When talking about love, attachment, jealousy, people think they know what love is, but they do not. And their misunderstanding about love creates jealousy. By 'love' people mean a certain monopoly, some possessiveness, without understanding a simple fact of life - the moment you possess a living being, you kill him. Life cannot be possessed. You cannot have it in your fist. If you want to have it, you must keep your hands open.

Sometimes people are so possessive that they become attached even to objects. Let me narrate a short story, a Buddhist nun who had a small statue of Buddha, made of solid gold. She would carry it while travelling from monastery to monastery. Her problem was that every morning she would worship her Buddha and burn incense. But incense cannot be directed, can it? Now this was very bad. Her own buddha was sitting there, while her incense, her offering had flown away to some other Buddha in some other temple.

She finally devised a strategy to ensure that the incense reached her Buddha, and her Buddha alone. She followed out a small bamboo and she kept it on her incense burner, directing the perfumed smoke with the hollow bamboo towards the nose of her very own Buddha.

But very soon there arose another problem. The nose of her Buddha turned black with the smoke. She was in a great distress - a gold Buddha, a solid gold Buddha, with a black nose. It simply did not seem right.

She inquired of older monks: "What should I do now? If I don't use the bamboo, then the incense... nobody knows where it goes. It goes to all kinds of Buddhas when I'm offering it to mine. And now because of this bamboo, his nose has turned black. What should I do?"

An old monk laughed and said, "Woman, you are an idiot! You don't understand the simple fact that all Buddhas are the same - simply statues of the same person. You have become attached to your Buddha, even though the entire teaching of Buddha is non-attachment."

The monk carried on: "This serves you right. Buddha has shown you that attachment makes you dirty. So beware! Just go to a goldsmith so he can clean and polish your Buddha. But from now on, just think of THE Buddha. Any Buddha, whichever Buddha gets the incense... perhaps he deserves it! And you should be happy that it has reached some statue, because all those statues represent the same person."