Tonight, I’d like to offer some reflections on attachment and particularly on attachment in family relationships, particularly in the area of parent child relationships. Someone was asking me recently, How can we fulfill our duties to our family without attachment? And this is a question which comes up because we’ve experienced the suffering in attachment very often. Or it may be that having heard the Buddha’s teaching, we keep hearing that attachment leads to suffering. And so even if we haven’t experienced it firsthand, we have some idea that there is a connection between attachment and suffering.
And in family relationships, where we have so much emotional investment in others, in the people that we’re closest to, so much of our happiness and well-being is bound up in our relationship with them and with their well-being and happiness, we experience firsthand that there is suffering in attachment. And so one of the ways that we can try to deal with this is to push away from ourselves those people who we see as the source of our suffering. That is, we try to protect ourselves by pushing away the people who are closest to us. And someone asked me one time what I thought of that. They said that they didn’t want to get too attached to their grandchildren because now they were trying to practice the Buddha’s teaching.
And so they didn’t want to spend too much time with their grandchildren. And when their grandchildren came to visit them, they didn’t want to take much interest in them because they didn’t want to build up too much attachment. And this is not a skillful way of going about trying to lessen the suffering in attachment. This is working from the outside in, that is blaming the objects of our attachment rather than understanding that we have to work from the inside out. We have to work on the attachment within our own heart.
And we can only do that through right understanding of where attachment arises, how it is fostered and supported and what allows it to cease. It’s no good just trying to cut off those objects, particularly when we’re talking about relationships like the intimate relationships, the interdependent relationships that exist in a family. So I’m going to, first of all, talk a little bit about the nature of attachment and then bring that into specifically the relationships that exist between parents and children to try to put those relationships in a dharma context, if you like. So attachment, Upadana in the Pali, arises because of some lack within ourselves. We are reaching out to something outside ourselves to bring pleasure, fulfillment, satisfaction.
The times when we feel most at ease, most complete, happiest are those times when we don’t want another thing, when we’re completely satisfied with what we’ve got. That sort of situation might arise in the most simple of circumstances. We might have gone for a walk in the bush and just being out in nature, being out in a lovely environment, we feel so relaxed. We feel so at ease. We don’t have any of the trappings that we normally need in order to feel this is a good situation.
We just feel replete, content, satisfied. We don’t want anything else. Nothing is missing from the situation that we’re in. But that kind of fulfillment doesn’t last for very long even if we are feeling completely satisfied out on our bushwalk. After a little while, we think, This is nice, but what next?
And so we move on to the next situation, the next thing that we think is going to revive that feeling of satisfaction, of pleasure, of fulfillment. And this is something for us to understand that the Buddha didn’t say that it’s not possible to experience pleasure and satisfaction in this life. But what happens is we understand that condition, that circumstance wrongly. We think that it’s going to last forever. We think that we can repeat it and it will be the same next time.
Or we think that that thing which has given us pleasure and satisfaction this time is always going to be around for us. We’re going to have access to it, that person, that thing, that situation. And so we grasp at the circumstances, the situations, the objects, the people, the conditions in our life, and we try to fix them within our grasp. We wrongly understand their fleeting nature. We wrongly understand that what satisfied us this time may not satisfy us next time or will have changed in some way that it doesn’t satisfy us because it’s not how it was last time.
So these coming together of causes and conditions which produce pleasure, which produce happiness, produce satisfaction are momentary, insubstantial, unstable and fleeting. And it’s our constant effort to try to repeat them, keep them, hold them, have them forever that causes us so much suffering. And through wrong understanding, we blame those causes and conditions for being other than how we want them to be, for giving us what we don’t want, for taking away from us what we had previously. Those things which we really find pleasurable, we we grasp and we become attached to, we identify with. This is mine.
This is part of my world. This is part of who I am. We include it as an extension of ourselves. Through wrong understanding, we think that having done that, it becomes our property, becomes under our control, becomes ours to do with as we wish. And this is all based on wrong understanding.
So we become attached to people in the same way that we become attached to objects and situations. Those people who are close to us, those people who have given us pleasure, who have satisfied us, helped us, been kind to us. We see them as an extension of who we are, of what we are, of what we own, what we have control over, what we need in order to be complete. We are seeking completion through objects, people, things in this world, things outside our real control, And that’s where suffering arises. So suffering is there at the beginning in that we don’t feel that we can be happy without that thing, that experience, that person, that situation.
The very reaching out is an indication of a feeling of lack or of the fact that we have experienced a sense of fulfillment but we want to repeat it without seeing its fleeting nature and then more suffering in grabbing onto and trying to keep and hold that which has given us that temporary satisfaction. The Buddha’s teaching is to help us discover that sense of completion and fulfillment within our own heart, understanding that nothing outside of our self is ever going to give us what we seek most heartily and that is that sense of fulfillment, of completion, of satisfaction. In our relationships with our children, with our family, this is one of the very hardest lessons that we have to learn. It’s there for us to see, but it’s a very painful one that we don’t want to see, that we don’t want to learn very often, that even those people who are closest to us, if we’re parents, those children who are born from our own body, even these beings are not an extension of us, are not our property, are not under our control. And if we seek fulfillment and satisfaction through those people, certainly sometimes we’re going to attain it, but it’s going to be fleeting.
It’s going to be temporary. It’s going to be unstable. It’s going to be subject to change. So now I’d like to talk specifically about parents and children in the framework of Dharma. When we think about parents and children, all of us have been children.
Some of us have been parents. So we’ve all experienced the dynamics of family relationships and those most intimate and close relationships of parents and children. In terms of dharma, the relationship of parents and children is born out of craving. Craving on both sides. There is the craving of the parents to have a child.
And very often, will say, Oh, we didn’t plan this child. It just came along. So that means that the craving was the sex act without the anticipation of producing a child, without that as being a conscious decision, but there’s still craving there in one aspect or another. And then there’s the craving to be, which brings us back again to birth. The child is born because of its craving to be.
All of us are born again because of our craving to be. So on one side, we have the craving of the parents and on the other side, we have the craving of the being to be born. Now, in our ordinary everyday life, if we reflect what happens when craving comes together in different aspects, when one party wants one thing and one party wants another, very often it leads to conflict. What do you want for dinner? I want fish and chips.
I don’t want fish and chips. I want rice and dal. Craving, conflict. Who’s going to win? So if you just reflect that this is what happens in very many circumstances, you can just imagine that the coming together of these beings, parents and children, born out of craving, is already the potential for conflict.
Very often, we become parents not through a conscious decision. It all happens before we’ve even thought, Is this really what we want to do? Now, I’m not a parent in this life, but I’m sure I’ve been a parent in many, many lifetimes when I talk about we. And I know from my own experience in this life that there’s a certain time, a certain age, when it just seems natural, it seems obvious that what you’re going to do is to have a child. There’s the biological conditioning.
That’s how nature operates, how it perpetuates the species. The most important thing to do is to go out and reproduce. And there’s a certain time in a female’s life when they feel that’s really an urgent matter. And then there’s also the social conditioning, which says, yes, of course, everyone wants to get married and have kids. If you don’t want to get married and have kids, you must be very selfish, thinking only of what you want.
But, of course, doing what you want, having children, is also selfish, just another side of the same coin. And so very often, we find ourselves with our marriage, our partner, with our children before we’ve even really reflected, Is this what I wanted to do with this life? Did I really choose this? Did I really reflect on it with wisdom? But it’s too late.
We’ve already got the family. We’ve already got the children. We’ve already got the partner. And so it’s a matter of doing the best we can in that situation. Parents very often, once they find themselves in that situation, see their children as an extension of themselves, especially if you have no dharma background and you think of the child as being just a product of materiality, the genetic inheritance of the parents, then you think, of course, this child is an extension of us, my good qualities, of course, my good points, anything that’s not so good must be theirs, meaning the other partner.
So there we see the child as an extension of who we are and as someone who’s going to fulfill our expectations, the expectations we have for that child and very often, unfulfilled expectations we had for our own life. Very often, parents will want their children to have what they never could, to do better, to go further, to have the advantages that they never had. And so their children are meant to live out their hopes and dreams. This is wrong understanding from the Buddhist point of view. It’s based on the assumption that this child who’s being born is coming fresh to this life and is just a product of the parents, mother and father.
Whereas in terms of the Dharma, this child isn’t coming fresh to this life and the parents aren’t the closest relative. The child is being born again because of its craving and also because of its karmic inheritance. And that is its closest relation. That is what’s brought it to rebirth again in these circumstances. When I lived in Sri Lanka, a woman came to see us once, and she told a very interesting story.
She said that she’d had a fourteen-year-old daughter who was about fourteen years of age, and she was a lovely girl. They were a very close family. And this girl had died. She’d been run over by the train, which ran through the center of the town. It’s very common practice that people would use the railway line running through the center of the town as a shortcut to get from one place to another.
And this fourteen-year-old girl, every day, walked with her friends on the railway track. And this particular day, there had been a very big storm. It was still raining heavily. And the girl was walking with her friends on the railway track and the train had been delayed because of the storm. Because it was still noisy, they didn’t hear the train coming behind them.
And the train came up behind them and didn’t see the girls because of the rain. And the girl turned around just in time, just to see the train about to knock her over, and she was killed on the spot. And the mother came to tell us that this had happened a few years earlier and the family was still grieving for this young girl who’d died in the prime of her life. And then some people came to visit them and they brought with them a young child about three years old, three or four years old, a young girl. And this young girl had remembered her previous life.
She remembered that she lived in this town where the railway track ran through the middle of the town And she remembered that she’d been run over by the train on a rainy day. And her family that she’d been born into in this birth started to put the pieces together and made some inquiries and found out that, yes, there had been this young girl killed by a train and it had been so many years ago. And this was obviously the girl reborn. And the girl was so keen to find the family that she lived with previously. And so her parents had made inquiries and brought the girl to see her previous family, to meet her previous parents.
But what happened was that the girl, the young girl, the three or four year old, said, Oh, I like these parents better than I like the parents I’ve got now. And she wanted to keep coming and visiting them. She wanted to stay with her previous parents. And, of course, the parents in this birth got very upset about that and they stopped all contact. And this is very interesting for us to reflect on because while the parents of the four tenets girl were still mourning the fact of her death.
There was a family somewhere else who was celebrating the birth of their child, the birth of this young girl some years later. So we can reflect on that. This is happening very often in this cycle of birth and death. While people are still mourning the loss of the person that they’ve loved, that person has been born somewhere else and very often with no memory of the family that they’ve been in previously. And this is also for us to reflect that when this child is born into our family now, we don’t know what we’ve got in the package that we’ve received.
It’s an interesting process how the child that’s born into the family immediately becomes ours, immediately becomes identified with this family, our children, our child. And we start to see that child in those terms. Someone who has just become a grandmother for the first time said to me recently, she said, Our little granddaughter, she’s not a pretty little child, not a pretty little baby, but she’s gorgeous. And that was typical. Now this child is ours, So it doesn’t matter that she’s not pretty, but she’s gorgeous because she’s our child.
And this is, again, based on the wrong understanding that this child is just an extension of us. Without seeing this child as being an individual in its own right and heir to its karma. That is its past intentional thought, speech and action. And the reason why we’re born is because of our own reasons, our own karma, and that’s what we bring with us into this life. Last year, we went to hear a talk given by a Tibetan Buddhist nun, Tenzin Palmo.
Some of you would have been there. And you would have heard a question that was asked at the end of the talk that she gave. Someone stood up, a woman who was heavily pregnant, and she said, Please give me some advice. This child that I’m carrying is not going to live for very long after it’s born. The doctors have said that there’s nothing that can be done to help this child.
What should I do? How can I support this child until it’s born and until it dies? And Tenzin Palmo’s answer was, first of all, don’t resent this child for not fulfilling your expectations for it. This is a very powerful lesson if you reflect on that particular story, that particular circumstance. This mother giving birth to this child would have done anything, gone anywhere, spent any amount of money necessary to produce a healthy child, to allow that child to live.
There was nothing she could do, nothing that the best medicine could do because this child was being born for its reasons and not according to her wishes and expectations. And this is so with each one of us, not just for parents to reflect with your children but for all of us to reflect having all been born according to our karma. And we’re very fortunate if our karma is such that we have good health and we have long life and we have supportive material conditions. It doesn’t happen just by accident. In this life, we are reaping the fruits of our past action, but we also have to replace, replenish what we’re using up now by continuing to do good karma, continuing to do what is wholesome to support ourselves throughout the rest of this life and into our future births.
But in terms of the expectations that parents have of their children, If we reflect on this story and we understand that it’s not on its own, it’s not unusual, this is the reality for all of us, then we can see how easy it is to cause ourselves suffering by expecting that these children who are born from our own bodies, who depend on us for their support and survival, are actually going to fulfill our expectations for them, are within our control, are owned by us. This is the source of suffering when we have those kinds of expectations or we assume that because this child that we’re with and that we love and who loves us now is always going to be that kind of loving child or a child who’s going to be here, who’s going to be available, who’s going to keep on doing things the way that we want them to do them. Children very often will throw back at parents. Well, I didn’t ask to be born. Whatever’s wrong in my life, it’s your fault.
We’ve all said that probably one time or another. But that again is not according to dharma. It’s wrong understanding. Those children are born out of craving. They’re craving to be here.
We, those children, all of us, and are born not only because of craving but according to our karma, born of our karma, inheriting our karma, abides supported by our karma. So we can’t blame our parents because we’ve gotten what we deserve. If our parents were not as good as we wanted, then we better do better in this life so that next time around, we’ll have the kind of parents that we want. How do we do that? By being that kind of person in this life, producing those kinds of conditions for our next birth.
And the Buddha said we can never repay our parents in this life just by looking after them even though that’s one of our duties because our parents give us a nesting place. They provide us with the place to go to when we are seeking rebirth. And they look after us during those vulnerable years when we wouldn’t be able to survive if we didn’t have their care. And so this is something for children to reflect on and also for all of us, if we are adults now, that the debt that we have to our parents can never be repaid materially. The Buddha said it can only be repaid if we bring our parents to wisdom, if they live in ignorance, to morality, if they live without morality, to generosity, if they live without generosity, if they’re stingy or if we develop faith in them, in the Buddha’s teaching.
These are the only ways that we can really repay the debt that we have to our parents. So if we think about these things as the foundation for family life, that is craving and wrong understanding, we cannot be surprised that we often come into conflict within our family relationships. And another reason for this is because, although we’re born according to our karma and we very often think that’s good, good karma has brought us to a favorable situation, sometimes we find that within the family there is an affinity because of negativity between members of the family, irritation, unwholesomeness that brings us into contact again with the same people that we’ve had past experience with. Now, you don’t have to believe this or think in terms of past lives, but very often in families, we notice that there are members who get on and members who are always in conflict. Some children parents will naturally have a liking for and others they’ll find very difficult to deal with because they don’t understand their character.
They don’t know how to handle them. They’re not like me. And a parent was telling me recently, they said that this is a terrible source of pain for them in their family. They said to me that people often comment how they favor their first child. It’s very obvious that they prefer that child.
And the parents said to me, You know, it’s true. I really prefer my first child. I like my second child but not as much. And my third child, I really can’t stand. What can I do about it?
Should I love the first child less? This is truly the sort of situations people find themselves in. And of course, my answer was not that you should love the first child less, but you should try to develop the same kind of love that you have for your first child for the other two as well. Now how do we do that? Why is it that the second child is less likable and the third child isn’t likable at all?
Because that child isn’t fulfilling the parents’ expectations, isn’t like I expect them to be, doesn’t serve me in the same way that my first child serves me. And I don’t mean serves me in terms of bringing me a cup of tea in bed. I mean serves me in my sense of I’m a good parent. Look what I’ve produced. This child’s very nice.
This child’s very bright. This child looks nice. This child does things well. This child’s pleasant. This child serves me.
The other children don’t. Not only is it the child, of course, there can always also be conditions that arise in a family at particular times, which mean that there’s a lot of trauma around the birth or the early childhood of particular children. And because of those circumstances, it affects the relationship that parents have with that child. So it’s not completely the parents’ unfulfilled expectations or their wrong understanding of what they can get from this child. There are many other causes and conditions operating.
And again, this is for us to reflect on. Doesn’t it undermine our sense of this child belongs to me, this child is under my control? Because even my relationship with this child, my attitude to this child, my emotional reaction to this child is going to be affected by things outside the child and my own control. This is just a very clear example of the fact that we aren’t ultimately in control of ourselves or those around us. And we need to reflect on this over and over again to start to break down and to challenge our wrong view and our wrong assumptions of our relationships within the family.
Because as I said, we become attached to those people who we think are going to make ourselves complete, make our life worthwhile, show that we’ve lived a good life. And all of those things that we attach to are subject to change. What happens to parents when their children marry and go off and live on the other side of the world, when the parents are no longer participating actively in their child’s life or in their grandchildren’s life? Where is that sense of I’ve been successful? I’ve been able to produce the kind of child, the kind of family that means that my life has been worthwhile.
This is the trap that we can so easily fall into. And we can do it not just in the parent child relationship. Obviously, we can do it in all of the relationships that we are very closely involved in, all of our intimate relationships with partners, with colleagues, with friends, but particularly in this most intimate one of parents and children. The The potential for suffering is great unless we see things as they really are. We won’t be able to let go of our attachments just by wanting it, just by pushing away those people whom we’re in relationship with.
The person who wants to fulfill their duties to the family in a detached way is already, if you like, working uphill because the fact that it’s my family and the fact that it’s my children is already reflecting this identification with the family as being an extension of who I am. And this is the point that we have to return to. This is the place where we have to start changing our understanding, developing right view, right at the point of the attachment in our own mind. It’s only when we work at that point when we start to really see with clear understanding, not mine, not myself, not an extension of me, that we can start to relate in a more detached way to the people around us. And very often, think, well, if I do that, I’m going to become cold hearted.
I’m not going to care anymore. But in fact, the opposite is true. When we don’t have a vested interest in things turning out the way we think they should be, then we’re more able to see what is the best for this person, this child, this being. Not what is the best for me, but what is the best for this individual, an individual in their own right? What can I do to most support them?
Sometimes we’re going to find that what is good for one child doesn’t support the other child in the family. And until we start to see them as individuals, we won’t be able to discern that. We won’t be able to know what is right for this child may not be right for this one. So this dispassion which arises through seeing things more clearly means that we’re able to see that individual in a much more rounded way, in a much more complete way, and, through doing that, to be able to offer that child what is most supportive for their own growth. So dispassion actually leads to greater compassion without strings attached, without the expectation that I’m doing this in order to get the result that I want.
And as I said, this is hard work. As parents, it’s extremely hard to separate ourselves from our children. But this is the work that needs to be done for our own growth as well as for the growth of our children. And it’s only by developing right view, the inner knowing, that we can, little by little, start to change the way that we relate to those who are closest to us. So may this teaching be of benefit to all of you and may it be something that you can continue to use throughout your life and may the merit of tonight’s teaching help us all to attain Nibbana.