On Spiritual Detachment

Detachment (tuan tuo) means transcending something and thereby slipping free from it. Everyone is born bound, yet essentially few people truly wish to be bound; being bound is a life choice made under duress. This duress may be conscious or unconscious. The conscious kind takes the form of various acts of self-discipline; the unconscious kind consists of behavioral and thinking habits already trained into us at the subconscious level.

What we fundamentally cannot detach from are the body's basic needs. Unless through suicide or natural death, the lowest survival needs must be satisfied. Some have tried to detach from the body's basic needs—for example, those who practice bigu (grain avoidance). Such detachment lasts at most a few days; if one persistently detaches from the body's basic needs, one is bound to meet an unnatural death.

If we still choose to go on living in this world, what we should truly attempt to detach from is not the body's basic needs, but the various spiritual obstacles and confusions caused by non-bodily needs, and the behaviors that those obstacles and confusions add as burdens to our lives.

Humans are social animals. In the course of growing up, influenced by our environment, we absorb a great deal of ideology and take it as our own life principles. A person at different ages may choose different ideologies as life principles; what one chooses depends on one's life experiences.

But this great world is multiform and ever-changing, so each person's ideology tends to change in the process of interacting with the world. We habitually call this process growth, or spiritual growth, or mental growth. Confucius held that a person's mind does not mature until around forty, which is why he said "at forty I was no longer perplexed"—and this largely agrees with what we see in the world.

Consciousness is the root of human spiritual suffering. Schopenhauer said that humans have only a little more consciousness than animals, yet because of this little consciousness, endless spiritual suffering arises. We rarely see animals take their own lives out of weariness with life, yet in the human world many people commit suicide because the spirit can no longer bear its load. The medical burden caused by mental disorders has already leapt to become the largest single expenditure in the health sector.

Human ideology includes various cognitions, beliefs, and all manner of emotions and desires. Schopenhauer summed them up as intuition, perception, feeling, and thinking. As a person lives in reality, the various disintegrating conflicts that arise in the spiritual realm often cause great vexation and pain. To be free of vexation and pain, one must detach from the various bonds of the spiritual world and achieve the greatest spiritual freedom. Only thus can one best ensure that one lives happily.

We live among a group, so the first thing we need to detach from is the influence of the group. We naturally have a kind of fear of the group; the philosopher Bertrand Russell summed it up as "the fear of public opinion." Whatever we do, we are always afraid of criticism and condemnation from public opinion, whether or not what we do concerns others. We have grown used to surviving by pleasing public opinion and pleasing others, and as a result we often have to ignore our own inner feelings.

So most people live in a state of being kidnapped by the outside world. Under the influence of this "fear of public opinion," more or less, they live like actors performing.

From an anthropological point of view, the fear of public opinion arises from humanity's cooperative survival model. This survival model determines that we cannot exist independently of the group; only by depending on others can we obtain all the means of survival. In agrarian society, the self-sufficient way of life could maximize a person's independence, which is why pastoral or mountain life in agrarian societies has always been longed for by world-weary people.

But in fact, in any environment, it is not difficult to remain independent. As long as one has the ability to stand on one's own—in a world based on monetary exchange, being self-sufficient while controlling one's desires and minimizing dependence on others—one's spiritual independence can be guaranteed.

The ancients said that if a person has no wants, his character is naturally lofty. Whether this "lofty character" is hard to measure or not, once a person has no wants, he will naturally become less and less bound. He need no longer survive by performance and disguise, and can live more and more truthfully and sincerely, with fewer and fewer spiritual burdens.

A person who wishes to throw off the bonds of the outside world needs inner strength. Most people throw off external bonds by leaning on various inner ideologies that resist vulgar convention. But this kind of borrowed strength easily creates another kind of bondage, so that in the end a person is bound by his own inner spiritual world. Thus some people, though apparently free of the influence of the outer world, have entered the prison of their own hearts. Many people need to rely on some idea, belief, or life ideal to anesthetize and motivate themselves; otherwise they live in utter boredom.

This may seem a noble act, but in the end it too breeds a great deal of vexation and all manner of conflict with the outside world—so much so that some go astray into obsession, some admire their own reflections, and some become arrogant and bigoted. A person still needs to detach from his own ideology as well, in order to enter a state in which he is affected neither by the outside world nor by the self, neither pleased by things nor saddened by himself.

But if one becomes attached to this state of forgetting both self and things, in the end one is again bound by that attachment and cannot reach a state of perfect harmony and unobstructedness. This too is a kind of spiritual bond, though a very hidden one that has little influence on our spiritual world. If we wish to be even freer, we need to continue to detach from this bond. This is what the philosopher Feng Youlan called the negation of the negation, and it is also what the Buddhist Yuanjue Jing (Perfect Enlightenment Sutra) means: "The mind is like illusion; one must also distance oneself from it. The distancing itself is illusion; one must also distance oneself from that. The distancing from the distancing illusion—one must also distance oneself from that. When one reaches that from which there is nothing further to distance, all illusions are eliminated."

Generally speaking, for a person living in the world, not being bound by things and not being bound by others are not hard to achieve; not being bound by oneself is harder. A person uses ideology to throw off external things, only to become the slave of ideology—jumping from one fire pit into another, simply unaware of it. Only by detaching from one's own ideology, so that one is controlled neither by the outer world nor by one's own heart, reaching the state of forgetting both self and things—and then detaching even from that state, reaching a state without fixed form that yet contains all things—can one be said to have entered the true world of freedom, able to move with easy mastery, unconstrained, living with full authenticity and courage, free of all perplexity.

So the state in which a person has the least vexation and pain is the state of having the fewest views, even none—and yet not clinging even to that state of having the fewest views. Having thrown off external influence, one then throws off the influence of one's own views, finally reaching a state without any influence. Detach from the outside world, then detach from one's own heart, and then detach even from that detachment, reaching a state with no trace to be found. Then the human spirit can be thoroughly free.

In this state, we are no longer affected by the outside world or by the self. We need depend on no belief, and we breed not the slightest vexation. We follow our heart's desire without overstepping the line, simple and natural, free of worry and fear, free of defilement and purity, with few desires and few wants, detached from the dusty world yet able to accomplish things within it. Such a state may truly be called spiritual detachment.