To "leave home for homelessness" to become a wandering mendicant therefore means to relinquish a particular way of relating to one's home or place rather than actually repudiating them. How many idealistic young men (like my younger self) have left behind their family and homeland in a grand display of renunciation to become a monk in a foreign land only to find that they have transferred all their delight and reveling in a place to something exotic? To detest one place only to delight in another does not, from Gotama's point of view, solve anything. Without a genuine change of heart in one's core relationship to life itself, pursuing a "spiritual" vocation will be a waste of time.
---Stephen Batchelor, in after buddhism---
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