Letting Go and Striving On: Overcoming the Paradoxes of the Path | 'Eastern Horizon' Magazine Interview with Ajahn Dhammasiha

Benny Liow, editor of 'Eastern Horizon' Magazine, Malaysia, conducted the following interview with Ajahn Dhammasiha, which was published in edition 78, January 2026.

I feel Benny's questions are highly pertinent for anyone trying to truly integrate Dhamma into their daily life. At the same time, I guess that not too many of our website visitors have this magazine readily at hand, and therefore I like to share it in full here on our 'Dhamma Reflections' blog.

Anumodanā to editor-in-chief Benny for conceiving and publishing this interview, and for his dedicated work at Eastern Horizon since the magazine's founding some 25 years ago.

Benny: Venerable sir, the Buddha often emphasized “letting go” or “non-clinging.” In practical terms, how is this applied in daily life? Is it more of a withdrawal or an active inner discipline?

Ajahn Dhammasiha: "Letting go" with wisdom is totally different from "letting go" as understood in worldly terms. For example, if my mother is sick in hospital, imagine I'll decide to "let go" and don't visit her. I don't look after her. Instead, I'm hanging out on parties, or go on a nice cruise. That's not letting go as the Buddha meant it. That's just laziness and lack of care for one's mother masquerading as "letting go".

True letting go requires wisdom, which is a rare quality. True letting go with wisdom actually enhances our ability to act for the benefit and welfare of ourselves and other beings.

Many people get that wrong. An Arahant, who has fully let go and doesn't cling, is not like someone suffering from autism, or some kind of emotionless "zombie". Only their defilements and negative emotions are gone. But they still experience all the wholesome emotions like loving kindness, compassion, gratitude, respect, noble friendship, joy in Dhamma & meditation. In fact, these wholesome emotions even reach their highest potential, as they are no longer tainted by desire, aversion and ego-illusion.

Therefore, the more we let go, the stronger and purer our mettā and karuṇā should become, enhancing our ability to act for the benefit of others.

Does letting go mean we must detach from our love for family, children, or partners? How does Buddhism distinguish between healthy, compassionate love and clinging attachment?

It means we have to detach from worldly love to family. But you don't have to abandon loving kindness, compassion, gratitude or respect. Instead, if you detach from family and friends in the way the Buddha taught, based on genuine wisdom and insight, you will have more and purer loving kindness (mettā) & compassion (karuṇā) for them.

You don't have to worry that you may end up a "bad'" parent or grandparent if you practise letting go. You'll be a better mother or father or granny without attachment. Because you'll have all this powerful loving kindness that is no longer tainted by delusion and desire.

If you don't believe me, just take the Buddha himself as an example. Although he had abandoned all attachment, he still went back to his hometown based on compassion. And he succeeded to guide virtually all family members to experience enlightenment, total freedom from death and suffering. Have you been able to do anything similarly beneficial to your family members?

Looking at the Buddha's example, we realize that our love based on attachment and self-illusion is much less effective in working for the true long-term benefit of our family, than the Buddha's totally selfless mettā & karuṇā.

Can you offer guidance on how to recognize when wholesome emotions — like care or love — are crossing the line into attachment or craving?

Are there signs we can observe in our own mind?

If we haven’t reached awakening yet, attachment and craving will always be part of our love for others. So we first of all have to be aware of that problem, and then we have to apply mindfulness and wisdom and brutal honesty with ourselves in analysing our true motives in caring for others.

For instance, am I really trying to help because they need help? Or is it actually me "needing to help them", although they're actually fine themselves? Is it perhaps even possible that I try to help so much because subconsciously, I may want them to be dependent on me? Deep down, I may be afraid that they might abandon me, but if I make them dependent on me, they can't do that.

Is it really out of non-selfish love that you want your kid to become an engineer or doctor? Or is that perhaps just projecting your own desires and aspirations onto the child? Perhaps the child would be much happier as a carpenter or cook or homemaker?

One tell-tale sign is your emotional response if your love or care is rejected. If it's pure mettā and compassion, you wouldn’t feel upset and angry about it. Sure, there may be some sadness or disappointment if they reject something that you're convinced would be genuinely good for them. But if you're getting really emotional and feel anger in your mind when they refuse your help, that's a strong indicator of craving tainting your supposed love and care.

The Buddha’s final instruction was “strive on with diligence.”

How do we reconcile this with the teaching of letting go?

Isn’t striving for enlightenment itself a subtle form of clinging?

Well, no real contradiction there, as we're "striving with diligence to let go" 😉

The Buddha's teaching is gradual. The process of letting go has to be done step by step, incremental. You don't want to start your Dhamma practice by letting go of striving for enlightenment, else you never get started. How about starting by using our desire for enlightenment as motivation to let go of killing, stealing, sensual misconduct, lying, intoxicants, anger and stinginess?

Once we've reached the third stage of awakening, non-returning (anāgāmitā), that's the time to worry about letting go of even the desire for enlightenment, as it can be an obstruction to our insight contemplation at that refined level.

Before that, it's more important to skilfully direct our desire for enlightenment in such a way that it supports our striving to develop generosity, virtue and meditation.

Is it possible to cultivate what we might call “non-attached effort”?

How do we apply effort in practice without being bound by expectation or outcome?

In the first sutta in Sāṃyutta Nikāya, a deva asks the Buddha:

"How, Venerable Sir, did you cross the flood?"

The Buddha answers:

"I crossed the flood without standing still, and without striving. If I stood still, I would sink. But if I strove, I would be whirled around."

You notice that we're dealing with a Zen-like paradox. If we relax our effort too much, we sink, we're regressing in our Dhamma practice. But if we try too hard, our mind gets agitated, and we don't progress either.

Basically, we're dealing with an application of the "Middle Way" (Majjhimā Paṭipadā). The middle way is never just a compromise, like in 'middle-of-the-road politics'. Instead, we have to transcend both extremes.

So we have to constantly use mindfulness and wisdom in monitoring how we apply effort, to keep it skilful and along the middle way. I like your expression of "non-attached effort". You could also call it effort that's not ego based, but instead motivated by confidence in Dhamma, motivated by compassion to oneself and other beings. You could also say "wisdom power, not will power". Or you could call it effort focussed on investigating, understanding and influencing conditionality.

However, this conundrum mostly comes up in the more refined parts of our practice, that is samatha and vipassanā meditation. For practising generosity and keeping one's precepts pure, the main thing is to put forth effort. Here, falling into the extreme of trying too hard is a minor danger. When it comes to avoiding bad karma, and making as much good karma as possible, the real danger is to not try hard enough.

In the light of anattā (non-self), who is it that lets go?

If there’s no fixed self, what does it actually mean to practice renunciation or release?

Well, first of all, the Buddha actually never said: "There is no self." (whether fixed or not fixed). He did say : "All phenomena are not self. The body is not self. Feeling is not self; and so on..."

Asking "who is it that let's go?" in the abstract doesn't help to let go. This question leads us into the "wilderness of views and speculation". Instead, the Buddha recommends to investigate in a very practical manner:

"Is this body permanent or impermanent?"

"Can an impermanent body ever give us perfect, lasting happiness?"

"This body that is impermanent, unreliable and ultimately disappointing, is it suitable to be regarded as: This is mine, I am this, this is my self?"

Ownership, I and self is not something that objectively exists or doesn't exist somewhere outside. It's an attitude that we create in our mind. It's a subjective perspective that we project onto things. The Buddha doesn't try to disprove the existence of I, me and mine. He simply points out the painful consequences we experience as the result of regarding something as me and mine. Once we see that our attitude of taking something as me or mine causes us suffering, we naturally stop doing it. Once we regard body, feeling and so on as: "this is not mine, this is not me, this is not my self", we let go automatically. That's what's meant by "practising renunciation or release".

Can the very desire to let go become a subtle form of attachment in itself — such as striving to be detached or clinging to the idea of non-clinging?

How do we avoid this trap?

We can not let go based on desire. Desire is the very cause of attachment ("taṇhā paccayā upādānaṃ").

We let go as the result of investigating with wisdom. We let go based on insight, based on seeing things as they truly are.

However, we can use desire skilfully to direct our mind towards investigation. That's something we can do based on desire. It's natural to have the desire to investigate when we're in pain. The moment it really hurts, we straight away try to figure out why we hurt, and how we can get rid of that pain.

The problem is that we're usually looking in the wrong place. We're usually looking only for external causes of our suffering: "I'm in pain because he's so mean to me". And sometimes we may even succeed in manipulating these external causes, to change the behaviour of other people. However, it's entirely impossible to control all external circumstances all the time, we never get out of suffering that way.

Therefore, the Buddha directs us to investigate the internal cause of our suffering: attachment. Being internal, we're actually able to do something about it, we can let go of it.

So we don't desire to let go. Instead, we desire to investigate, to understand attachment and it's causes and results. Clearly seeing how attachment causes us to experience so much pain results in the mind letting go.

As a layperson with worldly responsibilities, how can we walk the middle path — caring deeply without clinging, engaging fully in life without being bound by it?

"Engaging fully in life without being bound by it" is tricky. Once a person is fully liberated, they can "engage fully" in a very wholesome manner for the benefit of many. For example, building monasteries with large monastic and lay communities, teaching and training and encouraging and inspiring numerous beings. Just look at someone like Ajahn Chah and what he did. He could do all that without any danger of clinging, as the defilements were gone, irreversibly destroyed.

However, someone who has not yet experienced Nibbāna, not even on the first level of stream-entry, and who has never had an experience of full samādhi either (which is the vast majority of people) - such a person tends to get fully sucked in whenever they focus on "engaging fully".

I'd rather recommend to "hold life lightly". Engage, but maintain awareness and contemplate that whatever you engage with is impermanent, not-self, not really real ('sabbaṃ vitathaṃ idaṃ'). And establish an internal refuge you return to every day in your meditation, even if it's just for 20 min. Build a place of non-engagement and letting go in your heart, which gradually becomes your true home. All the external stuff you try to hold as lightly as possible, and only that internal space of peace and light and awareness is what you engage with fully.