Both Hinduism and Buddhism teach that we need to be detached from the drama of human psychic energy that surrounds us at all times. In fact, we should be detached from the physical world itself. But doesn’t this teaching, so hard to fathom for those of us who were brought up in the Judeo-Christian tradition, fly in the face of Christ’s and Buddha’s injunctions to be compassionate? All religions stress that compassion is one of the core values of life, yet how can one be compassionate and relinquish attachment to one’s fellow man at the same time? Lifting one’s own suffering may require detachment but alleviating the suffering of others cannot help but involve some sort of attachment to them.
In Chapter 14 of Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment, Deepak Chopra imagines how the monk Gautama himself struggled with this quandary before becoming Buddha, the Enlightened One. Chopra writes, “It was not difficult (for Gautama) to believe in the teaching of illusion, or maya, because he continued to see ordinary people as ghosts, weighed down with care and suffering.” Not so with his guru Alara, however, because “there was no pain lingering around him.” Still, Gautama was taken aback when Alara’s sad-faced, emaciated son arrived to visit his father. When Gautama offered the young man a bowl of rice, Alara “knocked the bowl out of his hand, and the rice scattered on the ground.” Alara then reprimanded Gautama sharply for this act which revealed Gautauma’s attachment to the world, saying, “My lower self once had a family. They are of no concern to me, just as this whole world is of no concern.”
In Chopra’s telling, Gautauma instinctively recoiled from this extreme act of detachment on Alara’s part, saying to himself, “How would the sad young man at Alara’s door feel to know that he was an illusion, another trap to be avoided?” Instead of following Alara’s lead, Gautauma departed, rousing his guru’s anger by this act of, in effect, firing his master. Two truths were revealed to Gautauma by this event. First, Alara’s anger proved that he was still strongly attached to the world despite all his protests to the contrary; despite having such extreme views on the subject that he was willing to reject his own son. However, the second and more important truth was that detachment without compassion is an empty void, not an enduring spiritual path. Gautauma promptly left Alara’s care and never again found a master he could follow.
One of the broad themes of Chopra’s partly fictional biography is that the masters who encountered Siddhartha and later Gautauma were strongly aware of something so sacred or powerful in his character that they voluntarily withdrew their protection or master-hood over him. While he was not yet the Buddha, they all saw the seeds of enlightenment or nirvana within him and felt that their assistance was either irrelevant or counter-productive. Having no other masters, Gautauma went on to pursue a path of extreme asceticism on his own, nearly dying of hunger and thirst before enlightenment finally came to him. It was only then that he was able to preach “the middle way” between monastic asceticism on the one hand and the worldly life of Prince Siddhartha on the other. Chopra’s book shows us how the three phases of the Buddha’s life—his evolution from Prince Siddhartha to the monk Gautama and finally to the Buddha—were akin to a metamorphosis from a caterpillar to a larva to a butterfly.
So what can we glean about the proper relationship between detachment and compassion? I believe one of the lessons of Buddha’s life is that we need to practice a compassionate detachment. Ideally, we can find a way to be detached from our loved ones while still loving them. Buddha never ceased to love his wife, Yashodhara, even though he chose to leave her when he abandoned his first identify as Prince Siddhartha to become the monk Gautauma and eventually Buddha. In the Hindu tradition so vividly portrayed by Yogananda in The Autobiography of a Yogi, the aged householder does not act cruelly toward his family or express anger toward them in order to overcome attachment. Instead, he simply walks away from them, just as in Chopra’s telling, Gautauma kissed the sleeping Yashodhara before leaving the palace forever. The key to a positive detachment, it seems to me, is to find a way to transmute and enfold one’s love of one’s spouse and family into a transcendent love of God. Whether this is a Buddhist notion or not is uncertain, since it is not clear whether Buddha believed in God or not. What he actually believed in was unadulterated Reality in its purest and simplest form.
Bird of Spirit 