Renunciation, that has a few different levels. One, I touched on earlier yesterday, Renunciation of material assets. How many shoes do you need, how many magazines and newspapers do you buy? Can you renounce some of those things that you buy and you collect and you keep in your home and so on? All the material things, that is one level of Renunciation.
But then there is the renouncing of attachment to whatever we have, no matter how little you might have. Even when a person has very little and they are content not to want what they don't have, still some things are very important. For eg. Maybe I think, "This jacket is so important, it's mine, it's mine." So we can get very attached, even when we have very little, we might get very attached to what we have. The amount of possessions is one level of Renunciation but how attached we are to our possessions is a whole different level. When you look at it in this way a person who is very rich may have many different things, assets and comforts, but they might actually have a very high level of Renunciation, they might not be attached to what they own, they simply use what they own for benefit.
Now, for me in particular, I have about, I don't know, maybe twenty shirts. Ooh, twenty shirts, that sounds like a lot, for me it is a lot. However, I have six or seven coloured shirts, I use for travelling. I have white shirts back at the Wat as most of you know, most of them are white, some a little off-white. But I have two different sets of white shirts. I have nice shirts I wear in retreats, and I have dirty shirts I wear outside of retreat when I am working. That gives me three times six or seven shirts, about twenty shirts. Now, if I do walk away from Wat Kow Tahm I would not take twenty shirts with me, but they have their own purpose. So I am not actually attached to having twenty shirts. All I need is a few, all I need is five or six. But because I have three different types of life styles, I need three different types of shirts.
This is another way, that even when a person does have a lot of material possessions, they may not actually be attached to those possessions as, "I need this many," but rather it's just that's what this person has to have for their occupation.
Now, some other people in the Buddha's day, the greatest of all the lay people, his name was Anathapindika, he was a multi millionaire. He was as rich as Bill Gates in relative amount of money. The very first time he met the Buddha he became first level enlightened person, termed a stream enterer, yet even then he did not change his life style in the sense of being a multi millionaire. He did change in the sense that all of a sudden he used all the money for more and more and more charities, but he kept making money, yet in his case he used it to provide benefit for others.. He build monasteries for the Buddha and the monks and became the foremost supporter of the Sangha. He remained a wealthy a rich person, even though he was partly enlightened, and he did wonderful good actions with all his money. He wasn't attached to the money for "me, me" but used it for goodness.
So when we think of Renunciation we can think of not having many possessions as one level but the attachment to a possession is an even more important level.
Now, going beyond the material things, can we renounce anger? Can we renounce greed? Can we renounce fear and all the mental states? That's even a deeper level of Renunciation that we want to work on, really using it for purification. So Renunciation does have different levels.