Second reply to question about the worldly life

Wow, this one is even longer! Thanks for your time and effort Joe - wow! :-)

To read the question, click here.

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Hello Katy,
Thank you for asking an excellent question. This is one that arises commonly in Buddhism and I think the issue is rarely addressed in a meaningful manner so forgive me while I give you a very lengthy response to it. Years ago I was attending a talk in a Buddhist monastery where the monk speaking said “all attachment is wrong, you need to free yourself from it,…. you must cut your hair and wear robes to be free of attachment”. After the talk I walked up to him and asked, “what about your attachment to bald heads and robes, must you give up this attachment”? He then proclaimed that he was not attached to it, that it is the sign of not being attached. I find this interesting Buddhist double speak. The idea of renunciation has resulted in a ‘spiritual’ competition’ among monks over the years. They have torn and sewn their garments to look ‘more renunciated’ than others. In my mind there’s a Monty Python skit here on ‘I’m more renunciated than you”. “Are not, I’ve got much less nothing than you do”, etc. I can hear their voices doing it. The idea of renunciation itself has become a material object and lost the point of it all. I am not saying there are not serious monks out there and that there is no validity to the idea of renunciation but you have to understand the point of it. If this is just a practice or ritual it has no meaning. If we truly realize that the things we desire and attach to will not ever bring us real fulfillment then we need not renunciate them because we have already broken through that illusion.
The illusion that wealth, sex, power or whatever will fulfill us is what drives us. In the story of the historical Buddha, Siddhartha realized that the hedonistic life was not going to fulfill him. It wasn’t that he renunciated it, it was that he knew existentially that it could not fulfill him. The mere act of renunciation without a profound realization of what is actually going on is pointless but to reach the point that you know beyond the shadow of any doubt that these things cannot fulfill you is priceless. In the midst of these things they can hold no attraction or sway over you, they have become actually meaningless. To just renunciate them causes an object in your mind that you stand ever opposed to and thus remains irresolvable. Look at the Catholic priests whom renunciate sex, are they free from the attachment to it? They must ever fight mentally to keep this renunciation and fight the self- created demons that arise from it. It is the renunciation of nature; how is it that nature is wrong here? Someone who has lived through it, has broken their attachment to it, and the illusion of it; is truly free and it holds no allure for them anymore. You don’t have to live through it to do this. When you realize about any one thing that it won’t fulfill you that will influence your view of all other attachments. When you inquire as to who it is that seeks fulfillment you will find these attachments dissolving. So what is most important is to realize where the root of your desire and attachments comes from and then you can move to resolve it.
I always go back to the early stories of Zen here. When Hui Ka went to Bodhidharma he was not told to renunciate anything, he was not told to meditate, he was not told to chant, leave his home or do prostrations but what he was told to do was to ‘show me your heart mind that I may pacify it” or present to me who it is that suffers. How can this be so ignored in today’s Buddhism? All of those other things come from the practice of Buddhism, the religion of Buddhism, that is carried on by others. They might all help but if you don’t do it with the right understanding, with the right drive and motivation, then it’s all practice without meaning. When Siddhartha gave it all up and sat under the tree he had been through renunciation and hedonism and neither worked. He knew he would starve himself to death if he kept up the asceticism. I believe William James once said, “ drink too much and see pink elephants, eat too little and see God”. In either case Siddhartha came to the point where he had to face himself in the moment and he sat under the Bodhi tree till this happened fully.
I know this is not “Zen” per say but I want to show you some writings from two prominent Indian philosophers on renunciation. Remember, awakening is awakening, Zen is just a word used to describe one method and has no real meaning in itself so because it’s not a Buddhist teacher does not mean that they are not talking about the exact same thing, they are:

From “Be as You Are” Ramana Maharishi

Q: The yogis say that one must renounce this world and go off into secluded jungles if one wishes to find the truth.
A: The life of action need not be renounced. If you meditate for an hour or two every day you can then carry on with your duties. If you meditate in the right manner then the current of mind induced will continue to flow even in the midst of your work. It is as though there were two ways of expressing the same idea; the same line which you take in meditation will be expressed in your activities.
Q: What will be the result of doing that?
A: As you go on you will find that your attitude towards people, events and objects gradually changes. Your actions will tend to follow your meditations of their own accord.
Q: Then you do not agree with the yogis?
A: A man should surrender the personal selfishness which binds him to this world. Giving up the false self is the true renunciation.
Q: How is it possible to become selfless while leading a life of worldly activity?
A: There is no conflict between work and wisdom.
Q: Do you mean that one can continue all the old activities in one's profession, for instance, and at the same time get enlightenment ?
A: Why not ? But in that case one will not think that it is the old personality which is doing the work, because one's consciousness will gradually become transferred until it is centered in that which is beyond the little self.
Q: If a person is engaged in work, there will be little time left for him to meditate.
A: Setting apart time for meditation is only for the merest spiritual novices. A man who is advancing will begin to enjoy the deeper beatitude whether he is at work or not. While his hands are in society, he keeps his head cool in solitude.
Q: Then you do not teach the way of yoga?

A: The yogi tries to drive his mind to the goal, as a cowherd drives a bull with a stick, but on this path the seeker coaxes the bull by holding out a handful of grass.
Q: How is that done?
A: You have to ask yourself the question `Who am I ?' This investigation will lead in the end to the discovery of something within you which is behind the mind. Solve that great problem and you will solve all other problems.

From David Godman in “Be as You Are”:

“This time-honoured structure sustained the common Indian belief that it was necessary to abandon one's family and take to a meditative life of celibate asceticism if one was seriously interested in realising the Self. Sri Ramana was asked about this belief many times but he always refused to endorse it. He consistently refused to give his devotees permission to give up their worldly responsibilities in favor of a meditative life and he always insisted that realization was equally accessible to everyone, irrespective of their physical circumstances. Instead of advising physical renunciation he told all his devotees that it would be spiritually more productive for them to discharge their normal duties and obligations with an awareness that there was no individual `I' performing or accepting responsibility for the acts which the body performed. He firmly believed that mental attitude had a greater bearing on spiritual progress than physical circumstances and he persistently discouraged all questioners who felt that a manipulation of their environment, however slight, would be spiritually beneficial. “

From Sri Nisargadatta “I am That”:

Q: Do you call it vairagya, relinquishment, renunciation?
M: There is nothing to renounce. Enough if you stop acquiring. To give you must have, and to have you must take. Better don't take. It is simpler than to practice renunciation, which leads to a dangerous form of 'spiritual' pride.

All this weighing, selecting, choosing, exchanging -- it is all shopping in some 'spiritual' market. What is your business there? What deal are you out to strike? When you are not out for business, what is the use of this endless anxiety of choice? Restlessness takes you nowhere. Something prevents you from seeing that there is nothing you need. Find it out and see its falseness. It is like having swallowed some poison and suffering from unquenchable craving for water. Instead of drinking beyond all measure, why not eliminate the poison and be free of this burning thirst?

And:

M: Mere physical renunciation is only a token of earnestness, but earnestness alone does not liberate. There must be understanding which comes with alert perceptivity, eager enquiry and deep investigation. You must work relentlessly for your salvation from sin and sorrow.
Q: What is sin?
M: All that binds you.



The desire to renunciate itself is an attachment and must be renunciated, right? So it creates its own set of problems. When my teacher, Masao Abe, left him home and went to the monastery the first thing he saw written above the gate was “To seek awakening itself is hell creating karma”. In other words that you seek to do this you create the problem.
I do think I have to address how this emphasis on renunciation comes up in Eastern thought because it is valid and important. When you think yourself to be the body and your thoughts you think those things that arise that please the body and mind will appease you. So mistaking ourselves to be that object of our thoughts, the thing we call ‘I’, we then pursue the objects of our desires. Ultimately these things will never fulfill us and many eventually destroy us. No matter how much we pursue the objects of our consciousness they cannot add to our fulfillment and only distract from it. The more we get, the more we want. We constantly delude ourselves that eventually the right amount of money, sex, power, relationships or whatever will fulfill us. We do not see our true self which can neither be added to or taken away from. That which is the root of our being is not affected by these pursuits. Sages of the past, having come to this as an existential conclusion then told their students that it is not till they realize how empty these pursuits are that they will be able to move forward. It became a practice rather than an existential fact. The students believed that these things don’t fulfill you and were misleading but they did not know it was the truth, they only believed it. It is the false identification of these desires as fulfilling that is the problem and not the desires themselves. There is no reason not to enjoy food, music, sex, relationships and other worldly pleasures so long as you truly realize that they and the collecting of them cannot truly fulfill you. I don’t mean understand that they can’t fulfill you, I mean profoundly and existentially know it. When this inquiry full bores into you then when engaged in those activities it will drive you to see who it is that is engaged in those activities. Nature lives fully engaging in these activities; there is nothing fundamentally wrong with them.


There is an old curse that goes, “ I hope you get everything you want”. Now, why is that such a curse? Because you realize you are still not fulfilled and cannot be fulfilled, it causes despair. It is not ‘you’ that becomes fulfilled but the overcoming of you, the profound and existential renunciation of the self that leads to true fulfillment. You as you now know yourself to be is what stands in the way of awakening.



The idea of a so-called spiritual life and a worldly life is just a construct of the mind. There are not two such separate lives that exist in distinction from one another just as there is not a separate self and true-self, this is all an illusion created by the ego. The root is always there, before birth and after death, you cannot be apart from it. In the religious world this is a dualism maintained by those who want ‘spiritual’ standing and rank. Where is there this delineation in nature? Can two such opposing worlds exist in the idea of Buddhist non-dualism? Don’t worry about such things. Let those who are attached to their non-attachment, robes and bowls, tend to such things if it makes them happy. Only you can inquire into your own self nature.

Let me make another point about the idea of renunciation. Are the poor in Dafur and throughout the rest of the world better off because they have nothing? Are they more spiritually aware and fulfilled since they have no clothes, food or shelter? They are not worldly at all and yet this is a desired state preached by many and to what ends. They have nothing to renunciate so what would one of these Buddhists tell them to renunciate? The one thing they have, that we all have, is the attachment to the idea of our self, the ego. Because they have nothing material does not mean that this relationship has changed at all, though it may. It is your relationship and identity with these things that matters and not the practice itself.

I cannot tell you to renunciate anything but what I can ask you to do is to seek who you are. If you pursue this you won’t need to renunciate anything because you will realize how fruitless those pursuits are, they will lose their meaning to you. When you love, ask who it is that loves and when you suffer ask who it is that suffers. Who is the other person that you love and ultimately who is it that was born and will die? It is not till you get to the root of your own self nature that you will answer these questions. There is no reason you cannot do this in every day life. In the ox-herding pictures of Zen the last picture is ‘Returning to the Market Place”, in other words, being in the world.
I know this was wordy but I hope it helps you.
Take care,
Joe