Renunciate vs Householder Paths
What are the practical implications of translating ancient contemplative code that was designed for monastics into a contemporary context for householders? This is a central question for any project of Redesigning the Dharma.
Meditation as Contemplative Technology
Meditation is more than simply a technique. Meditation is a contemplative technology embedded in a larger set of teachings, which themselves are organized into a larger and coherent path. A path will orient you in a particular direction, so it’s very important to understand the assumptions and values that underlie this path. Consider the truth claim that is foundational to all schools of Buddhism: the Four Noble Truths. The Buddha is often compared to a physician offering a diagnosis for what ails you; his assertion is that craving (Pali: tanha) is the origin of suffering. The early suttas offer a prescription for how to bring an end to this suffering, and, implicitly, they present an alternative vision for what it means to live a good life.
Different Approaches in Buddhism
Yet how a practitioner is supposed to undertake this project varies significantly among various schools of Buddhism. Theravada emphasizes renunciation, while Mahayana and Vajrayana offer approaches that more suitably align with the lifestyle of lay practitioners, offering methods of transformation and transmutation, respectively. Practically speaking, this will orient you to desire in significantly different ways, especially the difference between the early renunciate form of The Dharma and the later two turnings.
Historical and Cultural Context
When people initially begin a yogic, or Dharmic, path, they often don’t understand the historical and cultural context that shaped these particular paths, teachings, and associated worldviews. Around 600-700 BCE in ancient India, there was the Sramana movement. This was a group of wandering ascetics who explicitly rejected householder life as well as the Vedic worldview in order to seek liberation through very demanding yogic practices. While The Buddha rejected such extreme ascetic practices in favor of “the middle way,” by even the standards of later yoga, not to mention today, the flavor, tone, and prescribed practices and rules of early Buddhism seem awfully ascetic by contemporary standards.
Samsara and Nirvana
It was during this time of the Sramana movement that a paradigm emerged that would underpin all schools of yoga, including Buddhism, all the way up through the Tantras in medieval times: bondage to liberation. Not surprisingly, like ascetics in every religious tradition, these spiritual practitioners sought transcendence, and viewed the limitations of this mortal physical body, as well as its inherent drives and desires including sexuality, as obstacles to the goal of spiritual fulfillment. They posited desire as a central problem for the spiritual practitioner to solve or transcend. Worldly desire keeps human beings in perpetual pursuit (of fame, power, money, sensual pleasure) that ultimately leaves people chronically dissatisfied. This endless wandering is called samsara. Samsara can be thought of metaphorically as cycling through states of mind, chasing one desire after the next within this lifetime (the contemporary positive psychology teaching around the hedonic treadmill points to this idea).
However, it’s fair to say that in ancient India, most people intended this notion of samsara as a more literal, metaphysical claim regarding what drives our rebirth from one lifetime to the next. The goal of yoga was to achieve liberation from this bondage, “to get off the wheel of samsara.” This paradigm of bondage to liberation would underpin all yogic paths from the early Upanishads through the Tantras. Prior to the emergence of Tantra, however, these yogic paths emphasized renunciation. Two prominent examples of which we can still see are the writings of the early Buddhist suttas as well as the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. In other words, in clearly seeing the nature of samsara--that chasing desire would simply keep us from being reborn from one life to the next--the answer was to turn away from the world.
Contemporary Implications
Notably, if you don’t buy the notion of rebirth and you think that samsara is an accurate description for the state of affairs in this life, you could also adopt this stance of turning away from the world--though the appeal of doing so is significantly less compelling without the metaphysics of rebirth. While this can feel very theoretical, this has very practical implications: if you understand the historical and cultural context that shaped the yoga or meditation that you practice, you might begin to question much of the language and many of the assumptions and standard assertions that your teacher and peers keep echoing from the tradition.
One practical way that such an orientation continues to color contemporary orientations to practice, even in a non-traditional, non-Asian context, is for example the language that comes through in Insight Meditation centers. The Theravada worldview heavily emphasizes the impermanent and unsatisfactory nature of this realm. In so doing, it is privileging a very particular way of Being that it wants you to cultivate: equanimity, in pursuit of the archetypal masculine ideal, which it privileges above all other values—freedom from.
Redesigning the Dharma
From my perspective, wrestling with these kinds of questions lies at the heart of Redesigning the Dharma: how to unbundle teachings and practices designed for a renunciate context and translate these teachings for a householder's life in the 21st century. There are very few “householder” contemplative paths. From inception, some were designed specifically as paths for householders, such as Nondual Shaiva-Shakta Tantra and Sufism. There are other traditions in which prominent masters were householders, who usually had a symbiotic relationship with monastics, such as the Mahamudra and Dzogchen lineages of Vajrayana (Tibetan, Tantric Buddhism).
Personal Experience
Early in my own spiritual seeking, I was very fortunate to encounter this distinction between renunciate and householder paths. I learned about these distinctions in-depth in a more scholarly way, from Dr. Douglas Brooks, as well as within a practice context of a Kashmiri Shaiviate sadhana, with Dr. Paul Muller Ortega. Nonetheless, I continued to practice in a renunciate tradition, Theravada Buddhism in my case, even while also practicing in the explicitly householder path of “Kashmir Shaivism” with Paul, as well as another meditation teacher of Nondual Shaiva Tantra, Sally Kempton.
Undoubtedly, I continued to practice in Theravada Buddhism for very good reasons: on some level, I was gaining a great deal of benefit from the practice (otherwise, I would not have persisted in practicing). The fact that I had lived in a Theravada Buddhist country for many years, Thailand, also underlies an emotional connection to that tradition.
In short, the practices that I learned from Theravada Buddhism led to a greater sense of freedom and ease, more contentment, love and compassion, as well as significantly reduced levels of emotional reactivity and anxiety. To this day I have much love, affection and respect for the early teachings of Buddhism. Yet ultimately, practicing within a renunciate tradition also led to internal feelings of conflict and confusion, ones which I felt could not be reconciled with the way that I wanted to live my life. There were a few related issues on this point, but I think one boiled down to the way that such a renunciate path will tell you to orient to desire.
Personally, I found that I needed a path that offered a very different, and much more affirmative, relationship to desire--one that sought not merely to extinguish the flame of desire but rather to turn towards it, harness its power and integrate its shadows, however imperfectly. I needed a spiritual path that spoke to and included all dimensions of life, including sexuality and worldly aims, one that emphasized the body’s beauty and sacrality as well as its limitations and mortality.
Questions for Householders
I’m writing posts on this topic and having conversations with future podcast guests not to denigrate anyone else’s path, but rather to disentangle the confusion in which I found myself, and in the hope that these efforts might help others to orient themselves in a direction that feels more in alignment with their own needs and desires.
If you envision your own path as one of a householder, some very healthy questions to wrestle with are:
What is my relationship to desire?
What does this spiritual path have to say about desire?
In what ways will this path orient me in relation to my spiritual and worldly goals?
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