You Are Not Your Home

Toward friends, attachment rages like a river;

Toward enemies, hatred blazes like fire.

Therefore it is the practice of Bodhisattvas to give up that home,

Where the darkness of stupidity, of forgetting what to accept and reject, prevails.

• the 37 Practices of a Bodhisattva. Verse 2.*

Attachment and hatred. These are things that can cause us a lot of harm. We hold on tightly to the things we want and we try hard to push away the things we don’t want. Sometimes in Buddhism we talk about a concept called the three poisons. These are usually called attachment, aversion, and ignorance. But they have a few different names. It seems like that’s what we’re talking about here with attachment, hatred, and stupidity.

These are said to be the three feelings that cause us the most suffering. But in this case, we’re talking about people so I’ll limit our discussion to that. We are attached to people we like and we are averse toward people we don’t like. Sure, that makes sense.

I can understand easily why hatred is bad. It consumes us. It steals our joy. It makes us do awful things we wouldn’t normally want to do.

But what about attachment? This is a tough thing to think about.

In Way of the Bodhisattva, Shantideva says:

Beings who are themselves impermanent