MEDITATIONS: DOKKODO; THE WAY OF ALONENESS V.

Principle Five

Be detached from desire your whole lifelong. (Miyamoto, Musashi)

To live is to have desires, and to have desires is to suffer. Desire and suffering thereby reveal themselves to be the bedrock of being, just as the denial of desire and suffering shows itself to be the foundations of nihilism—we cannot hear Nietzsche’s claim from The Genealogy of Morals frequently enough that, “Man will wish Nothingness rather than not wish at all.”

But if this is true, we are left with a terrible conundrum:

Even though the Way cannot be seen except when you have no desire, people have eyes, so they see; they have ears, so they hear. Because such openings exist, there must always be desire. So the existence of desire in these openings is also a subtle function. Since the presence of desire is the wonder in the openings, to speak of having no desire does not mean abandoning desire. Why? You can’t cut off your ears and eyes and throw them away. As long as there are openings, there must be desires. (Lao-Tzu & Takuan 3)

How, then, are we meant to live detached from desire?

An answer can be found in the particularity of the translation. It would have been simpler to say, “Do not have desire your whole lifelong,” but that would presume something which the Zen Buddhists knew was impossible. Human beings must be in possession of desires, so the word “detached” was chosen.

What does it mean to be “detached” from a thing? It is a relatively foreign concept to the modern, materialist mindset; and even less materialistically minded people of the west still struggle to separate ego from emotion—which is a way of describing what detachment is.

To be attached to a person, place, or set of ideas is to value mostly highly possession and control of said person, place, or set of ideas. It is the love of the known over the love of the unknown, though that is sure to sound strange without further explanation. Said another way, attachment is valuing a relationship in its current form at the cost of devaluing future forms of that same relationship. We love our spouse or child in one way, and we don’t want that way of loving them to change, because—and we are wont to deny this—we feel comfortable, in control, competent, and powerful so long as our mode of relating remains within our domain of knowledge and mastery.

But being is not a static thing. People and places change, and we outgrow the applicability of different ideas at different stages of life. To cling to attachments is to forsake what is and what is becoming for the sake of what was and is no longer. Thus do the twin routes to tyranny and nihilism reveal themselves, both being different forms of discord with the world as it actually is.

Detachment, then, becomes synonymous with acceptance and affirmation of what lies outside of our control. We will not like or approve of much of what occurs in life, but we can choose to remove assent or dissent from our evaluation. We can identify where our wills cannot fulfill themselves and instead turn our powers of transformation inward, transvaluing our values, rising above ourselves in accord with Nietzsche’s postulation about the übermensch, cultivating fuller virtuosity through fragmentation, being broken by the Way as to fit more perfectly within it. This is both the Taoist equalizing assessment of all things and the alchemists dissolution via the Alkahest. It is Jung’s Enantiodromia, the Buddhist renunciation, and the Judeo-Christian submission to God’s will.

Understood this way, there is no difference between detachment, redemption, repentance, and atonement. They are all a letting go of control, a release of fear and anxiety through faith that our new desires will make us better than those to which we cling, that they will bring us into greater harmony with ourselves, others, and the Way. What attitude would be better to pursue our whole lives long than such a detachment from desire?

Lao-tzu and Takuan Soho. Tao Te Ching; Zen Teachings on the Taoist Classic, translated by Thomas Cleary, Shambala Publications Inc., 2010.

Miyamoto, Musashi. Dokkodo, translator unknown, 1645.