Is it allowed? · Buddhism
尾o · Japanese, tail
On attachment.
The Buddha taught that attachment is the root of suffering. We offer two kinds of attachment: plug and clip. This page is about holding both lightly, and about the lives in which the Buddha himself had a tail.
I · UpādānaOn attachment
The Buddha taught that suffering comes from craving, taṇhā, and from the clinging that follows it, upādāna. Let go of the clinging and suffering ends.
We offer two kinds of attachment: a plug and a clip. This page recommends holding either lightly.
Wear it. Enjoy it. Take it out. Do not cling to it. It was never really yours; it is synthetic.
Upādāna, the Pali word for clinging, also means fuel: what a fire holds on to and burns. Faux fur, as it happens, is flammable.
II · The Gateless GateTwo koans
The Gateless Gate · Case 1
無
A monk asked Zhaozhou: Does a dog have Buddha-nature? Zhaozhou said: Mu.
We asked our fox tail the same question. It said nothing, which, in this case, is the correct answer.
The Gateless Gate · Case 38
牛
Wuzu said: It is like a water buffalo passing through a window. Its head, its horns and all four legs have gone through. Why can’t the tail go through too?
Zen teachers have sat with this for nine hundred years. Our answer, which is wrong, is that it’s twenty-eight inches.
A koan is not a riddle with an answer. It is something to sit with until the question changes you. If our answers are not good enough, that is the point.
III · The Middle WayNeither too short nor too long
Our plug, from the smallest to the largest
The Buddha found that neither indulgence nor extreme austerity led anywhere, and called what lies between them the Middle Way.
When the monk Soṇa was wearing himself out with practice, the Buddha asked him, who had once been a musician, about the strings of a lute. Too tight, and it doesn’t play in tune; too loose, and it doesn’t play at all. Tuned between, it sounds.
Our plug comes in small, medium and large, and the one we recommend is the middle one. The Middle Way, to the millimeter.
IV · The JātakasWhen the Buddha had a tail
The Jātakas, the stories of the Buddha’s former lives, give him a tail more often than not. He was a hare who, having nothing else to give a hungry traveler, threw himself into the fire; the traveler was the god Sakka in disguise, who drew the hare on the moon so everyone would remember. He was a monkey king who made a bridge of his own body so his troop could escape the archers. He was a deer king who offered his life in place of a pregnant doe.
In each he was kind, brave and generous. Each had a tail.
Sasa Jātaka
The hare in the moon
Look up at the full moon: in much of Asia the shape on it is a hare, not a face.
The bunny tail →Mahākapi Jātaka
The monkey bridge
A monkey king stretches across a river so that eighty thousand monkeys can cross on his back.
Nigrodhamiga Jātaka
The banyan deer
A deer king takes a pregnant doe’s place at the block, and the king who hunts them stops hunting.
V · SīlaThe third precept
Lay Buddhists keep five precepts. The third is to refrain from sexual misconduct, kāmesu micchācāra. The traditional commentaries define it by whom: people bound to someone else, people under another’s protection, people who have not freely agreed. They do not define it by accessories.
So the questions are the ones the precept asks: Is anyone harmed? Is anyone deceived? Did everyone say yes? A tail is none of those things.
Monks and nuns keep the Vinaya, which is much stricter, and on this subject not on your side. Sorry.
The first precept, not to harm living beings, many Mahāyāna Buddhists keep by not eating meat at all; the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra has a whole chapter against it (one that scholars think was added later). Our tails harm no one and are vegan.
VI · AniccaIt sheds
Everything conditioned is impermanent: anicca. Faux fur sheds a little, forever, and a tail you love will one day be a tail you loved. So will everything else.
Brush it gently. Wash it rarely. Let it go when it’s time. And then, if you like, get another.
The Buddha’s last words, in the Pali canon, are about exactly this: vayadhammā saṅkhārā, appamādena sampādetha. All conditioned things decay; strive on with care. Brushing counts.
VII · WordsA few words
- O / shippo 尾 / 尻尾
- Tail, in Japanese.
- Taṇhā
- Craving; literally, thirst.
- Upādāna
- Clinging; also fuel.
- Anicca
- Impermanence.
- Majjhimā paṭipadā
- The Middle Way. Size M.
- Sīla
- Ethical conduct: the precepts.
- Kōan 公案
- A case to sit with.
- Mu 無
- No; nothing; neither. What the fox tail said.
Wear it lightly. Take it out gently. Then tea.
Other traditions, each on its own page
JudaismCatholicismOrthodox ChristianityIslamProtestantismHinduismWritten with real sources and a straight face, by a shop, not a scholar. For a ruling that binds you, ask your rabbi, priest, imam, pandit, teacher or pastor. We did not ask ours.