Audio recorded at Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 19-minute talk, Kyabje Rinpoche responds to a direct question from a lay practitioner: must one renounce home and worldly life to practise seriously? He reframes renunciation as an internal discipline—reducing attachment and anger—not a physical rule. What matters is sincere practice and a good heart, not location. He illustrates with a personal story: while in a Pakistani monastery, he wished to join a great meditator in retreat, but His Holiness advised him to stay and teach others instead, noting that one can gain liberation in a railway station in India if one practises properly. For practitioners caught between monastic ideals and household reality, this talk offers direct guidance.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 1994-07-10 – 1A – Retreat – KR.mp3
UUID: 48131f2d-f1f8-4dd0-bf53-bab800815b27
Teacher: Kyabje Rinpoche
Collection: Chenrezig
Date: 1994-07-10
Recorded at: Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide
Words: ~1,116
# Chenrezig Retreat 1a 1994-07-10
**Collection:** Rinpoche Recordings — Retreats and Workshops
**Duration:** 19.4 minutes
**Words:** 1,114
**Model:** Deepgram Nova-3
**Corrections applied:** 0
**Transcribed:** 2026-02-27 20:37
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Practice the great bodhisattva, then you have to leave your place and give everything up. It’s up to you. That’s how the teachings have been given. And that is one of the sole reasons or one of the main reason for a person to become nuns and monks or ordained so that they become ordained. They give up their worldly ways, and they go to a monastery, which literally meaning monastery means isolated place, which means that is the idea behind having, you know, people becoming ordained.
So now Rinpoche says we got about fifteen minutes before we knock off at twelve. So if you happen to have any question related to this particular what I’ve just said before, what Rinpoche said, and if you have any general Buddhist question that you may like to or have any types of query that you may have in relation to practice, Rinpoche will try to satisfy you as much as he can. If one is to leave one’s home place to engage in proper practices, is it a good idea to bring along one’s husband?
I’ve got a good lawyer there, the worst lawyer. She says it’s a good idea. So you both go and, you know, dedicate your life for the whole sentient beings, you know, and be free of attachment to each other. That will be even better idea. You have some company in that sense.
Leaving the human side of it aside, just to be strict with what Rinpoche said earlier, he said, when we said that leaving one’s worldly place, it actually applies to somebody who has this extreme, urgent, highly reached state of mind of wanting desperately seeking a solution for the entire sentient beings to be free from their miseries. And highly practiced person can do those sort of thing and leave their whole house and everything, give up everything they’ve got. But, however, somebody like us who who hasn’t even begun to begin those sort of path might be a little bit asking a bit too much of ourself and, you know, a bit too impractical. Fixed formula or fixed rule of ascetic rule that one must strictly follow the same in leaving their own house and so forth. It’s not that.
It is all perspective of one’s own practice. In the perspective or in the relation with the practitioner. When the previous lamas have mentioned that when having to live or having to give up one’s worldly thing, it is said it is only designed to say it might be helpful for some people, increase intensity of their desire to practice and their practice and so forth, or their intensity, their desire of reducing their attachment and their anger and so forth. But there’s no fixed rule. The previous lamas have said that place from that point of view, the place where you go is not the prime importance.
The prime importance, as we’ve always discussed, is of having a good heart, good mind. And if you can manage to reduce the level of your attachment, level of your anger to your surrounding people, and that’s what it’s all about. When we say leaving your place, it’s not as some sort of a strong, strict ascetic practice that one must follow. It is only designed as an additional help to find oneself less attached, less angered, so to speak. But if you can have less attachment, and then the place where you live is of no consequence.
If you can keep your equanimity going, you can be in a very crowded railway station or a very rowdy this is my addition in a with state of origin between Victoria and South Australia. Pretty nice of you. Perspective. There’s no strict rule as such. As the previous lamas have said that if one practices properly, then one can achieve the liberation while living in a very rowdy, crowded household life.
If one does not properly practice, then even by living in isolated place, one accumulates further more cause to be reborn in the lower realm. Give you an example, maybe a rat or something will be living in isolated places, but will be creating more and more bad karma, so to speak, you know, eating other species in the name of ecological balance. So it is the matter of perspective or a matter of relativity. It’s all about defining in relation with the practitioner.
Personal experience regarding that matter, when they first came from they first escaped to India, about a hundred, 1,500 monks were put in this remote, very hostile sort of place in Buxa, and he was practicing there and studying there. And Rinpoche wrote a letter to then the late His Holiness, asking that he wishes to leave the Buxa Duar monastery because he thinks the life is too short for him. So he’d like to go and join there was another great meditator, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, was a great, you know, meditating in the cave, so to speak. And he would like to go there himself.
And he got an answer from that. No. You’re not going there. You stay at the monastery and study, practice, and teach other monks to show them how to go about the thing. That is far more beneficial for you than going in the bush because he said, if you can handle practicing properly, the term that His Holiness used was, you can gain liberation in a railway station in India.
You can imagine if you’ve been there. That’s why he said, you can gain anybody will go nuts there for a few minutes. You can gain so he couldn’t go. Why? Okay.
Any more you want? Oh, I’ve got a really good question, but I think I better wait till tomorrow because I’m looking at coming here for two to three months. Alright. Okay. Fair enough.
Yeah. I just had a question about those of us who weren’t here yesterday when Rinpoche blessed the. Yes. Choose this one. Can somebody give just some proper picture of the wind horse, please?
Put the plaster up, please. Good, put it in place if you can. Oh god. Really? Stress.
I used to have this cook girl, you know, she always everything get busy. Stress, love. This is this one. Alright. Alright.
Good girl. Thank you.