Someone asked me recently to talk about renunciation, and the first thing to understand about renunciation is that, according to Buddha, what you’re renouncing is suffering and its causes – it doesn’t mention outside things at all. It might imply that you’d not bother with outside things, but the real meaning of renunciation is giving up suffering and its causes.
You could be a multimillionaire and have renunciation; you could be the poorest person in the world and have no renunciation. That’s the first point, and it’s really crucial to understand that.
If you know that you don’t want future suffering, the very first level of practice in Buddhism is all about the law of karma, nothing about the mind yet. You know you don’t want future suffering. The first kind of suffering, nothing special: we all know we don’t want to get killed, be harmed, lied to, stolen from, be lonely, have people be mean to us. If we take the view of reincarnation, we know we don’t want that future suffering.
The very first level of renunciation is to give up the causes of this future suffering, which is what? Harming others. So: control your body, control your speech, don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t kill, don’t badmouth: in other words, live a life of good ethics. That’s the first level of renunciation – we’ve got to start with that.
Then you go deeper and get into your mind and you see why you do harm with your body and speech, the servants of your mind: why you lie, steal, kill, jump on different boys – or, let’s say, buy too many kettles: it’s because of attachment. First you control the body and the speech, then you can begin to control the attachment.
In the Four Noble Truths Buddha effectively tells us that attachment is the main cause of suffering, so we’d better understand it!
At a basic level it’s emotional hunger that always wants something more, that’s never satisfied. It can manifest in many ways: you might be attached to alcohol, you might be attached to money, you might be attached to boyfriends, you might be attached to your own body. You might have a lot of things or you might not have a lot of things.
It depends on what we’re attached to. The problem isn’t so much the thing as it is the attachment itself. And to understand it we have to learn to understand the mind.
Let’s say your attachment manifests as wanting forty-seven kettles in the kitchen and hundreds of things around the house, then when you start to think about attachment, how it’s never satisfied, you would end up deducing, well, you know, it’s ridiculous: I will not get satisfaction if I buy one more kettle, so then you might stop buying more kettles. So, giving up things could be a consequence of giving up attachment.
But for some people who don’t have many things it might be different. I’ve never in my life had many physical objects, ever – I’ve never had a house, I’ve never had possessions – but, believe me, honey, I’ve got as much attachment as anybody else. It’s attachment to different things, you know?
Attachment is an internal state of mind that’s never satisfied with who we are and what we’ve got. That’s what attachment is. The biggest suffering in our culture, Lama Zopa says – the main suffering in the Western world, the modern world – is this terrible, terrible, terrible, primordially deep consequence of attachment from past lives, which is terrible dissatisfaction.
We are never satisfied – and the one we’re not satisfied with is ourself. That’s what we call “self-hate” in our culture: never thinking I’m good enough, never thinking I am enough, never thinking I have enough; no matter how many times my boyfriend tells me he loves me, I’m never satisfied. That’s the real suffering of attachment and that’s the consequence of practicing attachment in past lives.
Learning to see this, and then learning to give up that constant emotional hunger is really what beginning to get renunciation is – which means learning to be satisfied with who we are. That’s really the basis of renunciation. The consequence is that you’ll start to become more content now.
This is the Buddhist analysis of renunciation – it’s got little to do with giving up things; it’s much deeper than that. You with me?
The reason behind all of this practice is so that you can become more happy – that’s the consequence of it. If you end up becoming more miserable, then you’ve really got the wrong end of the stick.
And many people misunderstand renunciation as, you know, having a few things and not wanting sugar in your tea and being kind of, “Oh, I don’t care”: that’s depressing. That’s not giving up attachment. Giving up attachment brings you to become more disciplined, more joyful, more content, more fulfilled, and therefore, eventually, more kind and more considerate to others.
This is the consequence of giving up attachment, giving up suffering and its causes: you become more happy. Then when you die, you’ve sown all the right seeds in your mind, and you’re going to get another decent, happy life, and you’ll keep on moving on your spiritual path. How does that sound?