Tashi Chodron:
གང་དག་ཆགས་དང་ཞེན་པའི་རྒྱུན་འབེབས་པ།

སྲིན་བུ་སྡོམ་བཞིན་རང་གི་དྲྭ་བ་བྱེད།

དེ་ཡང་བཅད་ནས་རབ་བྱུང་མཁས་པ་རྣམས།

ལྟོས་པ་མེད་པར་སྡུག་བསྔལ་ཐམས་ཅད་སྤོངས།

Isabella Rossellini:
Those who fall into the streams of attachment and craving are bound like spiders in the nets,
they have made for themselves.
The wise cut off this craving and renouncing the world,
they abandon all sorrows without regret.

Annabella Pitkin:
This is one of my favorite kinds of Tibetan paintings because it tells a story, and I love stories. So we see the central figure of the Buddha Shakyamuni at the moment of his enlightenment. In the middle of this painting, the figure is larger than all of the other figures, surrounded by a halo with a kind of rainbow tinge and clouds.

And he’s sitting cross-legged on his lotus seat, as he is described as doing, under the Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya in India at the moment of enlightenment. And he’s touching the Earth here, symbolizing his triumph over Mara, the Buddhist personification of delusion, and attachment, and grasping, and addiction. And he is gazing at us in the kind pinnacle of freedom and liberation.

Fatimah Asghar:
There is so much joy that comes from feeling free, and I think being free allows you to actually follow and listen to your inner voice and cultivate that relationship with your inner self so you can kind of follow your destiny. And things that hamper your freedom don’t really allow you to be able to do that. It’s hard when you’re trying to feel like you can do what maybe you came to this earth to do, but there are so many obstacles or things telling you can’t, so freedom is incredibly important.

Isabella Rossellini:
Welcome to season 4 of AWAKEN, a podcast from the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art about the dynamic path to enlightenment and what it means to “wake up.” I am Isabella Rossellini, an actress, filmmaker, and your host for this season of AWAKEN, where we are exploring a fundamental concept in Buddhist thinking and philosophy: attachment.

Himalayan art has long been a pathway to insights and awakening, and in this season, we will look at objects from the Rubin’s collection as a way to better understand attachment and its counterpoint, non-attachment, which translates to openness, or seeing things as they truly are. With stories and wisdom from artists, writers, poets, Buddhist teachers, psychologists, scholars, and others we will explore the meaning of attachment and how it shows up in different parts of our lives.

In this episode, Freedom. Over the past episodes, we have looked at attachment and non-attachment in relation to ego, love, and interdependence. Now we’re going to explore what it means to be free from attachment, from expectations, from self imposed identities. A story from the life of the Buddha is a useful place to start.

Eve Ekman:
I was thinking about the Buddha, thinking about Martin Luther King, thinking about many of these great leaders who kind of exemplify spiritual qualities and dedication to social justice, they had to prioritize this calling to the world over their loved ones.

Isabella Rossellini:
Contemplative social scientist Eve Ekman.

Eve Ekman:
For the Buddha this is much discussed—there are some arguments—but the Buddha left his wife and small child. He realized that the attachments would only be piling up. And so, while his baby was still just an infant, he left in the night. To some accounts his wife knew and she pretended to be sleeping because she knew it would be too hard. Other accounts say that he was an irresponsible dead-beat dad pursuing his own joys. However, when he comes back and reunites with his wife, Yashodhara, and even before he leaves, he really tells her, “I need to find the kind of practice and path that will alleviate suffering for all beings, all time.” And even though they lived in one of their many palaces—they had a summer palace and a winter palace and they had all the court to entertain them with different music and food; they had everything they could possibly want—there was still suffering.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche:
When we see someone is suffering, we feel—it’s not that we don’t have empathy. One that is detached, it does not mean they don’t have empathy. They have empathy.

Isabella Rossellini:
Teacher and meditation master in the Bon Buddhist tradition Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche:
They want them to not suffer. They want them to be happy. That’s the love and compassion. But they don’t identify with them. The problem is when you identify with someone. Finding yourself, you have to destroy someone. Becoming better, you have to put somebody down. To be happy, you have to make someone suffer. To win, you have to make someone lost. That kind of identity is very destructive attachment. Because they’re attached to themself in a wrong way, and they are attached to others in a wrong way. If the others follow them completely where they’re guided, then everything is peace.

Dr. Richie Davidson:
In the Buddhist framework, of course, the further extension of this is the concept of emptiness.

Isabella Rossellini:
Psychologist Richie Davidson, Founder & Director of the Center for Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Founder & Chief Visionary for Healthy Minds Innovations, Inc.

Dr. Richie Davidson:
When we can deeply experientially see that we are constructing in our own mind these entities that we’re responding to in the world, it is a core element in freeing us from being identified with those elements. And that’s the source of attachment; it’s that identification.

Eve Ekman:
There was no way to actually keep out of the palace walls the reality of suffering. Even though his dad, Buddha’s dad, the king, he tried. He tried to prevent anyone working for the Buddha who looked too old. He didn’t want him to see death. He didn’t want him to know sickness. And it’s just interesting—how can we really prevent this reality that there is suffering. And there is pain.

Sonya Renee Taylor:
There are so many things we’ve made more important than life. 

Isabella Rossellini:
Author and transformational thought leader, Sonya, Renee Taylor. 

Sonya Renee Taylor:
There are so many things we’ve made proxies for life. They are standing in for life, right? They’re like, “Oh, my car is standing in for life.” “My relationship is standing in for life.” “My kids are standing in for life.” “My accomplishments at work are standing in for life.” But they’re not life. They’re not life. Life is breath. Life is breath! It is the ability every day to be a conscious entity on this spinning rock and the privilege to see how it all is gonna unfold in the wild-ass soap opera that it is.

That’s life.

Eve Ekman:
Then I think of Martin Luther King and the ways he had to—he knew what a risk it was to do what he was doing. Such a risk and he put himself out there. He was more motivated and engaged by the bigger freedom than the smaller. I think when we think of unattached love we could think of that, that way in which we recognize the bigger love.

Isabella Rossellini:
Poet and filmmaker Fatimah Asghar had to break away from their family and environment so they could free themself from what was expected of them and step into who they really are. Fatimah found that freedom through writing and poetry.

Fatimah Asghar:
I’ve been writing poetry probably at this point for maybe like 15 or 16 years, maybe a little bit more, and that when you think about that, if you’re in a relationship with someone for like 15, 16, 17 years, you’re able to be like, “Yeah, I am with that person”—there’s a comfort you have.

I just didn’t grow up in an environment where I felt like I was safe to say how I really felt about things, so then when I started writing poetry, even though it was through metaphor, just the knowledge that I could be on stage and say something that was mine—and be heard—was so powerful, and was so deeply thrilling, and so deeply freeing to me.

And it was freeing because it was also creating that kind of ease to choose, and to choose my words, and to choose myself; but it was creating almost like a freedom from the way that I had adopted a mantle of silence. So, it was really giving me the space to actually be able to talk, and to be able to be who I was, and to be free in that way.

Sonya Renee Taylor:
You don’t have to wait for life to take the big thing for you to become reacquainted with life. There are small, every day, tiny opportunities where you get to be invited to recontextualize and reorient your relationship to life.

Fatimah Asghar:
I think you can cultivate it. I think it’s about mindfulness, and it’s an exercise in getting out of your own way. I think if you’re so focused on things that are not important, such as ego, or how you sound, or whatever, that’s when you start to filter it. But the more that you can just do it and let yourself move out of the way, and then get things down, I think that’s a thing that’s available to everyone.

Sonya Renee Taylor:
This is why I value meditation so much, is that its invitation is to come back to the simplest, most essential aspect of what life is, which is the breath and the moment, right? And there, in that place, nothing else is actually needed. In that place, everything is exactly enough. And so, how do we keep coming back to that? How do I keep finding the practice that brings me back to life itself and not its facsimiles, right, so that I get to live in actual life. That to me feels like the beginning of a practice of non-attachment, of how do I let this other thing stop pretending to be the most important thing in life? Cause it’s absolutely not!

Isabella Rossellini:
Annabella Pitkin is a scholar of Tibetan ​Buddhism. Here, she continues to describe the painting she spoke about at the top of the episode, a painting from the late 18th century called Story of Noble Deeds. Take a moment to visit rubinmuseum.org/awaken to look at this artwork.

As she mentioned, it tells a story of the Buddha at the moment of enlightenment. We see this central figure, sitting cross legged, surrounded by a halo of light. Annabella Pitkin continues:

Annabella Pitkin:
And then all around, we see very detailed, very precise, very small figures, almost like a graphic novel that tells, in a circular form, stories of the Buddha’s previous lives, in which he was other kinds of beings. He was other men and women. He was other animals. He was all kinds of beings.

Fatimah Asghar:
I think of the ways that we consider identity as a journey. I don’t think that there’s a fixed point. And for a really long time, I kind of struggled with certain things in identity, because I was like, “Oh, there’s a certain kind of knowledge I need to have,” or there’s a certain kind of knowingness that might occur once I find out what this identity means to me. I think that, for me, the more I leaned into the unknowing was actually when stuff started to get really free. I was like, all of these identities are robust and complicated, and we’re kind of sitting on the precipice of them as these people who are in our bodies.

Annabella Pitkin:
And in each of those previous lifetimes, on his Bodhisattva path to becoming fully enlightened as the compassionate Buddha, who teaches the path to freedom for others, in each of those previous lifetimes, he already had special affinities for compassion, for generosity, for letting go of attachment, for benefiting others, and for the kind of radical freedom from self-cherishing and attachment that permits very profound forms of generosity, including generosity even with one’s own most cherished possessions, and even with one’s own cherished physical body.

Fatimah Asghar:
There’s no one way, or there’s no two ways, or three ways, or four ways to be an identity; it means what we are in this moment. And just how freeing I’ve found that outlook to be. To be like, “Yeah, actually I get to be these things, and I get to have my own unique exploration of what these things are, and I don’t get to be confined by someone else’s idea of what that thing is.”

Annabella Pitkin:
We don’t want to go around, you know, cutting off something, and giving it to someone else. That would, for most people, be an act of self-harm, and a kind of twisting around of Buddhist practices of generosity. In fact, the conventional way to think about the body is that it is extremely precious. It’s the raft that you’re going to ride on across the ocean of suffering, all the way to the shore of enlightenment. The body is this precious opportunity to practice the Buddhist path, and we’re so lucky to have it, especially if we’re humans. We should cherish this body, and take very good care of it, and kind of respect it, even when we don’t like what it’s doing, even if it’s sick or, you know, it’s getting old, or it doesn’t run as fast. It’s this extraordinary opportunity, particularly if it’s human, to practice Buddhism.

So that’s the kind of cultural frame that Buddhist audiences know extremely well. The kind of foundation of all Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist sermons is an instruction to the audience to reflect on how lucky they are to be in human bodies, to have human bodies, be human together with the opportunity to learn about Buddhism. So that frame makes it possible then for viewers to think about what it might be like, maybe just from a psychological point of view, to imagine the Buddha in a previous lifetime, as a prince or a king, who was so filled with generosity and love, and so free from any fear about what might happen to him personally, so free from any grasping or addiction to some limited egocentric sense of self, that he actually might be willing to give away part of his body to a being who needed it.

And for that being, that future Buddha, that act of generosity then is extraordinarily liberating, a kind of enactment of a freedom from limitation, the limitation of the egocentric, addicted, grasping self into an openness and a kind of spacious freedom.

Sonya Renee Taylor:
My friend said to me recently that I am very close to my soul self. I was like, “Well, that is a mighty compliment.

That the me that I am, like the me that presents in the world, and the most authentic expression of my beingness that it came here for its assignment, are close. I was like, oh, I like that. I like that there ain’t a lot of distance between me and that beingness. And I think that that shedding, that death had to happen in order for me to get closer.

Death is liberation. It’s just a liberation into a thing that we don’t understand and can’t comprehend fully and for a multitude of reasons have been conditioned not to trust.

And so, that death of that part of myself, that construction, could do nothing but give me greater freedom. It released all of the constraints, and all of the bars, the prison that that identity was constructed in. The prison of a lack of love. The prison of not belonging. The prison of fear of loss. Like all of that is such a confining way to exist. And I was trying to be the brightest thing I could be inside of a jail, right? And that death said, “What if there doesn’t have to be a jail?” Right? “Who are you then?”

And I feel like that’s sort of what I get to, I don’t know, exist in right now, like touch into, feel into.

Annabella Pitkin:
The sense that wherever you are in this universe of the painting, the Buddha is always there with you. And at the same time, no particular kind of community or environment or state of being seems to be excluded or left out. The Buddha just keeps showing up in all of these different contexts. And the Buddha-ness of the Buddha is always present. And there’s a kind of a delight, again, the discovery of, oh, there’s the Buddha again. So the sense that the cosmos itself, and all of the kinds of experiences that people have, could be seen from one Buddhist perspective, as permeated by the qualities of the Buddha. It’s an enormously optimistic and encouraging vision that, again, seems tremendously intimate and friendly and reassuring.

You’re not alone. The Buddha was also there. The Buddha might actually be there right now.

Sonya Renee Taylor:
I have not ascended to some enlightened being. I am still human, very human. I still have very human experiences. But, they don’t feel—yeah, they don’t feel like they are the sum of existence for me. They are just an aspect of life. And that there are many aspects of life and I get to see so much more of them today than the ones I was just squarely focused on before. And so it’s like—yeah, it’s almost like having panoramic vision. It’s like, oh yeah, I see that thing over there, but I also see all of this. And that part is not fun to look at, but it’s still there. But all of this is gorgeous! I get to see it all today. And there’s a deep peace in that.

Isabella Rossellini:
Letting go of our preconceived notions of what should be opens us up to a world of possibilities of what could be. That kind of freedom is a true gift.

You just heard the voices of Fatimah Asghar, Dr. Richie Davidson, Eve Ekman, Annabella Pitkin, Sonya Renee Taylor, and Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. 

I am Isabella Rossellini, your host.

To see the artwork discussed in this episode, go to rubinmuseum.org/awaken.

If you’re enjoying the podcast, leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts, and tell your friends. For more stories and news from the Rubin, follow us on Instagram @rubinmuseum and sign up for our newsletter at rubinmuseum.org.

AWAKEN Season 4 is an eight-part series from the Rubin.

AWAKEN is produced by the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art with Tenzin Gelek, Jamie Lawyer, Kimon Keramidas, Gracie Marotta, Christina Watson, and Sarah Zabrodski in collaboration with SOUND MADE PUBLIC including Tania Ketenjian, Philip Wood, Alessandro Santoro, and Jeremiah Moore.

Original music has been produced by Hannis Brown with additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.

AWAKEN Season 4 and Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now are supported by Bob and Lois Baylis, Barbara Bowman, Daphne Hoch Cunningham and John Cunningham, Noah P. Dorsky, Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), Mimi Gardner Gates, Fred Eychaner, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, Jack Lampl, Dan Gimbel of NEPC, LLC, Agnes Gund, New York Life, Matt and Ann Nimetz, Namita and Arun Saraf, The Prospect Hill Foundation, Eileen Caulfeld Schwab, Taipei Cultural Center in New York, and UOVO.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

The Rubin Museum’s programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts

Thank you for listening.