Some years ago while participating in a campaign to raise funds for homeless people around the world, the Dalai Lama said, “On some level, I am also homeless.”
He was most likely referring to the fact that he is exiled from his home, but the statement can be taken another way because on some level, we are all homeless.
The Buddha and his followers were part of the Indian tradition of parivrajakas, or “homeless ones,” men who had “gone forth” from householder life. To use an old expression, they had “dropped out” of society, rejecting not only homes, but kinship, class, and even their clothes, casting aside usual garments for old clothes and rags.
The bhikkhu’s homelessness, however, is symbolic of a greater homelessness, that of life itself. As everything in this world will eventfully decay and disappear, there is no real home for anything in this life, no permanent home in any case. According to the Buddha, the same applies to thoughts
In the Ratnacuda Sutra, the Buddha says,
Thought is formless, unseen, not solid, unknowable, unstable, homeless. Thought was never seen by any of the Buddhas. They do not see it, they will not see it; and what has never been seen by the Buddhas, what they do not see and will never see, what kind of a process can that have, unless things exist by a false conception? Thought is like illusion, and by forming what is not comprehends all sorts of events. . . .”
Wandering through realms of consciousness like a refugee, thought looks for a home. Thought thinks that perhaps by clinging to this or to that, it can find one. Thought forms attachments with name and form, with concepts such as “is” and “is not,” “self” and “other,” “me” and “mine,” and with emotions like envy, pride, and desire. Thought forms these attachments in hopes of finding a home. Thought wants to own a home.
However, ownership has its burden. It is easy to become a slave to things owned, and a passage from another sutra encourages us to strive to become the master of our mind, rather than let our mind master us. Moreover, since nothing can last, ownership is really an illusion. Nothing that is unreal can be a home, and in this way, there is no way to avoid being homeless.
To put an end to thought’s endless search for a home, we train our mind. We train ourselves, to think differently. This is one of the chief benefits of meditation, the way mindfulness helps us bring the mind into contentment and cease its relentless searching for itself. Through practice, we discover the true nature of thought:
During his meditation, a [practitioner] will find that not even one of the thoughts arising in the mind stays for an instant . . . [He or she] will find that the past mind has gone, the present mind does not stay, and the future mind has not yet come. [The practitioner] will discover that it cannot be found anywhere after an exhaustive search of it in the three times. As it cannot be found, it follows that it is non-existent and that all things (dharma) are so as well.
T’ien-t’ai master Chih-i
We, and our thoughts, are homeless because we are searching for a home that doesn’t exist, a home that we can never own. But when we let go of that, we realize that we’ve always been home, that home is all around us. We might call it the “abiding in the home of no-home.” When we open the front door and step in, we are home in the homelessness of Buddha-dharma.
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This is an edited version of a post published in 2012.