Theravada, Thailand & Householder Paths: Enlightenment or Bust
After unpacking some of the distinctions between “Renunciate vs Householder Paths” in my previous post, I’d like to draw attention to what I call the “Enlightenment or Bust” phenomenon.
This view of the path, and of contemplative practice, often arises in contexts in which renunciate forms of yoga predominate. While living in Thailand over the past decade, I’ve noticed these attitudes first hand. In Thailand, around 95% of people identify as Buddhist, and the particular form of Buddhism that is dominant in Thailand is the first turning of The Dharma: Theravada Buddhism.
As I sketched out some of the historical context in my previous posts on Renunciate vs Householder Paths, this first iteration of Buddhism arose in a context in which renunciate forms of yoga were first starting to flourish in India. While The Buddha rejected extreme forms of asceticism in favor of a Middle Way, he very much endorsed the basic orientation of the renunciate yogic paradigm.
Consider The Hero’s Journey story of Shakyamuni Buddha: after he discovers the Holy Grail of sorts (the Dharma, the set of teachings that lead to liberation) he does “return to the world” in the sense that he is not a yogi living in isolation, but rather he is a teacher who is actively showing others a path to liberation, out of compassion to alleviate the suffering of all beings.
Yet this very model from the early suttas endorses a hierarchy that places at the top of it a lifestyle of renunciation. It also promotes a relatively high degree of asceticism, even by the standards of later historical periods in India, to say nothing of today, which really don’t resonate with the sensibilities of most modern people, especially those living in urban areas.
The Buddha’s very own example speaks to this: even as someone who is fully enlightened, he does not wish to return to his responsibilities as a ruler, a husband, a father, or any other facets of householder life. In his view, as reflective of the larger paradigm in which he was immersed in axial age India, the ideal way to pursue a spiritual life, indeed to live the good life, was to live as a wandering yogi, who renounced his material possessions, his sexuality, his capacity to participate in creative endeavors.
The result is that people receive an archetype that they wish to venerate, but not to emulate.
Yet the entire point of The Buddha’s example is to apply these teachings in order to taste the freedom, peace, and deeper causes of happiness that they promise. So it seems to me that for those who wish to see the Dharma remain relevant in Thailand, or to make Theravada more relevant in the West, there needs to be a delicate balancing act between respecting tradition alongside a reimagination of this tradition.
Such a reimagining has to explicitly engage with the question of how to adapt an orientation to spiritual life that was designed for one context (monastics) for another one (a householder life in the 21st century).
The message that we receive from renunciate forms of yoga, such as Theravada Buddhism, is that if you want to become serious about this project of human development called “awakening” you should embrace renunciation, not only as a skillful means to actualize a certain level of awakening, but as a lifestyle, until the end.
For those who want to follow this path, that’s wonderful. However, there’s a major problem with it: since people are not shown ways in which spiritual awakening is compatible with householder life—with being engaged in the world, people do not bother to embrace the challenge in the first place. While they may never reach Enlightenment, a different orientation, and a willingness to engage in contemplative practice, could lead to a significant improvement in the quality of their life. In the words of one US meditation enthusiast: it could make you “10% Happier,” which could feel very significant on a personal level.
On the one hand, Thais are immersed in Dhamma. 95% of Thais identify as Buddhist, and it is very apparent that being Buddhist is baked into the collective identity of what it means to be Thai. From a young age, Thai children learn the teachings of The Buddha in their households. In schools, Thai children take a course on Buddhism for many years to learn the foundational teachings of Dhamma. They also learn the basics of mindfulness (Pali: satii) meditation.
From an outside perspective, I must commend Thais for doing a remarkable job, collectively, of embodying the teachings of Dhamma: gentleness of speech and action, kindness, patience, non-reactivity. These qualities are on clear display in public spaces in Thailand, in ways, large and small. I feel I have learned so much about the Dhamma, in small everyday ways, simply by living in Thailand and learning from the example of Thai people who have been steeped in the teachings of the Dhamma from a very young age.
For those of us raised in the West, we tend to associate religion with orthodoxy (what you believe), whereas in the East religion tends to be much more about orthopraxy (what you practice). Like any form of yoga, Buddhadhamma is ultimately about your ability to apply and realize the teachings. Study of the scriptures is certainly important--potentially very important, depending on which school of Buddhism you’re immersed in, but there’s a clear distinction drawn between intellectual knowledge and direct experience, with the latter being the ultimate aim.
With this in mind, what is the practice of most Thais? While there seems to be a resurgence of interest in formal meditation, particularly among more educated and affluent Thais, for the vast majority of Thai lay practitioners, their practice does not revolve around a consistent meditation practice, but rather by making merit. Making merit includes offerings to monastics and monasteries. One reason for doing so is that it’s a valuable way for a lay practitioner to practice the ethical precept of generosity (Pali: dana). On a cultural level, it is also accurate to state that there is a widespread cultural belief that making such offerings allows individuals to accumulate “positive merit” that will benefit them in this life and future lifetimes.
Many Thais will articulate the belief that in a future lifetime, with sufficiently accumulated merit, they will take the form of a monk and can hopefully then reach for and ultimately attain enlightenment (sadly, in the traditional Theravada view, female practitioners will have to wait until assuming the form of a male body to achieve full enlightenment--yet another example of an outdated belief that needs to be updated for the modern era).
As I became increasingly immersed in my own study and practice of Dhamma, I encountered this attitude in a very personal way. As I told Thai friends or family about sitting yet another meditation retreat they would playfully tease me that I was going to become a monk. I laughed it off, part of me finding the thought of me becoming a monk very amusing and the other part of me wondering “but why would I need to become a monk to practice meditation, or pursue spiritual aims?”
Even though those people themselves might not have sat so many meditation retreats, I think they understood something about the Dhamma that I did not. As they had grown up in a culture steeped in Theravada Buddhism, they knew that traversing such a (renunciate) path does indeed turn one away from householder life, which is precisely what the system was designed to do.
In the West, Theravada Buddhist centers have adopted a kind of hybrid model that seems to, indeed, produce something in between. The first generation of Western Dhamma teachers are not monastics, but effectively lived quasi monastic lives, going in and out of long-term silent retreats. Such individuals usually do not have kids (which would understandably be very challenging with such a lifestyle) and quite often are not in romantic relationships either. (Some teachers even cast skeptical doubt on the value of romantic relationships.)
Though it took me quite a few years of practice to figure this last part out myself, I could at least see examples of Western lay practitioners who had adapted this in-between way of living, so I didn’t really get all of the jokes that if I kept it up I was going to become a monk.
On a personal level, I will say more about what caused a movement away from renunciate forms of yoga towards paths more compatible with householder life, a transition that I have described in some detail in my post on “Renunciate vs Householder Paths,” but for now I just want to offer what I’ve been able to observe of this logic of renunciate yoga in others.
One way to describe the pervasive attitude among many Thais towards spiritual awakening would be what I call the “Enlightenment or Bust” phenomenon. When I would playfully tease in response that perhaps the Thai family or friend would like to join me on a retreat, they would laugh and respond “oh no, maybe in the next life.” You will encounter this kind of “maybe in my next life” kind of phrase quite often in Thailand.
Obviously, these stories are anecdotal, and clearly, there’s some humor involved in these situations. However, from broad-based research of Thais from religious studies experts and from cultural anthropologists, it is also obvious that the vast majority of Thais relate to the practice of Dhamma through making merit, rather than by following a regular practice of meditation that leads them towards spiritual awakening.
I’d like to really underscore a very basic point here about Dhamma: it is a contemplative technology that is designed to facilitate “awakening.”
While awakening is a term that deserves a post in and of itself to unpack, we can simply conceive of awakening as a training of the heart-mind that is itself one stream of human development, a highly valuable and underappreciated stream of human development in Western societies. Eastern cultures have really developed the most sophisticated and advanced systems for these contemplative technologies.
Thailand is one of the countries that has served as a tremendous resource for training teachers of meditation who then brought these teachings to the West. What’s so incredibly ironic is how relatively limited the practice of meditation is, even within this wellspring of meditation, in the country of Thailand (by contrast, Burma, in which Theravada Buddhism predominates, has a relatively strong tradition of lay practitioners, which underscores the fact that there are always multiple variables explaining any phenomena).
Like any country that encounters modernity, interest in religion tends to decline with increasing economic development and rising interest in materialist values. In Thailand today, it’s quite common to hear older Thais bemoaning the decline of interest in Dhamma in Thailand, especially among younger Thais and especially among those in urban areas.
Coming from a developed country like the United States, I can see that there is great potential for the practice of meditation to flourish, even amidst the larger trends of economic development and secularization. However, I think what’s helpful is an important way to reframe the attitudes around meditation, the path, and the goal of practice.
First, it can help to recognize the nature of the problem of “enlightenment or bust” for what it is: regardless of the intention behind these statements, in effect, these attitudes serve as forms of procrastination that delay the ability to actually realize the true conditions for happiness that are to be found within ourselves: through the application of the teachings and the practice of meditation, not in chasing external sources of happiness that consumer capitalism wants us to believe.
I think it’s fair to say that renunciation is an important part of contemplative traditions, for good reasons, and at least for a period of time. It’s extremely important, often essential, to have the right conditions in order to closely understand the nature of one’s own mind and its habitual tendencies. Whatever time you can allocate towards being on a silent retreat, a week, a month, could be a life-changing decision, as many, including myself, can attest. However, while practicing on retreat is highly beneficial, if you can’t sit a retreat, a regular meditation practice at home can also be a life-changing choice, and it’s a real disservice to people’s wellbeing to fail to emphasize this point.
What’s the goal of your meditation practice? Is it Enlightenment or Bust? Or could you start with the simple goal of being 10% Happier?
I offer this perspective with humility from the outside perspective of someone who has learned so much from Thai culture. Living in Thailand has brought me the good fortune of connecting with the Dhamma. As someone who has now practiced in several different schools of meditation from Asia, I think that calling out the “enlightenment or bust” mentality and reimagining a householder path in a tradition that was designed for monastics is, in fact, an essential step for modernizing the Dhamma in Thailand so that more people are actually able to realize the extraordinary promise of The Buddha’s teachings.