End in Sight:
Thom W:
The renunciate models are outdated. Although most of us need times of renunciation and asceticism (such as retreat time) to really nail some profound insight, the real meat of enlightenment is in how we bring that back to the world.
in your opinion, and why / how?
(It seems to me that your exact argument could have been made at any time in the entire 2.5 millennia during which Buddhism has existed; so I wonder, what's so special about the modern day, apart from the fact that it's modern and seems to sometimes come with the trans-context cultural presumption that what applied in the past no longer applies?)
This is a great question, End. As a matter of historical fact, the Central Asian forms of Buddhism often collated under the umbrella term 'Vajrayana' involve non-renunciate approaches to practice and life which date back well over a thousand years. The initial spreading of Buddhism into Tibet was largely represented by lay masters, and between the 9th and 11th centuries (before the second spreading, when the monastic theocracies came to power) the lineages of tantric and dzogchen practice were mainly transmitted through families of practitioners who lived normal lives while the sutra-based renunciate practices were transmitted through monastic lineages and the two were not particularly blended. During this period and on into modern times in the lineages rooted in this first spreading there were many important female teachers in the line of transmission, while the sects which emerged in the later spreading C. 11th century involve a monastic-tantric synthesis that effectively brought the Vajrayana to one degree or another within the umbrella of renunciate view, practice and lifestyle (including as that approach does, historically speaking if not natively, a rather strict androcentrism and patriarchal bias-- i.e., the ladies are objects to be renounced).
In these earlier Vajrayana lineages, this possibility of different orientations to cultivation is often expressed in the context of three basic approaches: renunciation, transformation, and self-liberation. These three terms refer to different principals of what to do with klesha (anger, pride, lust, ignorance, jealousy). Each principal is implemented with:
1) various (sometimes overlapping) methods of cultivation, and
2) various approaches to everyday life (roles and rules, in other words)
Each principle implicates a View about the nature of human experience and the Nature of Nature and the nature of the relationship between the two. These Views have in each case a conceptual side and an experiential side, the latter of which is the base for employing the methods and lifestyles of each approach.
Moving up the hierarchy from renunciation to self-liberation, the roles and rules are simplified and broadened until in the upper reaches there are no such prescriptions--- farmers, prostitutes, beggars, nobles, and so on are prominent lineage holders in these approaches, as well as monks and nuns and scholars. Moving down the hierarchy, the roles become more limited (monk and nuns, chiefly) and the rules governing conduct proliferate.
From this point of view, renunciate practice aimed at eliminating klesha and renunciate lifestyle aimed at restricting one's role and governing behavior with rules is as useful as it is to the individual who implements this principle at the precise time the implementation is attempted. It's 'outdated' for an individual who can understand and implement one of the 'higher' approaches. There is an understanding that these approaches are all worth experiencing first hand, as conditions within and around the practitioner are constantly changing, and the principle, method and lifestyle that is optimal for the individual in any given moment/day/week/year may well change and change and change again.
