The last post began as an explanation of the nature of pain and suffering. To recap, the Buddhist understanding of pain and suffering is that pain is a physical sensation, and the suffering of pain is how we relate to the pain.

This takes us to teachings about attachment, or clinging. You may have heard that Buddhism teaches nonattachment. People assume this means Buddhists are supposed to remain aloof from the world and avoid close relationships. That is not at all what it means, however. Zen teacher John Daido Loori said,

[A]ccording to the Buddhist point of view, nonattachment is exactly the opposite of separation. You need two things in order to have attachment: the thing you’re attaching to, and the person who’s attaching. In nonattachment, on the other hand, there’s unity. There’s unity because there’s nothing to attach to. If you have unified with the whole universe, there’s nothing outside of you, so the notion of attachment becomes absurd. Who will attach to what?

Once a fellow Zen student left a briefcase in a taxi. He began to worry about the briefcase, he said, and then he recognized that worrying is attachment. In order to worry, he had to conceptualize himself as a limited, finite being separated from something else, a briefcase. That's attachment, and it's also separation. You can't attach to something unless you perceive yourself as separate from it.

(He got his briefcase back, by the way.)

The conceptualization of a separate self takes us right back to the Four Noble Truths: Life is suffering (dukkha). Suffering is caused by greed, or thirst, and we thirst because we are ignorant. Again, we can't very well thirst for something unless we perceive ourselves as separate from it.

Yet we may liberate ourselves from ignorance, and our means for liberation is the Eightfold Path. Practice of the Path helps us realize ourselves as "unified with the universe," as Daido Roshi said.

How does this relate to pain? We don't think of ourselves as clinging to pain. Mostly, we want to rid ourselves of it; I know I do. In the next post I plan to write about what some Buddhist teachers have said about pain and how they deal with their own.