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I spoke last week on how to focus on the Dhamma during a cataclysmic political season, highlighting the doubt I hear from so many practitioners around how healthy it is to obsessively track the news. And like many of you I felt myself move through so many feelings and states in myself as I tracked the news this week. The crisis du jour—war plans leaked on an insecure messaging platform—reveals fractals of awfulness, with officials demonstrating incompetence and malice in equal measure. Facepalm.
I’ll talk tonight toward one solution for the doubt that can arise around engagement with the political situation. Often when we read the early Buddhist texts we elide the difference between monastics and laypeople, as the Buddha himself sometimes did—though not hardly as often as we do. Because it is clear that both monastics and laypeople can meditate and experience the fruits of meditation, we tend to assume that laypeople can practice virtually all of the disciplines that monastics can, only less intensively. But there are problems with this elision.
The core monastic discipline is a systematic renunciation of direct engagement with economic and social/sexual/familial culture. Monks and nuns replace working for, and spending, income with a system of organized begging: relying fully on gifts for food, shelter, clothing, and medicine—the four material requisites. And they replace dating, marriage, sexual partnership, and child-raising with the communal life of the Saṅgha, bounded by celibacy and substantial constraints on social activity with the laity.
These renunciate practices are far more central to the development of tranquility and insight than we commonly reflect on as laypeople, so although we can practice many kinds of letting go, wise livelihood, and living simply, none of these lowercase “r” renunciations really operate like the capital “R” Renunciations of commerce and sexuality/family. They don’t categorically change our lifestyle to something “against the stream” as monastic life does.
I haven’t heard this discussed much by Buddhists supporting social engagement, partly because Engaged Buddhism is primarily a Mahāyāna style, and the doubt I’m exploring here comes up more in Theravāda settings where renunciation is more starkly emphasized. But if we understand social engagement and political action as being intrinsically part of economic and social life, we can understand them not just as appropriate but even necessary parts of skillful lay practice.
In this week’s talk, I explore the lay-monastic dialectic in support of a vigorous social engagement on the part of dedicated Buddhist laypeople.

SEAN OAKES
Sean Feit Oakes, PhD (he/they, queer, Puerto Rican & English, living on Pomo ancestral land in Northern California), teaches Buddhism and somatic practice focusing on the integration of meditation, trauma resolution, and social justice. He received Insight Meditation teaching authorization from Jack Kornfield, and wrote his dissertation on extraordinary states in Buddhist meditation and experimental dance. Sean holds certifications in Somatic Experiencing (SEP, assistant), and Yoga (E-RYT 500, YACEP), and teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, East Bay Meditation Center, Insight Timer, and elsewhere.

LINKS
Website: seanfeitoakes.com
Community Page: In It To End It
YouTube channel: In It To End It
Spirit Rock: spiritrock.org/teachers/sean-oakes
Insight Timer: insighttimer.com/seanoakes

GIVING
All of Dr. Oakes’ independent teaching is offered on the model of Gift Economy, in the Buddhist tradition of dāna, inspired giving. Support of our teaching and community is gratefully received. Thank you for your generosity.

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Blessings on your path.