What is attachment and how does it impact our lives?

"Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut only to discover there was nothing in it to steal. Ryokan returned and caught him: ‘You may have come a long way to visit me’ he told the prowler,’ and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.’ The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away. Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon. ‘Poor fellow’, he mused, ‘I wish I could give him this beautiful moon’. ”

I adore this ancient Zen fable. It’s a simple story, but one with so many analogies and underlying moral implications. It's worth several reads before you think about it. Where in your life are you attached to material things? These things lead us to false securities and happiness. We go through life gathering, acquiring and competing to match our friends, our family, our neighbours. Most of us do not realize that we cannot take these things with us, until it is too late. Often this is on our death bed, as we are wrapped in our jewellery and family members jockeying for position of our material items that we finally get we cannot take any of these things with us.

Living a simple life without attachments does not mean you need to live in a hut on a mountainside. This means that you do not attach any meaning to any of these things, that at any moment you could give these away as they are meaningless to you. One of the great teachings I've learned from spiritual Gurus is the concept of absolute attachment to the whole existence. Detaching from your body and becoming one with the universe, in synchronicity and harmony. It looks at the moment when you toss aside the attachment, and you realize you are everywhere. Wait, what? Because of this attachment you feel you are limited by the body. It is not the body which is limiting you; it is your attachment to it. It is not the body which is making a barrier between you and the reality; it is your attachment to it. Once you know that the attachment is not there, there is no body to you. Rather, the whole existence becomes your body; your body becomes a part of the total existence. Then it is not separate. So, your body is nothing but existence comes to you, existence reached to you. It is the nearest existence to you, that's all -- and then it goes on spreading. Once your attachment is not there, there is no body to you; or, the whole existence has become your body. You are everywhere. In the body you are somewhere; without the body you are everywhere. In the body you are confined to a particular space; without the body you have no confinement. How can you be somewhere? Consciousness is not a space concept. That's why if you close your eyes and try to find out where in your body you are, you will be at a loss. You cannot find out where you are. but there is no "where" to you. Simply, you are. In deep sleep you are not aware of the body. You are. In the morning you will say that the sleep was very deep, very blissful. You were aware of a deep bliss running throughout, but you were not aware of the body. In deep sleep where are you? When you die, where do you go? Continuously people ask, "When someone dies, where do they go?" You don't know who you are when you are not in a body. You know only one phenomenon, and that is of embodiment. You have always known yourself in the body. You feel you are the body -- this is the attachment. You feel that you are not anything other than the body, not anything more than the body. You live as the body and you think and talk as the soul -- then there is a struggle and a conflict and then you are constantly in an inner turmoil, a deep unease which cannot be bridged. You go on thinking about yourself as the self, and everything that you don't like, you throw on the body. So you say sex belongs to the body, love belongs to you. Then you say greed and anger, they belong to the body; compassion belongs to you. Compassion belongs to the self, and cruelty belongs to the body. Forgiveness belongs to the self, and anger belongs to the body. So whatever you feel is wrong, ugly, you throw to the body, and whatever you feel is beautiful, you go on being identified with. You create a division. This division will not allow you to know what attachment is, and unless you know what attachment is and unless you suffer the misery of it and the hell of it, you cannot put it aside. You look in the sky and clouds are floating: move with the clouds, leave the body here on the earth. And the moon is there: move with the moon. Whenever you can forget the body, don't miss the opportunity -- go on a journey. And then you will become accustomed to what it means to be out of the body. And this is only a question of attention. Attachment is a question of attention. If you pay attention to the body, you are attached. If the attention has moved away, you are not attached. To be in the body, your attention is needed to be there. Your attention is your being. And if your attention is nowhere, you are everywhere.

Wherever you get attached, it becomes a new imprisonment. And whatever we are doing in life is this: we go on creating more and more imprisonments, bigger and bigger jails to live in. Then we go on decorating those jails so that they look like home, and then we forget completely that they are jails. If you toss aside the attachment with the body, realization happens that you are everywhere. You have an oceanic feeling, your consciousness exists without any location. Your consciousness exists without being tethered anywhere. You become just like a sky, enveloping all; everything is in you. Your consciousness has expanded to the infinite possibility. The moment you feel you are everywhere, freedom is attained. This freedom is not political, this freedom is not economical, not sociological. This freedom is existential. This freedom is total. And then only can you be joyous. The joy is not a consequence, it is the very happening. This bliss is not happening as an effect. The moment you feel limited you are miserable. Whenever you feel this freedom, joy happens to you.

You are listening to music and suddenly gravitation is lost. You are so absorbed in it, you have forgotten your body. You are filled with music and you have become one with music. There is not a listener to it: the listener and the listened have become one. Only music exists; you are no more. You have expanded. Now you are flowing with musical notes, now there is no limit to you. The notes are dissolving into silence, and you are also dissolving into silence with them. The body is forgotten. Whenever the body is forgotten, it is tossed aside unknowingly, unconsciously, and joy happens to you.

Ryokan was willing to give up his stuff, yet it let him sad, as he knew this thief would never know what the experience of life would be like when you have no attachments and you are completely present. In this state, you see beauty and wonder in everything. You are connected to life and life does not rule you. We come into this life naked and full of wonder. It is our duty to find this space for the rest of our lives. Not just at the moment of our passing.


The moon cannot be stolen because anyone who would steal the moon already has it. There are a number of wonderful things that we possess without realizing it. All that is required of us is to simply sit back and recognize them. However, all too often we are too busy working to get things we don’t have that we have no time to appreciate the things we already have. The moon is free, and you cannot steal what is freely given to you. We already have a number of precious gifts. The difference between them is that if we accept that the best things in life are free, the moon among them, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we already have them; we might still need to reach out for them. The moon is not constantly being appreciated, we need to act to appreciate it. We need to take advantage of the number of opportunities for a pleasant life that are free, and not to overlook them simply because we aren’t asked to pay. The best things in life are free but often they take a great deal of work. For example, for an artist the best thing in life may be to paint a masterpiece. Learning how to paint a masterpiece does not necessarily take money, but it does take a great deal of hard work and dedication. It is not something that the artist can simply reach out and take for themselves. I agree that it often seems as if the best things in life tend to be those that we work for, rather than pay for. We only really appreciate the value of something if we work for it. And so it could be that when we look back upon the things we had or have that we only fully appreciate those that we worked for instead of paid for, even though by some objective standard some of the things we paid for were equally valuable.

So, my philosophy on the moon is that Ryokan could not give it, because the moon cannot be possessed. The regret he had was in fact, that he could not teach that the biggest treasure is the enjoyment on watching the moon, not owning it. In the end the thief remained poor because he lacked the understanding of the fact that real treasures are not material in nature. The moon is somehow permanent in our human perception, whilst the clothes he gave are subject to the perils of time. The Zen master was not attached to any material possessions. He is wealthy because he is content. The moon is a symbol of that contentment and peace. He could give away his clothes without thinking twice. What he would have liked instead to offer the thief, was something that cannot be stolen; his appreciation of nature, his enlightenment and his wisdom.