Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute retreat teaching, Ven Thubten Dondrub addresses the painful paradox of attachment in relationships, especially with family and intimate partners. He distinguishes carefully between attachment and genuine love, showing how attachment arises from a felt sense of inner lack and places crushing expectations on others to make us happy—a burden no one can bear. He explores how this plays out with children, lovers, and family, and traces the root of attachment to low self-worth and failure to recognize our own basic goodness. The talk then shifts to practical methods: developing concentration and analytical meditation together, recognizing our Buddha nature, and cultivating real self-appreciation so that love for others can flow naturally without demand or dependence. He addresses how to work with delusions when we cannot avoid triggering objects, and offers the practice of loving-kindness meditation—genuinely wishing others happiness without expecting anything in return. Pitched at retreat practitioners working to transform the mind.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 07 Letting go of Attachment 1998 02 22.mp3
UUID: 070edb27-d278-4c80-8dd7-3601f6741a3a
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: Retreat (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 1998-02-22
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.2 minutes
Words: ~4,365
They’re experiencing an effect dependent on the causes, their own actions in the past. Wonderful people. Well, this is another huge topic. I tried to explain, but according to the Buddha’s teachings, everything depends—every effect depends on causes. If you experience a result, you created the cause. Like karma, let’s say, because a plane dropped out of the sky.
Karma is not so nebulous. I mean, it is a very subtle subject and not difficult to understand. Sure. You can debate it, but I’m not quite sure what point you’re making. Charged with the karmic weight.
Yes. But the Dalai Lama came after the teachings in the Buddha. I mean, the Dalai Lama is not the central fact of Buddhism. Karma and the teachings on rebirth weren’t developed to somehow justify Dalai Lamas. Sure.
That’s absolutely true. But then it’s a doctrine of necessity. It isn’t. No. No. It’s not, because the Dalai Lama came long after people believed in these teachings, and the central teaching of Buddhism is the teachings of emptiness. This is the most profound part of the Buddhist teachings, and the law of cause and effect is an essential part of those teachings. I agree with you then. Well, you don’t have to. But I’m trying to say that this is what, in the Buddhist teachings, we’re trying to develop finally—wisdom, the wisdom that realizes emptiness. That relates to people and to them being factual. Well, so is karma, because karma is an integral part of the way you realize emptiness—by understanding dependent arising, and the law of cause and effect is a fundamental aspect of dependent arising. I’m not quite sure what your point is. You just said that there is cause and effect and then you say, why bring in the cause and effect? I don’t understand.
There wouldn’t be Buddhism without the law of cause and effect. It’s not a necessitous doctrine. It’s not a necessitous doctrine. Potentially, that’s not—but I’ll agree with you. Because deserving has got nothing to do with the law of cause and effect.
You’re a what? I don’t understand. Right. Because it’s a very subtle thing. It’s very complicated. The subtlety of it is—well, I tried to talk about it for a couple of hours, a couple of nights. I can’t go into it now. But it’s not related. Yeah. A long, long time, but it doesn’t make complete sense.
Well, I think if you understand it, it makes complete sense. Much, much more sense than anything else, especially if you understand the relationship between physical matter and mind. Then if you understand that, if you study something about cognitive science and if you study something about emptiness, if you combine those, then the more you know something about that, the more you can understand about the law of cause and effect, how it really makes sense. Yes, but it’s not even that simple. Who knows who the Tibetans who were suffering were or when they—they may have created the cause for that ten billion years ago, ten billion lifetimes ago.
I was thinking, it’s like one-time Roman Catholic. Found that nothing is in love with the pope in place. Think it’s like mythology. Yeah. Well, if you have that idea of Buddhism, then it’s not worth following.
What? What? It’s confusing. Well, it can be. It can be, sure. Sure. Yeah. But whatever we experience—I mean, it depends to some extent on others, but for that experience to have come, the principal cause comes from ourselves. Yeah. It’s exactly responsibility.
Well, that’s what it leads to. But it’s not like it was invented to make us be responsible. It’s a perception of how the mind actually works. Yeah. Since your experiences are your mind, so for your mind to have an experience, the cause lies within your mind.
Maybe we can leave it because it could go on quite a bit. Sorry. If there is something more on what I’ve been saying about it. Yes? Well, of course, once you have responsibilities, you can’t give up your responsibilities. That’s irresponsible. Buddha did, didn’t he? Well, you mean Śākyamūni? Well, if you—yeah. Because he knew what he was doing and what the result would be, I think. And that’s the responsibility. Because, also, if you check up with the life of the Buddha, he gave up his—he abandoned his wife and child and all his family and everything, but his wife became a nun and she became an Arhat, his son became an Arhat. Most of the concubines in his harem became nuns and became Arhats. His father became an Arhat.
So because of doing that, you know—but we’re not at that level. So, of course, everyone has their different types of responsibilities that we have to follow. And but, again, all one can do is try to see them in the context of the real meaning of life and fulfill those, but give some time for other things, the important things. I mean, I don’t know what else I can say specifically or something you particularly worry about. Sure.
Partly, what’s emphasized in the Mahāyāna tradition is to try to do things, to change your motivation for doing things, and to try and motivate that everything you do is done for the benefit of others, not just for yourself or just for your family, but that this becomes a cause for developing your mind in a very expansive way. And you can use the practice of working with your family to develop greater qualities for sure, by practicing patience and trying to develop actual real love for your family rather than just attachment for your family, which is pretty difficult, but, I mean, we have to do. We should do. And yeah. I mean, one thing I haven’t got around to saying, maybe just take the opportunity now to say that, again, one of the faults of attachment is particularly in the situation of relationships with other people.
One of the things about attachment is that because of all the things I already mentioned, that we have this sense of something lacking within us, and we try to find that outside among other people and other things, and particularly with people, of course. And then we seem to find that, and we become dependent on these people, are very attached to them, and because they are making me happy, feel fulfilled and so on. And that happens, and we call that love, but much of that is attachment, and it has this quality of attachment to people and things—has the quality of expectation. Right? And this is a very insidious kind of thing, especially in relationship to people.
That because we’ve developed this relationship, you have made me happy, therefore I love you, blah blah blah, and it goes on with attachment, which is not love. With attachment you then expect this person to behave continuously in a certain way because this particular behavior makes me happy. Yeah. And we call this “I love you because you make me happy while you do this, I love you because this makes me feel good.” And so in a situation with a lot of attachment, there is a lot of expectation. And, like, also the more insecurity one has oneself, a sense of lack of worth, then you find that in someone else, the more expectation you—you know, you’re expecting this person to make me happy, perfectly happy all the time.
And this is an incredibly heavy burden to put on anyone. We call this love, but in fact, it’s not loving the person at all. You’ve placed this huge burden on this other person to perpetually make you completely content and happy and solve all one’s problems. Can we make choices? Sure, we can.
But maybe if I could just carry on for a little while. Sorry. Henry Ford. Who? Henry Ford, he said you can have any color in your car. Hang on. Yeah. The color is black. Unless it’s a Model T car. No. No. I don’t think so. No. Oh, I lived here a long time.
Yeah. That’s the choice of our mind. Yeah. No. And yet, this wonderful national anthem that they’re about to be free, but they were not free.
Oh, sure. Sure. We are not free politically, socially, and especially we’re not free in our mind. But this is where we can achieve freedom. This is the most important one. Actually, the law of cause and effect enables us to have that freedom.
But just going back, you know, to this point that our attachment and not our love puts a lot of expectation and burden on the people we so-called love, so-called. Yeah? So this is really not a very fair thing, and it creates a lot of conflict because each person is expecting so much from the other and expecting one’s inner lack of fulfillment to be fulfilled. And that’s why there’s so many difficult relationships, because there’s so much expectation.
And also one does that with children. You expect them to be like this. My children have to be like this. Yeah? And my children will provide my happiness and security and this and that. But children have their own lives. You know? People say, I want to have a baby, and so it’s their own personal possession. But when you have a baby, you’ve got a little body with an ancient, ancient mind. Yeah? It’s not your baby at all in a way. It’s its own being. And yet we—you know, I expect this child to do this, this, and this, behave like this, this, this, and this. I mean, to some extent, of course, we have some responsibility to encourage our children to do certain things, but we have so much expectation which we put on people that we say we love, but it’s just attachment. And it’s not love. It’s not being kind to people to expect them to make me perfectly happy. Nobody can do that. One’s children, family, all of it together can’t do it. It’s just not fair. It’s not right to do that. It’s completely unwise, unskillful to do that.
Which doesn’t mean we can’t love our family and enjoy our family and give time and energy to them, but we should try to be free of the attachment that’s involved, that dependence and the expectation that comes with that dependence, because that kind of thing really destroys everything. And what goes with that—which I tried to point out—is that the more we have this sense of inadequacy within ourselves, the more we desire something out there. And the more we desire something out there, the more we’re attached to it, and the more we expect something from it, demand something from it. And also, you know, attachment has this quality of living in the past. You were like this before, so you always have to be like this. There’s no space for someone to change or for oneself to change.
So one of the strategies of overcoming attachment is trying to see that one has—that we have this value. Yeah, we really do have it. I mean, we do have our negative qualities. We have to admit to those. We do have our limitations. We have anger and pride and jealousy and so on that arise in various ways at various times. Definitely, we have those, but this is not our true nature. We shouldn’t identify—we make a mistake when we identify with those things as being me and as being my true nature. Pardon? I took an ego trip just now. Pardon?
I don’t know about that. No. It’s okay. No problem. Instead of—I related everything to myself instead of realizing that I live in a world of lots of other people.
Yeah. That’s okay. I wasn’t able to answer your questions very well, but we’ll try. No. But my thinking, my body. That’s our karma. Is just our karma. I haven’t made the choice of being nothing. I’ve made the choice of coming here. Sure. That also is our karma, that is ours, and it can change. One can work on one’s health too. Yeah, definitely.
So maybe just to kind of continue this point a little bit first, okay, is that in the process of overcoming our attachment, because our attachment doesn’t go away overnight, we have to reduce our attachment, minimize it, particularly to particular people and things, but still we have the tendency, the potential for attachment all the time is there. We can try to modify individual attachments step by step. Since our mind is colored by attachment to some extent, then when we try to reduce our individual specific attachments, there can be this sense that we’re going to suffer, we’re going to lose out, and maybe in one way, very temporary, maybe we do.
Because it’s some hard work to give up our attachment. There’s effort and pain and you think, oh, I’ve failed and it’s not working, we torment ourselves with all this kind of thing. So there is some difficulty, but we have to have the confidence in the long run it really does work and that a state of non-attachment is better than a state of attachment. It’s more satisfying. So we have to, on the one hand, work on that, but on the other hand, we have to develop some sense of our inner worth. Yeah. To find this satisfaction within ourselves and just basically develop this confidence that we do have this basic goodness. It’s always there despite the fact that there are these other dark clouds that sometimes hang around us, our negative side. But below that and always there is this basic goodness that we can take refuge in, which deserves happiness, that has real value, that we are worthwhile people, and that we have what we are really seeking inside ourselves.
If we really develop that awareness and like a continuous awareness of that, sense of that, to some extent in our life, then the more we keep in contact with that, then there’s no need for attachment. There’s less need for attachment. There’s never any need for attachment, so there’s not the—there’s less kind of this desperate need, which is desire, attachment. Which doesn’t mean we stop being affectionate, kind, loving people. In fact, when we have this inner sense of value, it means we have love for ourselves, valid love for ourselves, which we have to have. And when we’ve got that, we can actually love other people. We can—if we appreciate ourselves for what we are and our potential, then we can appreciate other people, which is love. If we can wish ourselves happiness by giving up attachment because following attachment isn’t being kind to ourselves. It’s not being loving to ourselves, following attachment, because it’s just a source of suffering and limitation. Alright.
So in developing this understanding of what our inner quality really is, and therefore developing love for ourselves, real appreciation for ourselves, this acts as a basis for genuine love for other people, not affection—not attachment for people, but real affection, just appreciating them for what they are, wanting them to have happiness. Just that. That’s what love is, just simply wishing happiness for oneself and for others, and it has to begin with oneself. If you don’t love yourself, if we don’t love ourselves, we can’t love other people. We can only have attachment for other people. Yeah. But if we have some real affection for ourselves, we can have real affection for others. And then we can give them space in that to be themselves, to change, and go their own way because all we want is for them to be happy. We’re not demanding something for ourselves because we feel inadequate. Right.
Of course, this can only be done step by step, but it can be done. It definitely can be done. So this can be done by thinking about our Buddha nature and our precious human rebirth, the situation that we’re in. Just these simple things about what we did at the beginning. We try this breathing meditation or any kind of concentration meditation where we concentrate on something, by doing that, our mind becomes calmer and clearer. And that is a reflection of what we’re looking for anyway. It’s some glimmer, some hint of what we’re actually always seeking out there, but which is in us all the time. Just by a little bit of meditation, one gets some calmness and clarity. Yeah. Some peace. And that’s a good state of mind. It’s a very nice state of mind. It’s a virtuous state of mind, or where it can lead to all virtuous states of mind.
In that, when the mind is more focused, calm and clear, then naturally the positive potentials in the mind can develop—one’s patience, love, affection, sensitivity, equanimity, wisdom, compassion. They all can develop from that basis because they’re already there. So if we create that situation, then we can start to experience something, some glimmer of our Buddha nature, of our basic goodness. Yeah. And then we can feel real affection for ourselves because we have this good stuff inside us. We really do, and it’s always there. It’s always there. Right?
I mean, one of the things that Lama Yeshe used to say many years ago, he discovered about Westerners is we have such a low opinion of ourselves. Even if we’re very arrogant, proud people, deep down, we have such a low opinion of ourselves. Yeah? And that’s why we need so much stuff to make me feel good. Yeah? If I have all these things, then I am something good. But having and being are very different things. But, actually, there is this good stuff there, but we never allow ourselves to experience it. And if we ever look in our mind, all we see first is confusion, which is usually what does happen when we sit and meditate. People complain, I don’t bother because I can’t concentrate. When I try to meditate, all I get is lots of thoughts, so I don’t bother meditating. This is a really strange way of thinking because, of course, there are all these strange thoughts. There’s all this thought going on. It’s always there. It’s actually always there. It’s just when you sit down and try to meditate that we become aware of it. But it’s going on in our mind twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, out of control, now with no awareness.
Do you have to work on it? I mean, there’s some potential for them to arise, particularly if there’s some strong past imprints. But basically, we have to work on them. So you have to add them to—yes, yes, because, particularly in this tradition, the Gelugpa School of Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism that this center follows, was founded by Lama Tsongkhapa, Je Tsongkhapa. He explained that there are two main kinds of meditation. One is concentration meditation, which involves focusing on one point and subduing thoughts, which is what most people think is meditation, but it’s only one kind. But there is another kind which is equally, if not more important, which is what is called analytical or checking or contemplative meditation, where you think about specific things in a controlled way, having developed some degree of concentration and having subdued the negative thoughts, the confused garbage thoughts that we usually follow. On the basis of that, one then develops one’s positive thoughts. And there are meditations, you know, systemized meditations that one does that increase the thought or that enable the potential for love to develop by thinking about it, that enable the potential for compassion to develop by thinking in a certain way about suffering of oneself and others that increases one’s little bit of compassion.
For lovers of calm like me, the first thing is to achieve the kind of calmness necessary. Well, but no. It’s good to do both together. Yeah. Yeah. Because just developing this calmness from our tradition, the way most of our lamas say, this is a little bit of a trap because this kind of calmness meditation is so pleasant, you get trapped in it and it just becomes, what I think Trungpa used to call one aspect of what he used to call spiritual materialism. I have no idea. Yeah. That it’s a very nice state of—you know, you feel very nice and spiritual, but you get stuck there. You don’t develop. And that itself isn’t any great achievement on the path because just that kind of concentration with some calmness and clarity, that doesn’t eliminate the causes of suffering. But it’s definitely a method that if you use it with the right motivation, with the right understanding, is very important. But the trap is if one doesn’t have—hasn’t developed the right motivation and the right understanding, one can get just stuck in there.
Yes. I don’t know. Not familiar enough with the tradition to know how they do it. No. I don’t really know. Yeah. Could you give us any book titles? Titles? Book titles. On? Oh. Book titles about attachment. I don’t know of any just on that subject that I can think of offhand. But, of course, this topic, this subject of attachment comes up in many parts, in many Buddhist books. On the nature of the mind also, what is there? There’s this book by Kalu Rinpoche called Luminous Mind, but that’s not just about the mind. Mhmm. Okay. Alright.
Well, they’re in many Lamrim books like Pabongka Rinpoche’s Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand. Also, a book by the commentary by His Holiness Dalai Lama called The Path to Bliss. Yeah. I haven’t read it. I’m just—yeah. I have to read this one. Yeah. The biggest selling Buddhist book, and I haven’t read it. I’m kind of a bit ashamed about that. There are too many good Buddhist books to read now. But some of these things you get from here and there. It just comes from reading and thinking about many different points.
Any other questions? Yes. This is kind of difficult. Most likely—yeah. Well, in terms of objects, not people, but in terms of objects, one skillful thing to do is to avoid the object. Because I was saying the reason any delusion arises, any afflicted thought arises, is because firstly there’s the potential in the mind, but then there is the meeting of the object. So the easiest thing to do in the beginning, as a beginner, is to avoid the object. As soon as you know this kind of thing produces this kind of thought in my mind uncontrollably, then the first thing to do is to try to avoid the object. But of course—and then you’ve got some space to work on that delusion. But that is the main thing to do, is to use one’s mind to work on the delusion because we can’t always avoid the object. But, of course, while one is in contact with the object, it’s very difficult to reduce the delusion. That’s the way it works. The more frequently you’re in contact with the object, the more the delusion arises.
But then on the other hand, if you have some wisdom and you’ve thought about it, then by being in contact with that object and you can see the nature of the suffering that comes from relating to that object with attachment rather than just appreciation, affection or love, then you’re forced because you’re always in contact with the object to change. It gives some kind of opportunity to change and to see that what is causing the problem is my attachment, which means I’m exaggerating something here. Right? Some big exaggeration is going on. Also the quality of holding on to the permanence of something and the expectation and the dependence. Right? So these things we can try to reduce step by step.
And at the same time, to gain some inner confidence, some inner refuge. Especially if one has that bit, then it’s easier to overcome the attachment, the dependence, the expectation. And also just to meditate on loving kindness, that I want this person to be happy. Right? Not just I want them to be happy so they’ll make me happy, which is attachment, but, really, how can I make this person happy? And not just superficially happy, how can I entertain their ego and so on, but how can I give them some, you know, real inner peace? How can I create—I can’t actually give them that, but how can I create the causes, conditions for that for them? Right. How can we relate that way?
It is—I mean, in traveling around, I’ve seen some people who have some amazing relationships with each other like that.