THE CONTEMPORARY STARTING-POINT
The ideal of non-attachment has been formulated and
systematically preached again and again in the course of
the last three thousand years. We find it (along with
everything else 1) in Hinduism. It is at the very heart of
the teachings of the Buddha. For the Chinese the doctrine
is formulated by Lao Tsu. A little later, in Greece, the
ideal of non-attachment is proclaimed, albeit with a certain
pharisaic priggishness, by the Stoics. The Gospel of
Jesus is essentially a gospel of non-attachment to 'the
things of this world/ and of attachment to God. What-
ever may have been the aberrations of organized Chris-
tianity—and they range from extravagant asceticism to the
most brutally cynical forms of realpolink—there has been
no lack of Christian philosophers to reaffirm the ideal of
non-attachment. Here is John Tauler, for example, telling
us that * freedom is complete purity and detachment which
seeketh the Eternal; an isolated, a withdrawn being,
identical with God or entirely attached to God.* Here is
the author of The Imitation, who bids us 'pass through
many cares as though without care; not after the manner
of a sluggard, but by a certain prerogative of a free raind,
which does not cleave with inordinate affection to any
creature.* One could multiply such citations almost in-
definitely. Meanwhile, moralists outside the Christian
tradition have affirmed the need for non-attachment no
less insistently than the Christians. What Spinoza, for
example, calls 'blessedness* is simply the state of non-
attachment; his 'human bondage,' the condition of one
who identifies himself with his desires, emotions and
thought-processes, or with their objects in the external
world.
The non-attached man is one who, in Buddhist phrase-
ology, puts an end to pain; and he puts an end to pain,
not only in himself, but also, by refraining from malicious
and stupid activity, to such pain as he may inflict on
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