Here,
when you enter and are,

is and is not
are equal.

The rocks in a Zen garden are, if you like, no more than the spaces between the spaces.

That is and is not, that birth and death, are equal, is easy to say, but hard to live with, to feel in one's heart of hearts.

On one of the first occasions on which I visited Shogyoji, Chimyo sama asked me at dinner what had been my last words to my wife, with whom I had lived for more than forty years, and what were her final words to me, as she died.

Because there were none, for she died unexpectedly in the night, when I was away from the hospital for an hour or two to rest before what was expected to be an even more difficult following day, and the simple, well meaning question cut so deep, tears came to my eyes and I wept.

And then I apologised to Chimyo sama, not because it was bad manners and Englishmen of my generation are not expected to weep in public, but simply because I never should have reacted in such a way.

My weeping did nothing for her, for she was dead and beyond all weeping. I was weeping, in truth, for myself.

In the words of the Bhagavad Gita, "the wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead”, but I was not wise, was not able to escape my attachment to myself or reach beyond my attachment to my wife.

To be at peace with oneself and with all that is; to love and not fear the loss, and to face it calmly when it comes, like a rainy day in spring or a shaft of sunlight on the green hills, suddenly gone: that to me is the meaning of non-attachment.

The world as it is, or rather the world as it seems to be to us, but is not, is all we can ever know, and living at peace with that knowledge is the foundation of the wisdom of the wise.

In the final words of the Bhagavad in the Diamond Cutter Sutra,

“Stars, darkness, a lamp, a phantom, dew, a bubble.
 A dream, a flash of lightning, and a cloud — thus
 we should look upon the world.”

Time-driven as we are, we are forced to live in the now.

The past is never to be recovered, it is gone; the future, in the world as we know it, unknowable.

The one thing that does seem certain to me, is that to try to escape from the dream that we are dreaming into another dream, to be so attached to our transient lives that we seek to prolong them beyond our deaths, is folly indeed.

If we seek for Heaven or Paradise or the Pure Land, we must find it around us and in ourselves, and live in it now, and now, and now, for each successive moment as it passes.

To do, or to try to do good, in the now, in order to lay up a store of merit to get ourselves into Heaven or to achieve Nirvana or reach the Pure Land, seems to me to be wholly misguided, and something which I would see, in myself, as nothing short of despicable.

As far as we can, to be free of ulterior motives; to do for the doing, whatever we do; to try to do good because it appears to us to be the right thing to do at a given moment, and for no other reason, appears to me to lie at the heart of non-attachment.

Perhaps if we do that, if we try to see things as they are in a world of endless illusion, enlightenment may come.

Perhaps it will; perhaps it will not; but that will not matter at all.

If not being attached to our very life itself, is the path of wisdom, how much greater must be the foolishness of being, or letting ourselves become, attached to what we see as our own past achievements in that life, or to the possessions that we have chanced to accumulate in the course of it.

It is easy, of course, to talk in the abstract of wisdom and non-attachment, but to be wise, to be non-attached, in our actual, everyday lives is a very different thing.

As I said to you last year, it is, for most of us, in little things, in the small things that we fail to do, or all too often cannot be bothered to do, that we can lay the foundations for true encounters, and it seems to me that the same is true of any attempt to sever or weaken the bonds of attachment which bind us.

Because we know that perfection is out of reach, many, perhaps even most of us, tend to do nothing, or almost nothing at all, to make non-attachment a central, unconscious feature of ordinary, day to day living.

To give you an almost comic example from my own recent past, arising out of my saying that this year I would talk about non-attachment, it occurred to me that all my life I have talked and talked, quite often to such an extent that nobody else could get a word in edgeways.

So I thought that perhaps I should take a practical, not just a theoretical, look at my own attachment to the few works of art or other small treasures that I had somehow collected during the last few years or had lived with and grown fond of for half a century or more.

Besides, in one's Will, one nearly always leaves somebody something they don't much want and which someone else would have loved to have had.

So, during the following days, I asked my few, my very few, good friends to come to my flat by themselves and take away anything that they liked, and, being real friends, they did, and quite surprised me by how much they were, in fact, happy to have.

The things that they took, I find I have never missed, but then, of course, I still enjoy the things that they didn’t take.

All in all, it added up to no more than a small, inconsequential experiment on myself in preparation for giving this talk, and a rather pathetic proof of that attachment to non-attachment of which I spoke at the start.

However that may be, I do not, in my own self-serving way, believe that life has to be extreme in order to be good.

One way of attacking the problem of non-attachment, much loved by the writers both of the Christian New Testament and the Buddhist Sutras, is to leave behind family and friends and loved ones to follow the master or, in the case of the sutras, in order, abstaining from action, to meditate alone in a forest or on a mountainside.

That, as is all too obvious by now, is not a way that I would be able, or would want to follow, nor is it, it seems to me, the path that most Buddhists, among them Shin Buddhists, in particular, wish to tread.

Priests and followers alike, Shin Buddhists fall in love and marry, have children and bring up families.

So for me, and I think for you, the way is not to try to escape, which may in itself become a form of attachment, but to enter into the battle of life; to fight it to the utmost of one's powers, and yet to be unattached, not only to the battle itself, but to its outcome, in the way that the Lord Shri Krishna urged upon Arjuna, the archer, at the start of the Bhagavad Gita.

To quote the Bible or the Koran or the Sutras, is a dangerous pastime, for, as Shri Krishna tells Arjuna:

"As a man can drink water from any side of a full tank, so     
 the skilled theologian can wrest from any scripture, that     
 which will serve his purpose."     

Nevertheless, as the very context of the great myth itself reveals, although the achievement of wisdom is, for us all, the ultimate goal,

"No man can attain freedom from activity by refraining from action,
 nor can he reach perfection by merely refusing to act ……
 for action for duty's sake is superior to inaction."

Sadly, all that I have succeeded in doing for you, in the course of my own activity now, is to string together a series of platitudes and tell you, as if they were something new, things which have been better said many times before and which, in any case, in one form or another, you already knew.

All the things that I have talked about in the last few years; encounter, love and compassion, doing for the doing, non-attachment, are, indeed, indivisible parts of one whole, of a single way of life which it seems that it may be worthwhile to follow.

But perhaps you are thinking by now, as I come at last to the end of my talk, at least he was not so foolish as to have gone on to treat of enlightenment, which, perhaps, is the most paradoxical topic of all.

So now I must disabuse you of that last, comforting notion.

One evening, some time ago, Taira gave me, or possibly only lent me, though I still have it, a copy of Taitetsu Unno's revised edition of D. T. Suzuki's Buddha of Infinite Light , and I started to look at it on my way home in the underground train.

The very first words that I read in his Introduction were 'BUDDHISM SPEAKS OF 84,000 PATHS to supreme enlightenment'

But, as we rattled and bumped along, I got, at that time, no further than that, since there wandered into my head the following Waka:

Eighty four thousand

the paths
to enlightenment.

How
do you find one?

For each path
is a no path

until you have turned
your back.