Clinging & Its Cure
June 21, 2024

One of the methods that the Buddha recommends when dealing with distracting thoughts is the relaxation of thought fabrications—more precisely, the relaxation of fabrications. What it comes down to is that you notice how, when a thought comes into the mind and it grabs your attention, there’s going to be a little pattern of tension someplace in the body that’s your marker for keeping that thought in mind. If you can locate that pattern of tension and release it, the thought goes away.

Some people have called that tensing up “the clinging response.” They say that if you could just keep your energy throughout the body relaxed all the time, there would be no clinging. That would be the end of the problem. But actually, the physical tension is the result of the clinging, it’s not the source. It’s one of the things that enables the clinging to stay. You can do some symptom management. You notice you’ve got patterns of tension in the body that correspond to different thoughts, you can release the tension.

This is one of the reasons why we go through the body, section by section, to release old patterns of tension or new patterns of tension, to clear things up a little bit. It also allows you to step back from your clingings. But the clingings themselves are something else. After all, they’re mental. Patterns of tension are physical. People say that if you could be alert and mindful all the time and keep the body relaxed, you’d be fine. But the question is, why do you not stay alert to the whole body all the time? The mind tends to zoom in on things, forgets the world of the body, and it gets into another world, the world of a thought, the world of an idea. That’s where the clinging happens.

As the Buddha said, we have clinging to the aggregates. There are some passages where he says that we’re clinging not so much to the aggregates themselves, but to our desire and passion for fabricating aggregates. It’s as if we have a particular skill. We’ve learned how to fabricate things and we just love to keep fabricating, because we realize that’s where a lot of our happiness comes from: changing the world, changing our experience by the way we fabricate it. The problem is that we can also fabricate things pretty sloppily, with a lot of ignorance, and we end up causing suffering.

The way out, of course, as the Buddha says, is to fabricate a path. You take those aggregates and turn them into concentration; you turn them into a right view; you turn them into all the factors of the path. That will provide you with a way out.

An important part of that is having right view about what the clinging is. The Buddha lists four kinds: clinging to sensuality, clinging to views, clinging to habits and practices, and clinging to doctrines of the self. It may sound like a random list, but it corresponds to some things that have been noticed in modern psychology. Clinging to sensuality would correspond to what Freud called the id: your raw desires for sensual pleasures. Clinging to views would be your sense of the reality principle, how the world actually is and how it works. Clinging to habits and practices would be your superego, the part of the mind that tells you what you should be doing and what people at large should be doing. As for your sense of the self, that’s your ego, the part that’s trying to negotiate between your desires and your sense of what’s proper, what’s appropriate.

Now, in Freud’s view, those parts of the psyche are constantly in battle because the shoulds he knew, the shoulds of the Judeo-Christian tradition, don’t have much to do with your happiness. They’re just laws that have been laid down. But from the Buddha’s point of view, the shoulds he recommends, the shoulds of the four noble truths, are designed specifically for your true happiness. So even though there’s conflict in the mind, it doesn’t have to always be there.

We have to understand these forms of clinging because we have to use some of them, the skillful forms, on the path. We also have to learn how to let go of the unskillful forms.

The one form of clinging for which there is no role in the path is clinging to sensuality. Sensuality here means your fascination with thinking about sensual pleasures, planning sensual pleasures. The Buddha’s not saying you have to deny yourself sensual pleasures, but you should be very careful about the kinds of sensual pleasures you go for, and the amount to which you allow them, or your desire for those pleasures, to take over the mind. As he said, if there’s a sensual pleasure that you indulge in and it doesn’t have a bad impact on the mind, that’s okay. But if it requires that you break the precepts or if it has an intoxicating effect on the mind, that’s something you’ll have to restrain yourself from.

Now, the substitute the Buddha gives is primarily the pleasure of concentration, but there’s also the pleasure of knowing that your actions are harmless. There’s pleasure in virtue. There’s pleasure in right view, in seeing things clearly. Think of all those people who listen to a Dhamma talk by the Buddha and, at the end, they say, it’s magnificent, magnificent, like someone who’s carried a lamp into the dark, who’s turned upright things that were turned over. Just seeing things clearly explained in a way that makes sense and points to the fact that you can play a role in putting an end to your suffering by changing your attitude, by changing your actions: That’s good news. There’s a pleasure that comes with accepting that, that there is a role for your agency in the world.

Think about all the different teachings that were available in the Buddha’s time. So many of them said that the world just goes on its own way. Human actions are unreal or impotent: pretty discouraging teachings. Here the Buddha comes and says, “Hey, you’re going to have to sacrifice some things, but it will lead to happiness.” People who were intelligent saw that as good news.

So the Buddha is not having you deny yourself pleasure as you follow the path. It’s simply a matter of learning new pleasures, learning to appreciate the pleasures of virtue, the pleasures of being responsible, the pleasures, of course, of concentration.

As for views, of course, he put aside a lot of views that were hotly debated at that time, such as whether the world was eternal or not eternal, finite or infinite. But there was one issue on which he taught a lot, which is that basically karma and rebirth. In his explanation, that’s really one issue. That’s a view that you hold to inform your practice of the path. And of course you hold to the view of the four noble truths.

As for habits and practices: Sometimes this is translated as rites and rituals. I’ve known all too many people who say, “Well, I don’t believe in any rituals, I don’t believe in any rites, so I’ve got that one taken care of.” But we all have a strong sense of what should and shouldn’t be done. Even people who say, “There is no should and shouldn’t be done” believe that you shouldn’t have thoughts of should and shouldn’t be done. You shouldn’t have thoughts of right and wrong.

The Buddha, however, said that an important part of his teaching was that he taught people some basic principles for understanding what they should and shouldn’t do. This is how they protect themselves from unskillful urges, unskillful ideas.

It comes down, of course, to the precepts, the practice of virtue, concentration, and discernment. You take on the Buddha’s shoulds because they’re good for you. He formulated them not because he wanted to impose his will on other people, or just because he liked rules. He formulated them because this is what works. You act on skillful intentions, the results are going to be good. You act on unskillful intentions, the results are going to be bad.

Now, the working out of that principle can be complex, but it gives you a clearer idea of what you should be doing at any one moment. When there are no obvious shoulds from his precepts and rules, he gives you the principle for how to learn from your actions as to what actually works, what actually doesn’t work in being harmless. Those are the habits and practices he recommends as part of the path.

And of course, doctrines of the self: He does talk about the self as its own mainstay. The self as its own inner critic. What it comes down to is having a healthy sense of self that’s competent to do the path, takes responsibility for your actions, and has a strong sense that you will benefit from doing this.

This self falls into three types. There’s the self as the consumer, the you who’s going to enjoy the results of the path. Then there’s the self as the agent, the you who’s actually going to do the path. And then self as the commentator, the part of you that’s watching over the activities of the other two senses of self, making suggestions, passing judgment. If it’s skillful, it’ll not only pass judgment, but it will also say, “You could do it better this way.” Constructive criticism: That’s what it should be offering.

An important part of the path is training these senses of self. You don’t just say, “No self. There’s nobody here, nobody doing the path,” and abandon all responsibility. That aborts the whole process.

So you learn how to use skillful forms of clinging to stay on the path and to develop the path. When the path is fully developed, that’s when you can think about letting go of all forms of clinging. It’s interesting, there are some passages where the Buddha says, “The things that are inconstant, stressful, are not self: What in there do you let go of?” And he answers, “You let go of the desire and passion.” In other words, you don’t let go of the aggregates, you don’t let go of the senses, you let go of your desire and passion for fabricating things out of them. Which is why when arahants gain awakening and then come back from the awakening experience, they still experience the aggregates, but without desire and passion.

So you learn how to use these things wisely, looking at how you relate to them. In the suttas we chant on the not-self characteristic and the Fire Sermon, notice that the Buddha talks about how you develop disenchantment for the aggregates and disenchantment for the sense media. Then he says, “From disenchantment, nibbidā, you go to virāga, dispassion.” Notice: Dispassion doesn’t have a specific object. It’s not just dispassion for the aggregates, it’s dispassion all around, including dispassion for dispassion itself. Ideally, that’s how it operates. It’s not limited just to dispassion for the aggregates and the sense media. It’s all around. Total.

That’s what liberates you. All too often we hear the word “dispassion” and it sounds gray, lifeless, dull. But the Buddha wants you to realize that our passion for fabricating things is what has gotten us into trouble. But it can help get us out of trouble by fabricating the path. Yet then you have to let go of the path, too. When you lose your passion for fabricating the aggregates and clinging to the aggregates, that’s when the mind is liberated. You realize that all the activity in which you were so wound up was actually getting in the way of something much better. Which is why awakening is such an unexpected experience.

So that’s the cure for clinging. The real clinging is mental. The side effects are in the body. If you can deal with those side effects, as I said, it’s part of symptom management but it doesn’t effect the total cure. The total cure has to be done inside the mind as you see what you’re passionate about, what your desires are aiming at, what they’re clinging to, and you learn to see that you’re better off not clinging. That’s when you’ve really cured yourself of the clinging and set yourself free.