Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Your personality is the way you think and act. Each of us has a personality that we know and many other people know, even though each person will look at our personality a little differently.

Your personality, for example, may be described as easy going, pleasant, friendly, disciplined, serious, highly principled… You agree to that, and many people would agree to that too.

But, watch out, your personality could turn into an attachment trap (bẫy chấp). Say, a trait of your personality is “pleasant,” because you always smile and talk sweetly. But if you try to be pleasant all the time, you may grasp onto that pleasant label and would not do unpleasant things when a situation requires you to be unpleasant. Say, you clean up the neighborhood road every day and many neighbors join you to cleanup every day too. However, instead of cleaning as everyone else does, one neighbor consistently dumps garbage on the neighborhood road everyday. Maybe you should be telling the dumping neighbor to be considerate and stop his dumping, even though he may feel very unpleasant with you and your talk. If you don’t want to be unpleasant and, so, you don’t talk to the dumper, you probably are being trapped in the attachment trap of pleasantness, to the detriment of the entire neighborhood.

Our good traits usually are our attachment traps like that, simply because we want to hold on our good reputation. Attaching to good reputation is attachment and is, therefore, bad for our spiritual health.

Attaching to anything is bad, including sacred books, the Bible, the sutras. Once you are attached to a “good” thing, it becomes bad because you become its prisoner, without the freedom to work differently when a situation requires.

People think that you should not attach to the bad but should always stick hard to the good. No, attachment to anything, good or bad, is bad, because you become a prisoner and lose the ability to be flexible when required.

Wish you all understand what attachment and non-attachment are, for your spiritual health.

With compassion,

Hoành

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Trần Đình Hoành
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