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Renunciation - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 01, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Renunciation

I am going to talk about a topic that has a reputation for being unpopular in the Buddhist West. I hope by the time we finish, it becomes popular.

I’ll begin with an analogy to get to the topic. Imagine something is going on in your life and you are really tense. You are beside yourself with tension, preoccupation, and concern. You start feeling like you aren't being efficient or getting anything done; you are just going in circles. You try to cook, but you keep dropping everything. You spend more time cleaning up than cooking. It’s not working.

Finally, it dawns on you: "Maybe I should meditate."

You sit down. You aren't really ambitious in meditating; you just sit down to be present for all this tension and agitation. Maybe you close your eyes, or sit upright. As you sit there, something begins settling. Some of the tension might even feel like it is draining away. Things get a little bit quieter. You feel your shoulders release, maybe your belly releases, and you think, "Oh, this is kind of nice."

So you stay. Something begins coming back to what we might call a homeostasis. If you do it long enough, maybe you get really relaxed. You might be slouching a little bit because it feels good to finally just be relaxed. But if you keep staying with it, something inside of you—not exactly your desires, but something almost physical—feels like an upwelling of wanting to be upright. There is a movement to come into a kind of homeostasis where we are not tense, we are not overly relaxed, but we are here in a nice, balanced, full way.

A number of things had to shift for that to happen. Things had to be quieted down and relaxed. Certain preoccupations faded away. There are still issues in life to be dealt with, but we aren't obsessing about them and making ourselves tense. It was just a very nice process.

If you decide at the beginning of that process—when you are still running around—"I really need to settle down and let go of some of this stuff. I need to quiet down. I need to release a lot of these things I'm caught by," it could work just as well.

In traditional Buddhist language, what you were doing was renunciation.

That is the unpopular topic. If we think of renunciation as giving up your house, your home, your spouse, and everything in order to go off and be a monastic living a life of radical simplicity—well, that is why it is unpopular. "Why do I have to let go of all these things?"

When the Buddha talked about the word he used for renunciation, it didn't have the same obvious negative connotations that the word "renunciation" has in English. In English, renunciation is so closely associated with leaving something behind, getting rid of something, relinquishing something, or giving it up. The Buddhist word translated as renunciation might have that association, but it also has a positive association.

The Pali word is nekkhamma¹. It literally means "to go forth," "to go out into the open," to leave a confined space and walk in the open air. What is emphasized is what is gained in the process of renunciation rather than what is lost. It is not meant to be an act of deprivation; it is meant to be something positive that brings you something really good.

In the example I gave earlier, if you were running around tense and someone said, "I think you should just renounce," you would probably get angry with them. But if you understood that it meant allowing you to "go forth"—to go out back into the world after a period of meditation, refreshed with the open air of a clear heart and mind—your friend's advice might be seen as really good.

"Oh, I just have to settle down and relax and be present." There is actually a natural process inside. I don't engineer this kind of settling down; I just have to be still for a while. Just being still quiets the momentum, the fueling of tension that obsessive thinking creates. There is a quieting, an emptying out of obsessive, tense mind states which don't serve us. They limit us; they hinder us. They are the ones depriving us of a natural, healthy way of being.

The process of settling and quieting is a process of letting certain things go so that we can come into this healthy homeostasis. We are actually enhanced by it, not deprived by it.

Part of the reason why the Pali word nekkhamma is translated as renunciation is that it is the word used for someone who becomes a Buddhist monastic. They "go forth." The idea is they go forth from the "dusty confines" of home life—which maybe meant a small hovel with thirteen kids and all the struggles—and somehow, as a young person, you decide, "Enough of this. I want to go out now and find a whole other way of living that clears the heart, that clears the mind, that frees it all."

In Christianity, the word for becoming a monastic is to renounce. We have taken that Westernized word and applied it to a Buddhist monastic calling. But when renunciation is discussed as a practice, the focus is not on letting go of things, people, or activities in and of themselves. The focus is always on a renouncing, or a going forth, from unhealthy states of mind.

There is a lot of discussion about renouncing "sensual pleasures" in the English translation of Buddhist teachings. But it turns out that you can't really renounce sensual pleasures. You would have to go live someplace that is always unpleasant, like hell. Sensual pleasures are part and parcel of life. The sun is shining, and it is nice. I had a lot of pleasure walking down here today; just the fresh air was so nice to breathe.

The word that is translated as sensual pleasures is a Pali/Sanskrit word, kāma². It has a dual meaning. It means sensual pleasures, and it means sensual desires. Desire is a product of the mind. So what is being let go of is sensual craving, sensual compulsions. Those can be let go of.

There might be one or two of you here that maybe, once, accidentally in your life, were somehow caught and trapped by some kind of sensual compulsion. I don't want to assume anything, but it does happen to some people. Sometimes they regret what they do afterwards. Sometimes they make a mess of their family because of that particular drive for sensual pleasures.

What the Buddha was talking about is not letting go of sensual pleasures. To make that clear, in one of the texts, the Buddha is described as experiencing more sensual pleasures than anyone else in the world—just with the food he eats, or walking down the street. There are no hindrances, no obstacles for him really taking in and experiencing sensual pleasures to a great degree. So it is not sensual pleasures, but sensual compulsions that are renounced.

Why is that going to make your life less interesting? It certainly will make it less suitable for a soap opera. Most of the novels we read involve someone doing something kind of unethical; that is what makes it interesting. If we want our life to be a novel, maybe sensual compulsions are how you make it exciting. But maybe those novels in real life don't end very well.

The idea to renounce compulsive desires is not meant to deprive us, but to give us something better. The act of renunciation is always a movement to something better. What is that? A certain kind of freedom. Allowing something from within us to come forth with a healthy, wonderful, inspiring movement.

Just as with sitting down to meditate when you were so tense, afterwards it is inspiring to go forth and continue your way. You find yourself surprised. Maybe you have been away from your phone for thirty or sixty minutes—that is like a record. Normally, you would just grab it to look at what has happened in the world, in email, texts, or social media. But you are so settled, you have come into a balanced state of mind. You are so content sitting there that the compulsion to look is not there. You know that if you go for the phone, you are going to lose something that you have gained. It is going to diminish you in some way.

So for that moment, you renounce your phone, or the desire to check it. Then you go make your lunch. You sit down to eat, and you are so content. The colors are so good. You are happy. The phone is there, but you know that normally you might think, "I'm alone eating, it's a waste of time. I could be doing two things at once. I might as well check my emails." But it is so nice to sit and just eat and feel the food. No wonder the Buddha had so much sensual pleasure when he ate—he didn't have a phone! [Laughter]

Having meditated and felt so good, sitting down and eating without looking at a phone, something settles even more. It feels even nicer.

Then you get a phone call from your neighbor saying, "Something tragic has happened. I feel really sad and I could really use some company." You go over there, and you are so glad you did all those things beforehand because now you are completely present, open, and available. You are not having to be torn away from your phone. You are not caught up in the anxiety of what you have to do. You are not thinking, "I wonder how quickly I can help this person so I can get back to my phone." You are so happy that you entered this nice, quiet homeostasis because, wow, you were there for that person in a good way.

Renouncing—letting go—is not meant to be deprivation. It is meant to actually enhance us. If a Buddhist teacher tells you to renounce, they should probably change their English. They should say, "Go forth. Come out of that shell. Come out of that prison you have created for yourself. Come out of how you are caught in preoccupations. Come forth. Join me here in this freedom."

The Pali word translated as renunciation implies both movements. It implies a letting go, leaving something behind, but it also implies the beautiful feeling of going forth into freedom. Both meanings are there. It is similar to walking through a door from one room to another. Simultaneously, you are leaving one room behind and going into the next. This idea happens together: a letting go of a previous way of being trapped in your mind, into an experience of freedom.

This dual meaning is explicit in other words for "letting go" in the Buddhist language. There is a word sometimes translated as "relinquishment." I don't know how often we use that word in English—usually, it is not a good thing, like relinquishing control. But it is used to describe a really high level of spiritual maturation. In deep meditation, some of the deepest attachments are relinquished.

However, the word used for relinquishment—actually several words—have dual meanings. Sometimes what they mean is giving, or generosity.

On one hand, there is relinquishment; on the other, it means generosity. Which do we choose? Maybe it is the same thing, like going through the door. We have a positive association with the word "giving."

These words are used to translate a Pali phrase describing a lay person who lives at home with a mind "free of stinginess," who "delights in giving," and "freely gives, open-handedly."³ The word "delight" is used repeatedly. Sometimes they translate one word as giving and the other as giving away. In other situations, they are translated as relinquishment.

We do that a little bit in English. We have the expression "to give up." "Give up" kind of means to surrender, to collapse. But I think originally it meant to offer up on the altar. To give something up is a sacred act in the religious sense. Or we say "give away." Giving away can be a beautiful thing—to give away something in a generous, open-handed way.

This act of giving contains within it these two sides of going through the door. If you give something with your own hands, you have to relinquish it, let it go, by giving it to someone else. But what happens then? Now your hands are free for the next task. You are now free to do something else, and you are so glad to not be carrying this thing around anymore that was limiting you. Giving has both these qualities: it is a letting go, and in that letting go, there is a movement of freedom in the hands, and maybe in the heart as well.

So back to this word renunciation. It has this positive association of what we gain in the process. Back to the analogy at the beginning: one of the things we gain is homeostasis, a healthy inner life. We come into balance.

Part of the purpose of surrendering, or renouncing, or relinquishing, is to enhance something about ourselves. Not to become less than what we are, but to come back into who we really are in a healthy, basic way—free of compulsions, free of addictions, free of hostilities. To feel how good that feels from the inside out.

What is waiting in each of us is a healthy heart and a healthy mind. One of the strategies for coming back into that is to let go of all the forces in the mind which are unhealthy, which keep us tense and reactive.

For those people who meditate, meditation is one way where you don't have to do the renouncing; it does it for you. If you sit quietly and peacefully, with time, everything that is being held onto will release. It will settle. But there is nothing wrong with you helping out. From time to time, you might want to consider letting go—certainly letting go enough so you can meditate.

I know some people have a hard time getting to their meditation because there is that phone, or all the things they feel they have to do. The momentum of always checking the device or the momentum of certain attachments makes it really hard to slow down and stop. When it is really hard to stop, that is when maybe renunciation becomes an act of courage.

"Okay, I really have to do this. Let me at least let go physically of what I am doing. I don't know if I can do it with my mind, but at least physically I will sit down. It will be a little bit like being in the rodeo—I know the wild bronco is there, but I am going to sit there and see what happens."

Chances are, something will settle and quiet.

Does that make renunciation a little more popular? A little bit more welcome?

I thought it was kind of funny to give this talk today because, right after Thanksgiving, the neighbors started putting up Christmas lights. I thought, "Oh good, I'll give a talk preparing us for Christmas: Renunciation." [Laughter]

Q&A

Question: What is the difference between renunciation and surrender? Or is there no difference?

Gil: It is not exactly in your question, but I love the word sacrifice because it has the word sacred in it. It literally means in Latin "to make sacred." Although "sacrifice" is often used to mean a diminishment—like you have to give something up and get nothing in return—there is something about the act of letting go that can make something sacred for ourselves.

In terms of renouncing, the Buddha said: If renouncing something makes unhealthy states stronger and healthy states decrease, you should not do it. When renouncing makes healthy states stronger and unhealthy states go away, that is the kind of renouncing you should do.

Your question is a good one. I don't know how to answer it directly because it is a bit of a linguistic, semantic question. But the teaching of the Buddha applies to both. If surrendering makes things healthier for you and the unhealthy inner life goes down, do it. If it is the opposite, don't do it. Maybe you don't have to compare the two; each thing can be its own thing in your vocabulary. It is something you have to feel within yourself.

Audience Comment: So, it's more like a testimonial. I came here a few weeks ago. I was very disturbed. I spoke to you and said that I'm tired of being my own cheerleader. You said you would be my cheerleader. That meant a lot. I said I wanted to give up... and you said, "Don't give up." So thank you for doing all this for all of us.

Gil: Thank you very much.

Audience Comment: This brings up a memory of mine that I haven't thought about for a long time. Before my husband and I got married, we took a trip to Nepal as an experiment to see if we could get along well enough in those camping circumstances. We were in the Khumbu area going up towards Everest. My husband is just fascinating; he loves anything to do with Nepal and the Everest area. He studies it and absorbs everything.

There was a book he had with a picture of this one monastery that he wanted to replicate. We were hiking by, and he took this picture. This was in 1986, so we didn't have phone cameras. I asked to borrow his camera. I took some pictures, put the camera down, and we started hiking again. A little ways away, I realized, "Oh my God, I forgot the camera." We dashed back, and it was gone.

It had the picture that my husband really wanted. And he said, "It's okay." That was such a pivotal moment in our relationship—that he relinquished, gave up that picture. In that, he stepped into an expression of love for me and forgiveness.

Also on that trip, I had always liked to put my boots outside the tent. In the middle of the night, I dreamt that somebody needed those boots, and I said, "Yeah, go ahead and take them." The next morning, my boots were gone. I didn't have another pair of shoes, but my husband did. His feet are much bigger than mine, but we made it work with extra socks. I hiked the rest of the trip in sneakers that were too big for me.

I haven't thought about those experiences for a while. The camera one we talk about a lot—every time we meet somebody, we say, "This is a really important moment in our relationship." It puts it perfectly in the context of what you are talking about.

Gil: Very nice. So he let go of the camera, and what came forth from that was 40 years of a good marriage?

Audience Comment: Well, we try to remember that time, and then it helps us in the other times.

Gil: Wonderful. Thank you all. It is very nice to have you and have this time together.