This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Attachment, Clinging, & Grasping - Gil Fronsdal. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Attachment, Clinging, & Grasping - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 29, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Recently, I was in contact with two wonderful Buddhist teachers from Israel, peace activists. One is a Palestinian woman and one is a Jewish Israeli. The result of this conversation was that we're going to have a public conversation together on October 11th through the Sati Center for an hour and a half. You can imagine that such conversations are a magnet for divisiveness and challenges, but the idea is to not do that. Instead, the idea is to talk more about what their own experiences have been in the challenges of the last few years.

They're both Buddhist teachers. The Palestinian teacher supports Palestinian Buddhist communities, and the Israeli teacher supports a wide range of people in Israel. So, we'll discuss how it's been for them, how it's been for their communities, and how they've been seeing all this. They have a very different perspective than most because most perspectives that we hear these days are presented as if there are two sides. There might be other perspectives as well. So, it should be nice and meaningful, and important at this time. I think that there are important voices that need to be heard that don't get heard, and so I'm hoping that this will be a meaningful conversation. I'll be hosting it, and it's through the Sati Center. It'll be on Zoom, and probably everyone's chats will be turned off.

Attachment, Clinging, & Grasping (link)

Today, I would like to talk about a core Buddhist teaching that could be considered, in common colloquial English, to fit under the topic of attachment. In Buddhism, it isn't just an issue of an attachment. The Buddha put a lot of emphasis on how human beings are collectors of attachments. We collect large bundles of them, and they're heavy. As part of this talk, I want to make a point using a little bit of odd terminology. I want to refer to "dharmology." Dharmology is the Buddhist equivalent of theology. Theology is about the study of God and things having to do with God. Dharmology has to do with the study of dharma, the study of everything having to do with the dharma. So, I want to offer you, as something to keep in mind as we go through this talk, a little saying that I made up:

Dharmology is biology.

So what does that mean, and why would I say that? Dharmology is biology.

Attachment is a common colloquial word that's used a lot, just casually, without a lot of thought. Generally, it's considered to be a problem, something problematic for people. You might say, "That person's been too attached to me," which usually means they've been too needy or too connected, or they want too much from me. Or, "That person's really attached to their devices; they're so preoccupied you can't get their attention."

An odd thing happens when you come to Buddhist circles. For some reason, Buddhist teachers and Buddhist scholars don't use the word "attachment" very often in talking about Buddhism. I get the sense that if we start using the word attachment, people start protesting. Even though it's colloquially used as a problematic thing, it touches some nerve. It's like, "We shouldn't be criticizing this attachment thing. It's important." Some of it might have to do with psychology, where there's a very positive use of the word attachment, which refers to the kind of healthy bonding or prioritized relationship that happens between parents and young children. Something goes amiss if that relationship is not healthy, and the connection, the bonding, is not done in a healthy way. It can be problematic for a person for the rest of their life. My wife, when we had our first child, went to a group that was a Bay Area network of groups called Bay Area Attachment Parenting (BAP). It was a wonderful group, and they had really healthy ideas about parenting. So maybe some of the protest has to do with how the word is used in psychology. But I don't know. Maybe it's just because it's a colloquial, common word, it may be a little bit too personal.

A little bit less personal is the usual way this is said in Buddhism: "clinging." You know, like Saran wrap or something. That's a kind of safe distance. Maybe the word is not that common, so people are willing to hear it more. Or the related word, "grasping." I like grasping because it's biological. It's something you do with your hand. It's not just Saran wrap where you're not responsible. You know, "My smartphone clung to me. I didn't want it, but I'm not responsible." But grasping is a hand metaphor. Your fingers wrap around some object and hold it really tight, and one has to pry it loose, as we say in English sometimes, because the grasping can be so intense.

These things can touch very deep parts of us, and they have a kind of biological origin. I'll exemplify this with my experience when I was 20 or so. There was a period of time where I had very, very little money, and I often was hungry for long periods of time. In the wake of that period, you know, having enough food is a biological thing. Out of that time, there was a very strong biological grasping for food that took the form of thinking about it a lot. It took the form of overeating when I could get it because I didn't know when I would get it again. And also hoarding, just gathering more than I needed because I didn't know if I was going to have enough for the next days. Even after I had enough food and I knew I was going to be safe food-wise, this deep biological instinct of survival was still operating for me—the grasping, the concern.

One of the things that Buddhist practice did that was so important for me was that Buddhist practice is biological. It affects the biology, it affects deep places, the places of the survival instinct, and allows something very deep and biological to relax and feel safe, feel connected, feel secure, feel a sense of sufficiency and wholeness and goodness that can actually heal the kind of conditioning that comes when our survival is at stake. To try to heal my grasping, my attachment, and the behaviors I had around food simply through logic, simply by thinking differently and understanding my thinking was a little bit off—I don't think that would have really touched this deep biological source for this instinct to be attached, to be clinging and grasping. But there was something about the deep reconditioning of meditation that really allowed something to release and soften and see the world in a different way.

So whether we call it attachment, clinging, or grasping, it's maybe up to you. When you hear Buddhist teachers use any of these words, you're welcome to switch it over in your mind to one of the words that works better for you.

We can get attached to many things, and we then create collections of things. So what do we grasp onto? What are some of these collections?

One of them is the world of appearances. It's said that some people give more care and attention to what clothes they wear than to the words they speak. There's a tremendous industry in this country and a lot of emphasis on clothes and what people wear, and those have a lot to do with identity—how we want to be seen, how we want to see ourselves. There can be positive and negative identities. One that I still have to some degree is a negative identity. I don't know if anybody ever noticed, but I never wear anything with a logo on it. Because of this attachment I have, or this orientation I have, I don't want to be identified by anything. I'm not exactly proud of it, but it's pretty light these days. It just means that if I have a choice, I don't get clothes that have it. But I have things that have a logo on it now, like t-shirts, which maybe I use to sleep with. I'm being more flexible now. [Laughter] So, appearances—how we look, our hair, concerns about our weight, concerns about our size, all kinds of things. There are horrific ways in which our society is concerned about appearance, and we're concerned about other people's appearance. A tremendous amount of violence gets done with racism because of how people appear. So there are a lot of attachments to how people appear.

The second big area of attachment has to do with comfort and pleasure. Some people are really into pleasure, and they grasp onto it. Within certain kinds of intense orientations towards pleasure is what is called addiction in our society. We have whole treatment programs to try to support people with what on the surface looks like intense grasping and clinging to the pleasure of certain substances. But people who don't have what we call addictions, or even attachments, will spend an inordinate amount of time and money to orient their lives around pleasure in a very innocent way. It's possible that you've spent more money buying a car, or renting a home, or on the clothes you have—all kinds of things. You spend more than you really need to just to do the job of having a roof over your head, protected from the environment, because you want to have a nice view, you want it to be comfortable on your body, you want to have pleasure where you live. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that, but there's a spectrum from a healthy orientation to the well-being that can come from a certain modicum of pleasure, to being attached to it. This attachment can be such that maybe we have employment that is not good for us, but it's going to provide us with the money that allows us to have all these creature comforts that we want. So there's a kind of an attachment that drives behavior and activities that we don't even feel proud about sometimes.

The third area is ideas and concepts that we live by. We need to have concepts in order to be in the complicated social and environmental world that we live in, to simplify our life and understand how to find our way through it. For example, we have the idea of traffic lights, and I hope we all share what those mean. Because we all share that idea, we don't run into each other very often with our cars. If we had different ideas—if for you red means go and for me red means stop—we're in a little bit of trouble. But this capacity to have concepts and ideas also gets in the way. We have prejudices, ideas that we project on others. We have ideas about ourselves: "I'm great," "I'm horrible." It isn't just that we have ideas; they are a source of a lot of attachment and clinging—ideas of how we want to be seen. One of the reasons I moved to a Buddhist center, the San Francisco Zen Center, was because while I was already practicing, I was still pretty neurotic. When I went to the Zen Center and spent time there, a very peculiar thing happened. I didn't know it until I was around them, but I was playing a lot of social games. I was trying to present myself to people to convince them that I was a certain kind of person—an intelligent person, a kind person, a good person. I wanted people to see me in a certain way, so I acted accordingly. I didn't realize I was doing it; it just came with being human. But when I went to the Zen Center, they didn't respond the way they were supposed to. It was like I was met with a blank mirror. I saw myself in the mirror of the other people, and I saw what I was doing. I thought that was invaluable—to see these attachments I had around all these concepts of who I wanted to be and who I shouldn't be. I really loved the idea of seeing that so I could put it down, so I didn't have to be in the world that way.

The fourth area of attachment is to stories. There can be a tremendous attachment to stories, to what happened. Horrible, wonderful things happen, and then we get attached to that, and we review it and live by it over and over again. One of the places where the mirror into our mind becomes really clear is in meditation. You have to live with yourself in a way that you can't be distracted. You're sitting there and you start seeing, "I'm a storyteller. I'm telling that same story from 20 years ago over and over and over again." Our human capacity for memory is not 100% good. Things shift and change. We live in memories as if they've been frozen, but some of those memories are of resentment, some of joy. We get attached to the memories and to who we are in relationship to them. A terrible thing happened, and we get attached to that story, and the identity is "I'm a victim." That victim mentality can go on for decades. Or "I'm a savior," and that can be where we get stuck. We live in stories about the future, stories about how great we will be or how terrible it will be. And in these stories, we're often the main character. It's a little bit shocking to realize how repetitive these things can be. As I like to say, if someone followed you around all day talking to you and was as repetitive as you might be in your head, you would beg them to stop talking. But it doesn't occur to you to ask yourself to stop, because it's almost as interesting this hundredth time as it was the first time.

The fifth and last one is cognition, sometimes called consciousness. This usually has to do with an attachment to who I am as a cognizing person. The ability to cognize, to be conscious, to be aware is so central and deep that some people, especially religious people or meditators, get attached to this idea: "This is who I am. I'm some kind of pure consciousness, some kind of non-dual consciousness, some kind of ultimate, pristine consciousness. Everything else is just attachments and ideas, but this is the real thing. This is who I really am."

So, all these things are things we can grasp onto. The Buddha describes that through the process of attachment, we're collecting them. I call these the five bundles that we're collecting. The usual English way of translating the Pali word is the "five aggregates," but "aggregates" is a little bit of a funny word. I prefer "bundles." You gather together firewood and you tie it up. The Buddha said you have these five bundles that we gather together and are attached to. They become heavy things that we carry, sometimes called burdens. I liken it to someone who's going to go for a long, wonderful day of hiking and decides, "Who knows what I'm going to need out there?" So they bring five big suitcases with them. It's a little awkward to carry five suitcases on a nice little afternoon hike, but you do it. You carry one at a time 20 feet, go back for the other one, and eventually, you move all five. You didn't get very far into the walk, but it was really good because you had all your attachments with you.

A lot of this has to do with ideas. I believe that in our modern society, we are more and more living in the world of ideas and less and less in biology. Remember: dharmology is biology. What I mean by this is how much time people, especially in this part of the world, are oriented towards screens and to data—ideas that are preserved and transmitted through data. I know people now, as soon as they want to know something, they'll ask AI. If they want to buy something, AI will provide a wonderful answer. That's good, but it means you're outsourcing all kinds of decisions that in the past were not just ideas presented as data, but had to do with a personal, immediate connection that involved more than ideas. It involved aesthetics, biology, intuition—all kinds of things. I believe that if we really trust our biology deeply, without any grasping involved, we have deep inner knowledge about what is healthy and appropriate for us to eat at different times. But if I outsource that to AI and say, "I'm going to be doing a lot of exercise today. What should I be eating?" you might get a good answer, but slowly, step by step, we're losing our own ability. It's like people who use Google Maps all the time and lose their capacity for spatial awareness. We can lose inner biological capacities because we live outsourced to a screen, to ideas. Yes, it makes life easier, but we're limiting and truncating our natural, biological intelligence, which Buddhism is trying to get us back into.

The Buddha was very clear that these five bundles that we get attached to really limit us. They divide us and separate out certain parts of us that we focus on, cutting off other parts of who we are. The biological orientation of Buddhism is to heal those divides, to heal the way that we truncate and limit ourselves, to allow for a broad, global, embodied intelligence to begin operating. This global biological intelligence gives us an experience of wholeness, of well-being, of peace, of deep satisfaction and contentment. It's a deep source of psychological and physical health that begins to do the reconditioning that many of us need because we become so fully conditioned by the artificial world of data we live in more and more. In doing that, we live from the head up, losing touch with the fullness of who we are.

Part of Buddhist practice, a very important part of it, is to heal all the divides and limitations that are caused by clinging, grasping, and attachment. The primary way Buddhism addresses this is to overcome and bring to an end the suffering, the dukkha¹, the pain that arises because of these attachments. The core attachment that the early Buddhist tradition emphasized over and over again was the attachment to self, the self-identity that is built around each of these five areas: appearances, comfort, ideas, stories, and cognition. Maybe one or two of those is a little bit of a mirror for a few of you here that you could take a look at.

The result of this is really wonderful. To have the inner life become free and feel healthy is a balance against all these social forces that, if we buy into them, cause us to end up being less whole, less complete. And it can be done. I just came back from teaching a month-long retreat, the first one we've ever done at our retreat center. In thinking about this talk, I had a very silly idea. People who do retreats, by the end of the retreat, their faces and skin are kind of radiating. They look like 10 years younger. I thought, the way to get people interested in these meditation retreats—and probably how we can make a lot of money—is we'll just call it a "month-long skin spa," and people will be lining up to come. [Laughter]

Reflections

So those are my thoughts for today. We have some minutes before the normal ending time, and then we have the potluck. It's a particularly nice day if you would like to say hello to the people near you, maybe share an idea or something from this talk that was meaningful for you. Of course, if you don't want to stay, you're welcome to go. If you don't want to talk, you're welcome to just sit silently and wait until the potluck begins. But if you do stay to talk, if you could just look around and make sure no one's left alone. Meet together, maybe two, three, or four people right around you, and have a little chat. Introduce yourself, and I'll ring the bell when it's time to begin setting up for the potluck. Thank you.