Welcome back, Gleef here, and today we're going to chat about issues around house and home. First, though, let's watch Shelby move to her new house...
There's no place like under the flip... There's no place like under the flip...
Background
Recent events have made me pay more attention to housing issues, my own housing, and that of people around me. Of course, issues of housing also bring up issues of home.
Buddhism has a lot of teachings about house and home, perhaps some of the harder Buddhist teachings to realize touch on those topics. The sutras explicitly encourage people to practice pabbajja, to go forth, leaving their homes behind and adopting a homeless lifestyle. On the flip side we find modern Buddhist teachers like Bernard Glassman working to fight homelessness in downstate NY and Massachusetts. Yet there is no contradiction, what gives?
Dharma Chat — Keep The Home Fires Burning
I'm sure we've all heard the phrase, "Keep The Home Fires Burning", which entered common usage in the US and UK towards the start of the "Great War", World War I, when it was title of a popular song written by Welsh songwriter Igor Novello. But why is it plural, why "fires". In the context of the song, it makes sense, he's singing to all the women of the UK, so of course there are many home fires in the many homes of the empire where the sun would never set. Still, when we use it more personally, "Have a nice trip, I'll keep the home fires burning", we keep the plural, why? Back in the day, there was generally only one fire to worry about in a modest home: the hearth or the wood stove (and nowadays, with municipal gas service, maintaining a fire is not a major concern)
But I notice that, at the turn of the 20th century, the UK was deeply invested in their colonization of India, and some cultural diffusion was taking place. I speculate (without having concrete evidence on hand), that the phrase came via India, with roots all the way back through the Vedic Householders of 2500 years ago, of Siddhartha's day, who were responsible for maintaining three ritual fires to make all the appropriate household sacrifices (cow's milk was an important sacrificial offering at the time). A householder in that society was both religiously and socially expected to literally keep the home fires burning. A warrior caste householder, when off to battle, would have had to delegate that responsibility to someone else in their home. "I'll keep the home fires burning for you..."
The sutras also speak of these home fires, but in a less nostalgic way; the sutras use these three fires as a metaphor for the three poisons, anger, greed and delusion. One of the most poignant parables in the Lotus Sutra of Mahayana Buddhism centers around rescuing people from a burning house, the ritual home fires having gone awry.
Siddhartha urges lay people who wish to really work in earnest towards enlightenment to go forth, to lose their attachment to their homes, to extinguish the three fires of the Vedic householder and live, homeless, as a monk, surviving among the Sangha, within the broader community, on alms from others.
But, unlike the homeless we find on our city streets (and in the tent cities around our towns) Buddhist homelessness is a deliberate choice, made with right intention, and with an understanding of how this will help things. He does not urge people to find themselves forced from their homes and struggling to survive as outcasts from the community among which they live; that sort of homelessness calls for compassion and help getting these people on their feet. And, while these people remain attached to the idea of the home, regaining a sustainable home is an important step towards getting these people on their feet.
Dharma Chat — The Emptiness of House and Home
Emptiness is a Buddhist concept that I've discussed earlier in this column, but it's very hard to explain with words. It's shorthand for "empty of independent existence", which itself is shorthand for something that defies language. Something that is empty arises from causes, seems to have some independent existence (but on closer examination, is very much interdependent on everything in, among and around it), and eventually will seem to no longer exist. Getting too attached to things that are empty leads to suffering, gets in the way of liberating ourselves and others.
House and Home are empty.
It's easy to see how a house is empty. It arises from causes, people have gone and turned whatever was there before (forest, farmland, another house), into a shaped plot of land containing a structure. The structure is not independent, it's tied to power lines, water supplies, even a service-free shack is continually being subtly transformed by the breeze, by the sun, by the insects, by the residents. Eventually, the house will be gone, nothing lasts forever.
The same could be said for anything we might call a house: a piece of an apartment building, the space over a garage, a tent, a cardboard box in an alleyway. Even if you flee to the wilderness and house yourself in a cave, that cave hasn't always been there, it's quite dependent on the world around it, and eventually the cave will no longer exist.
Home is harder to define, it's such a personal thing. Someplace become Home because we have decided it is home, being there makes us feel at home. Our sense of being home is affected by the world around us, and our sense of home will eventually disappear. We might move and cultivate a new sense of home; one day, we will die, and all such formations as "our home" will die with us. You could look at Home and see it as the name we give to our attachment towards House.
And attachments, from a Buddhist perspective, are trouble. Understandable, forgivable trouble, but trouble nonetheless.
Dharma Chat — Mindful Householding
So right now I'm sitting in my bedroom, surrounded by the clutter of far more stuff than I possibly need, as evidence after evidence presents itself to me that my current living situation is neither healthy nor sustainable. On the flip side, I find myself still very much attached to the idea of a home: I live with a cat I feel responsible for; I have an assortment of medical issues that I can mostly manage, given heat, hot water and electricity, but not so much without them; I have no connection right now to a monastic sangha, and thus no community which I can go forth into today, and no confidence I could do it without one.
In short, I'm not ready to fully Go Forth, be skillfully homeless, to lose my attachment to House. I am, and expect to remain for now, a householder, so it behooves me to pay attention to what that means for me right here, right now. Let me start with a list of what I find important in a house, for it to meet my needs.
- A structure to shelter me and my cat from the elements, offering reasonable security from people who won't respect my needs
- Readily available and reliable drinking water, heat, hot water, electricity
- A safe and ventilated place to have a cooking fire (preferably a gas stove, but I'm somewhat flexible)
- A place where I can refrigerate, freeze and otherwise safely store some food
- A safe and clean place where me and my cat can get rid of our bodily wastes
- A door to help me keep the pootie from the pillow, my cat allergies are mild most of the time, but significant when I'm trying to sleep
- An affordable and somewhat predictable cost, in terms of obligations I must meet to maintain my access to this house, and to the required services (water, heat, etc.)
My current house is giving me difficulty, especially with items 3, 4 and 7 on that list. While I'm not going forth into the homelessness of the monastic life, nor threatened by the homelessness of modern "civilization", I'm probably going to be finding a cheap one bedroom apartment sometime soon and moving there.
While I consider my needs above to be modest, I also find it important to remember that they far outstrip what billions of people in the world, thousands of people in my city, even some people reading this diary, have available to them; that if times get too much tougher, I might find myself having to rework my life to accept much more modest needs.
So how about you? What do you need in a house, how attached are you to a home? Any other questions, concerns, conundrums?