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અનાસક્તિગ
lated and systematically preached again and again in the course of the last three thousand years. We find it ( along with everything else!) 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 nonattachment 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. Whatever may have been the aberrations of organised Christianity-and they range from extravagant asceticism to the most brutally cynical forms of real politikthere has been no lack of Christian philosophers to to reaffirm the ideal of non-attachment. * * * 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 mind, which does not cleave with inordinate affection to any creature '. One could multiply such citations almost indefinitely. Meanwhile moralists outside the Christian tradition have affirmed the need for non-attachment no less insistently than the Christians. What Spinoza, for example, calls "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 phraseology, 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
