Q: Bhante, I am facing a dilemma. My parents want me to pursue a family and a successful business, believing it will bring happiness and merit for the both of us. However, I see this as unbeneficial in the context of saṃsāra. If I choose monastic life, I’ll disobey my parents and hurt them, as they don’t value the Dhamma. Is there a way to avoid causing them pain while following my path?
N: No, no, you can’t have it both ways. On one hand, you have a goal that’s kind of easier to accomplish in a way, more palpable, more satisfactory to more people. Your family, job, looking after your parents. On the other hand, you know, it has limited benefits. The benefits are only for this life, and even that’s questionable.
T: It’s not guaranteed.
N: It’s not guaranteed that you’ll be sickness-free and free from ageing and death. That’s unavoidable, and it might come sooner than expected. Plus, lots of other factors can come in the way. On the other hand, you have a task that would obviously displease everybody around you, be much harder to accomplish, which you’d be much more uncertain to succeed at. But if you do, then you’re done. You have ended the saṃsāra for yourself. So it’s like, what type of vision you have, whether it’s short-sighted or long-sighted. Are you courageous enough or not. But you can’t go both ways, you can’t, it’s impossible. And also, if you think like ‘oh well I’ll do one for a bit then I’ll do the other one later’, theoretically I suppose that’s possible, but practically, the longer you stay engaging with the household life, household duties, accumulating results of the actions of a householder, the more burden is accumulating. Which means it’s going to be harder and harder to give it up. Because the more time that passes, it’s going to start to concern more and more people. Not just you and your parents. And then it will be factually harder to sever those ties. So the status quo, it’s not going to stay a neutral thing that then you can just switch twenty years from now. No, the burden will be there, binding you even harder. So basically, you want to make that decision sooner rather than later, and then stick to it.
T: Many people come up with this kind of dilemma.
N: Yeah, I mean it was in the Suttas often as well. People leaving their parents, family, duty.
T: You don’t want to harm your parents, but you think, do they know what is beneficial?
N: Well that’s the thing. See, back in India, you leave your family, if you were the only son, there was a good chance they probably wouldn’t live much longer. Or when they reached old age, that’s it. You were their insurance policy. But that’s not the case today. So you might displease them, but hardly any parents today would be existentially threatened if their child leaves. Certainly if you come from Western society. There are plenty of systems in order that mean you wouldn’t need to be there. And mind you, even people whose children don’t leave them, the children don’t look after the parents, there’s so many other ways. So then you want also to just check, basically. Is it just that you’re going to cause them mental discomfort and upset and disappointment? And don’t conflate that with like, ‘oh no, they really need me for their survival’ which is most likely not the case. But either way, you’re going to have to take responsibility. If you choose to appease them, you can’t then later on in your life complain. Because you chose what they wanted over what you wanted. And you have to stick to that now, and everything that comes out of it, twenty years later, it’s on you. You can’t blame your parents, or anybody else. You made that choice.
And same, if you choose to pursue the way out of saṃsāra and go the uncertain path, build up the courage, it’s on you. Any suffering that your parents have, upset, disappointment, it’s on you. So you have to accept it. And then, again, if you practice successfully you will find a way out of it without needing to abandon your practice and the Dhamma. But, that is conditional upon successful practice. You could use it as an inspiration and a criteria and a threshold for the successfulness of your practice. Are you able to bare the weight of leaving your parents, incurring them suffering to do what you want, not doing what they want from you? Despite them raising you, investing their whole life in you? Are you able to ensure that? Practice rightly, not be moved by it. So each time you get careless in your practice, just remember what’s at stake: the welfare of your parents that you abandoned. So, can you afford then to be careless and mess around, and ‘oh today I’ll ignore my intentions and I’ll act out of sensuality?’ Because this is what you caused.
T: That’s quite interesting, because you can use that remembering, if your parents are hurt by your going-forth, you can use that as a motivation to do the right thing. Which is factually the right thing. Which could lead in the future, then, to you, if you succeed even just a little bit, being virtuous and then finding peace in that.
N: Well, that is the most meritorious for them.
T: Again, if your parents had to then meet you again at that point, and they were good enough parents, they would at least recognise that their son, their daughter, was actually happy. Factually doing quite well. And that would then make them happy as well, so it would be worth it.
N: Even if it doesn’t, the fact that they have raised a being, an individual, that has now become established in virtue and right view and right effort and so on, they will partake in that. Because you wouldn’t be where you were if they hadn’t raised you rightly. So that’s what I mean, it’s beneficial for them as well. But yeah, they might not see it.
T: But it’s good if you have compassion for them.
N: Of course, sure sure, if there is an opening for them to hear it, to learn from you. Which there might be, and there’s probably a good likelihood, if some time has passed and they’ve come around and accept it and so on. But either way, it’s not going to be easy. If you choose to stay because it feels like you can appease more people sooner and it feels safer—is it though? I mean, you might not see tomorrow. Things happen. And you gave up the whole opportunity for complete freedom and escape on account of something that you didn’t even get to do. Because again, people do assume they’re going to live forever. So when they make these plans about the future, and family, and a job, and looking after parents, years, decades ahead, it’s like… OK, but do you have that much time? How do you even know that? So if you were to think more acutely, in a more disciplined manner, more aware of your situation, that liability to sickness ageing and death is not thirty years from now, it’s always the same, always equal from the day you were born, then I think it would be easier to make this decision. You would not even be considering it really, you would not be weighing these options. Because, again, it’s not just that it’s even more uncertain, but you might not even get to actually develop it the way you were hoping.
T: Even if you have the perspective of what you just said, that death is there for you all the time, even if you have that perspective, and then the world is telling you that you’re wrong.
N: Oh that’s irrelevant. Nothing can come in between that. Just experience that anxiety of knowing that things could end, it doesn’t matter who says what. It won’t make a difference to that recognition.
T: And if it does?
N: It’s when you yourself forget it, or think you’re absolved from it. That’s when you start considering these long-term things and forgetting how uncertain they factually are, and how contingent they are upon all sorts of things that are not in your control. Your health, other people’s health, circumstances, everything else around you.
T: You’re not sure about your perspective that you have, that death is always present, you’re not sure about that really, if the world starts to say to you ‘no, that’s not the way it is, forget it, it’s about life and living’.
N: It hasn’t sunk in.
T: It hasn’t sunk in then. You’re swayed, still, by the world.
N: Yeah, I mean, even asking the question ‘Can I have both? How can I do both?’ It’s already like, you know the answer there. You’re just hoping, clutching at straws, basically. You want to hear something magical that will absolve you from responsibility either way. But I’m saying the opposite. You’re going to have to accept responsibility for both. So if you stay with your parents, you have to accept responsibility for everything that comes out of it, and for not pursuing the practice and liberating yourself. If you go and pursue the practice for liberating yourself, you have to accept full responsibility for that. Whenever you’re slacking, non-diligent, lazy, you’re going to have to accept that and the fact that you caused your parents immense amounts of pain. So it’s not just that can’t have both, you’re going to have even less, either way. But that is still more right than lying to yourself about it.
If you become a monk, then your responsibility not only doesn’t diminish, it doubles up. And that’s a good thing.