I recently saw a documentary about an isolated Zen monastery located in the remote Japanese mountains. This monastery welcomes aspirants and seekers from all over the world provided they speak a reasonable level of Japanese, which is the one language everyone at the monastery uses to communicate.
One of these aspirants was a Japanese man who had moved to the monastery from Tokyo. He had gone off the rails early in life, had turned to violent crime to make his living, and had undergone a disastrous marriage and divorce.
He had left Tokyo and come to the monastery after realizing that his way of life was causing untold damage to himself and everyone around him, both those he cared for and strangers he didn’t even know.
He had left his two children behind in Tokyo in a last-ditch bid to get his life back on track.
While the documentary was filming, he experienced a crisis of doubt about his path. He was in the process of reconsidering whether he should go back to Tokyo to support his children. One of them was in grade school and one of them was in middle school. He felt that his decision to become a monk had seriously undermined his standing as a father and vice versa.
He consulted the abbot of the monastery who counseled him that he hadn’t yet given up his attachments to the world. The abbot advised this man that he needed to do further work on himself to detach from these connections in order to leave behind the suffering brought on by his doubts
This to me is the Buddhist religion’s greatest failure. There is a very good reason why the vast majority of monasteries around the world, from every religion on the planet, will turn away monastic aspirants who carry a lot of debt, who are married, or who are in any kind of committed romantic relationship.
The reason for this is that the wider world still holds a certain obligation over the person. They aren’t free to commit themselves to a totally spiritual path because something more important requires their time, attention, and commitment. These aspirants are urged to discharge their prior obligations and priorities to free themselves before they pursue their spiritual paths to their fullest.
What obligation, responsibility, and commitment could possibly be more important than raising our children and giving them the parental support they need? What spiritual advisor on the planet could possibly think it’s a good idea for a parent to walk away from their children—for any reason?
This dereliction of duty is the polar opposite of everything the spiritual path stands for. This is not what attaining a higher spiritual state means. This is pure escape from responsibility. It’s laziness in its most blatant and despicable form. This is running away from something much more important than the spiritual path.
Buddhism, especially monastic Buddhism, and indeed every form of spiritual monasticism around the world, has as its highest stated calling the aim of improving the world, reducing suffering, and setting an example for the rest of the world to follow.
Name me one thing that accomplishes this aim more effectively than parenting. Walking away from our obligations as parents is the opposite of all of this. Walking away from our obligations as parents causes additional pain, suffering, and resentment to the next generation. Walking away means passing our problems to the next generation to solve them for us.
In order to understand this problem, we need to look at the two different meanings of the word “attachment”.
The first meaning is the one used by Buddhism—the kind of attachment the Buddhist religion encourages us to get rid of. This form of attachment is essentially synonymous with emotion investment in an outcome, an expectation that a certain situation or relationship will yield a certain result, and either happiness or disappointment when the outcome differs from our expectations.
It is true that emotional investment in these kinds of expectations can lead to disappointment, resentment in our relationships when people don’t behave the way we want them to, and disillusionment when forces beyond our control affect the outcomes we hope for so badly and work so hard to attain.
It is also true that we can eliminate much of this pain and free us from the emotional consequences of these attachments by releasing our expectations, taking a step back, and viewing these situations from a big-picture vantage point.
This is all only one side of the discussion, however. We have to consider the second meaning of the word “attachment” to fully understand what it means to give up these attachments.
Scientists and researchers who study human development use the word “attachment” to describe the bond of emotional dependence, mutual trust, affection, and commitment between parents and children, spouses, close friends, and others with whom we form deep, lasting personal relationships.
These are the relationships that make life worth living. The love, understanding, trust, and admiration in these relationships offer us the highest forms of pleasure, meaning, and fulfilment that humans are capable of.
What on earth are we doing searching for spiritual meaning and answers if we aren’t finding it in these relationships? The kind of bliss, belonging, and higher perfection we’re looking for in our spiritual lives—we can already find these things in our families and relationships with those closest to us.
Spiritual attainment means nothing without these connections. I would bet cold hard cash that there is not a parent alive on the planet who will find any kind of happiness and fulfilment without their children in their lives. Only a psychopath could possibly think that they could.
I would also bet cold hard cash that the abbot of this monastery didn’t have children of their own. Only someone who had never had children could even think of encouraging a father to turn his back on his young children when they need him the most. This is reprehensible behavior and, in my most humble opinion, this kind of advice instantly disqualifies this abbot as a spiritual advisor.
The father made some very interesting remarks in his interviews with the documentarians. The father stated that his children had supported his decision and encouraged him to go to the monastery to become a monk. He stated that they had been the adults in the situation by recognizing his need to leave for his own sanity.
This is the very essence of bad parenting. The very instant you put your children in a position of being the adults in your life while you play the role of a child, you’ve already failed as a parent.
It is your job as a parent to make absolutely certain that you never put your children in this position. It is your job as a parent to be the parent your children need you to be. It is not your children’s job to consider what you need at the expense of their own needs.
It is your job as a parent to modify yourself, your lifestyle, and your way of fulfilling your needs to accommodate your children’s needs. If what you want conflicts with your children’s needs, then you have to make a change to adapt to their needs.
It is totally unreasonable to expect your children to adjust their needs to suit you or to make your life easier or to fulfill some need of yours. It is the height of selfishness to leave your children without a parent so you can go fulfill your needs somewhere else.
I can understand a father who had become violent, criminal, or mentally ill needing to leave for a time to clear his head and get his life back on track. It would be admirable for such a father to remove himself from his children’s lives to avoid causing them additional harm.
The very minute he got his life back on track, the very minute he even thought that he could make a positive contribution to their lives, he should have been on the first train back to Tokyo to help support them, either financially or by being there for them even in the smallest possible way.
It would never be acceptable for him to stay away from them out of some misguided notion that detaching himself from them and removing from their lives was some requirement of the spiritual path. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, removing himself from them would be accomplishing the opposite of everything the spiritual path is supposed to accomplish. It causes more harm—to everyone—including the absent parent and the wider world that these children will join once they grow up.
While getting ready to write this post, I watched a summary and breakdown of the TV series, Arcane. In the story’s climax, a powerful mage decides to remove all thought and decision-making from humanity to relieve the suffering brought about by these attachments and connections.
I can’t count the number of movies, TV shows, books, and every other form of media that has portrayed this scenario. Someone gets the brilliant idea that the world would be better off without the emotional connections that cause us so much pain.
All of these people are portrayed as misguided. Most of them are psychopathic or mentally damaged in some way. They are never heroes. They are usually supervillains.
The heroes prove the supervillain wrong by pointing out the great beauty, happiness, love, and benefit these relationships bring to all of our lives. Human life would be meaningless without these attachments.
Giving them up, severing them, or trying to eliminate them is the absolute worst thing we can possibly do. Removing them might relieve our pain, but it will also cut us off from what could be our highest form of happiness, connection, and spiritual attainment.
These attachments are the antidote to all our pain. They’re the cure for the world’s ills.
Eliminating these attachments would confine us in a dull, lifeless existence of pure monotony. We wouldn’t feel pain, but we wouldn’t feel love, happiness, or bliss, either. We would feel nothing. I can’t imagine anything worse than that.
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