This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video A myth for hard times - Gil Fronsdal. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to IMC. I do have an announcement, and I think of this announcement as part of the talk, maybe a prelude to it. For quite a while, I’ve been wanting our community, both in person and online out in the wider world, to be involved in a second large fundraising drive. This follows the one we did right after the invasion of Ukraine three years ago, where we raised money for Save the Children to support the children affected by the war there. A lot of them became refugees, and Save the Children did wonderful work supporting children and families. They’ve been an organization that’s been around for decades, maybe 100 years, doing wonderful work—one of the more reputable nonprofits around.
I’ve been wanting to do this for the last year or so, and it took a while for our community to get properly organized around this. We can finally do it now. It’s for the Save the Children emergency fund, which goes to children and families in emergency situations around the world. Things are pretty dire, with the risk of starvation and all kinds of things. The primary places now are Gaza, Sudan, Syria, and Ukraine still.
We are starting that fundraising drive officially today. It was posted and made available on Friday. Last time we did it, we raised $70,000, which I thought was pretty fantastic. This is an opportunity for our community to come together and feel like we’re coordinating. Sometimes, working together, we can have a bigger impact in the world than if we just do it individually. It seems very timely that we’re doing this. It wasn’t the plan that the federal government should have, in a certain negative way, cooperated with our efforts by shutting down USAID, the Agency for International Development. There’s a huge crisis now with international support, and so now, in our small way, we’re stepping into that vacuum with our ability to donate to Save the Children. I think in some ways, we’ll make more of a difference than we would have if we had done this some months ago.
This is an attempt in our community to meet the need. One of the key people organizing it is Ram, who is standing all the way in the back. He’s also involved with a lot of wonderful humanitarian efforts connected to the outreach from the IMC orbit. I’m quite inspired by our orbit. I just went down to IRC for the last two days. One of the things our orbit is involved in is chaplaincy training. We’re training people to be spiritual caregivers in the chaplaincy mode. Once a year, we do the yearlong training at IRC, the retreat center, for two days. It was very significant for me to be at the retreat center with the current climate of things, the chaos of this world. Sitting in the meditation hall there, it felt like one of these places of refuge that’s protecting the good heart, protecting spiritual practice as a through-line that will stay constant through the ups and downs of civilizations. I have this image of monasteries being places deep in the woods or mountains where, no matter what goes on in society, they are preserving spiritual practice, spiritual ideals, and an ethical life in a very important way to make it continue through time. I felt like we were down there in this place that has that kind of role in our society, training people to offer spiritual care out into the wider world. I loved it.
Then I realized that, coincidentally, for the next two days, Monday and Tuesday, I’m training one of the other chaplaincy programs coming out of our orbit of IMC, which is the Buddhist Eco-chaplaincy, training people wanting to offer spiritual care in the context of the environmental crisis. That’s a wonderful group of 36 people, and they all have to do a project for the year-and-a-half program. Last night, I read all their project proposals, and I was so inspired. Wow, we created this program out of thin air, and now these people are doing these wonderful projects in the world having to do with eco-chaplaincy. That’s pretty cool.
Then, coincidentally, Friday and Saturday, we have a third kind of spiritual care, chaplaincy-informed program called Anukampa, which is bringing some of the ways that we do in chaplaincy, some of the orientations there, for personal growth for people who are not necessarily going to offer spiritual care but want to touch into that world and grow from it. It just represents how much this orbit of IMC is doing. We’re doing a lot of things here and there that are usually not publicized. Ram, who I just announced, is connected to a lot of it. So if some of you are interested in learning more of what we do, you can talk to him at the tea time.
In this world of chaos that we have, it’s quite amazing. We were in a planning meeting yesterday with the faculty of this Eco-chaplaincy program, which will be continuing through a two-day session on Monday and Tuesday. We had planned some weeks ago what we were going to do, and we realized, wait a minute, the world has changed so much in the last two weeks, we have to rethink the whole thing. We didn’t know two or three weeks ago that the world would look like it does now. So we’ve reorganized it to try to better meet the circumstances we’re in, especially for people offering spiritual care to the world. When the world has changed, and probably a lot of them are dismayed by what’s happened, how do we support them and care for them? Sometimes you have to care for the caregivers before they can go out into the world.
I was very moved to know after the fact—I wish I’d known while it happened—that this last week, twice, students from the high school which is one block away marched through the streets, down to the city courtyard, to protest the way in which ICE, the immigration police, is coming and taking students out of high school who may be undocumented. I don’t know if they’ve done that in local high schools right here, but it’s happened in San Jose, where they’ve gone into the high school. From what I understand of it, it’s a horrendous thing to do, because to take a student out of high school because they’re undocumented as bait to get their parents to come and get them means now the parents are also in that mix. To have that kind of dynamic, that kind of tension and challenge for a family, must be absolutely awful. There was a movie many years ago called Sophie’s Choice, and I wondered, what kind of thing are we doing to families? They had a walkout in that high school in East San Jose for the students protesting that.
So we have high school students and other students in this country now who are afraid—afraid for themselves, afraid for their fellow students. We live with a lot of people now who are afraid. Maybe some of you are afraid, some of you are quite concerned, maybe some of you are in danger because of this. Some of you know people who are. And some of you might know people in the wider world whose communities now have had their aid, their food supplies, cut off because aid has been cut off. Medicine supplies have been cut off, medical care has been stopped, and people are starting to die because of the very quick way in which this administration has decided to make this change without careful planning and consideration for the impact.
These actions that are happening are dismaying and frightening, alarming for many people. We should certainly name it and recognize how difficult it is for some people. And for some people, they are finding it is the medicine they’ve been waiting for, the change they’ve been hoping for. That’s also happening. So how do we find our way with all that’s happening in our society?
That was a long prelude to my talk. I want to tell you a Buddhist myth. It might be, in the context of all that, that telling you this amazing, strange myth would seem like diminishing or underplaying what’s going on in response to it. But it’s how the Buddha responded to similar things that happened in his time. Some of us have this image of the Buddha sitting quietly in the forest, peacefully, and he probably was just all serene and wonderful. But periodically through his lifetime, societies fell apart around him. There was war that he was not in the middle of necessarily, but in the places where he lived and traveled for 40 years, there was warfare, famine, and all kinds of things. Society was falling apart.
The representative of that is that he died peacefully. We tell this wonderful story of him laying down on the ground between two flowering trees and dying very peacefully and serenely in a deep meditation practice. And it was nice for him. But around him, his societies were falling apart. Around him, war drums were being beaten, and kings were being usurped and thrones were being taken over. One of his prime disciples had been murdered just a few months before he died. So even though he died peacefully, the context was one of great upheaval. There were no courts to go to, to say, “Please stop.” There were no checks and balances for these monarchs who were basically dictators who could just have people’s heads at a moment’s notice. There was no check and balance unless the neighboring country attacked you.
In some ways, it was an awful time, and the Buddha responded with myth, maybe because that was the safest way. It was an oral culture back then, so you couldn’t write a manifesto and post it on doors or get it in the news. The way that things traveled was through people speaking. So a good myth, a good story, probably traveled a lot more than someone standing on a soapbox and saying, “You know, it’s not a good idea to have war.”
The Buddha supposedly composed these myths, and this particular myth is designed in a classic literary form, if you know about literature, called chiasmus.1 That’s a ritual way that’s done in the Bible and Homer and many places, where the literature, the writing, is done as a journey into a pivotal point, and then the journey goes out in a mirror image of going in. People in the ancient world knew this form of ritual myth-telling, so they knew to be carried along by it, dip down into it, and then come out of it, maybe in an inspired way. I don’t think I can tell it that way, but maybe you’ll follow along and understand how it is.
It’s a myth because it starts off at a time long, long ago when people lived for 80,000 years. That was a lifetime. It describes how society devolves, and as society devolves, it affects how long people live. Almost biologically, people’s lives get shorter and shorter. It goes from 80,000 to 40,000, to 20,000, to 10,000 years, and eventually, you get to seven days. That’s pretty bad. That’s the worst that it evolves to. Society and the world and people just become horrible to each other, absolutely terrible. And that’s when things change. Then it comes out, and over the centuries or millennia, the lifetimes increase back until the glorious time when we can live for 80,000 years.
The pivot point of the story has to do with people going into the forest, leaving the ordinary constructed world of human beings where we have institutions and government and all these things that we create to make sense of our social life. They actually leave, they go to the forest, and there, the turn, what has to happen to turn society around, happens in the forest.
There are other places where the Buddha tells a similar story. This is not a myth, it’s just a metaphor he uses. When he discovered the path to awakening, he likened it to a person who goes into the woods, a woodworker or something, and finds an overgrown path. But he sees the traces of the path. He comes back to the monarchs of the realm and tells them, “I found the traces of an ancient path.” They say, “Oh, okay,” and they go into the forest and clear the path. They find the path takes them to some glorious, overgrown city that’s been covered over for a long time. Here again, the idea is something in the forest. The forest here represents some other dimension of life that is outside of the ordinary, constructed, imagined, synthetic world that we live in—of building up our ego, building up our concept of self, building up our concept of the world, the cathedrals and the edifices we have of abstract, constructed, engineered society, which is both good and challenging to live in.
I was just thinking about how this imagined, constructed, unnatural world is now the source of the wealthiest people in the world. It’s not because they’re really good farmers and they produce things people need that makes them wealthy. It’s that they’re making these things that just a few decades ago didn’t exist. It comes out of this constructed, imagined world of the human mind. That’s the world that’s taking over in some ways, dominating and having the power. So here, the Buddha is offering another way: going back into the natural world, represented by going into the forest.
In this myth, the myth of the wheel-turning monarchs, these are universal monarchs who, in mythic times, own a huge area of the world, so they’re very powerful. For many generations, the monarchs know how to live and how to rule ethically. This is a description of how they rule: “Rulers honor, respect, and venerate the truth, have truth as their banner and guide. They provide just protection and security for their court, troops, aristocrats, assistants, brahmins, and householders, towns people and country people, religious practitioners, animals, and birds. They do not let injustice prevail in the country. They provide support to the poor.” This was written 2,500 years ago in the Bronze Age. I love saying that. This was relevant that long ago for human societies.
That went on for about six generations. In the seventh generation, one of the monarchs stopped doing some of this. He governed the country according to his own ideas. The people did not prosper as they had when former kings proceeded in the noble duty of a monarch. But then the ministers came to the person and said, “Wait, you’re not doing it right, and the people are suffering now.” They said to him, “You should ask us about the noble duty of a monarch. We will answer you.” So he asked, and they explained it to him. After listening to them, he provided justice and security for his people, but he did not provide support for the penniless in the realm. And so poverty grew widespread.
When poverty was widespread, a certain person stole from others with the intention to commit theft. He was arrested and presented to the king, who said, “Your majesty, this person stole from others.” The king said to him, “Is it really true you stole?” The man said, “Yes, it’s true.” Remember, this is back in the ideal time when everyone was living ethically and honestly. “Yes, I stole.” “What was the reason?” said the king. “Sire, I couldn’t survive otherwise.”
In Bergen, Norway, they still have on the wall of the old castle one of the first rules of the land that says explicitly, “If someone’s starving, it’s not a crime to steal.”
So he said, “I can’t survive.” The king provided him with some material support, saying, “With this support, keep yourself alive and provide for your mother and father, partners and children, work for a living, and provide an inspiring donation for religious practitioners that’s conducive to happiness.” So the guy said yes. But then another person stole something from other people and was arrested and presented to the king. The same thing happened. “Is it true?” “Yes.” “Why?” “To survive.” So the king provided that person with material support in order to build a career and support their people.
But then people heard about this and they thought, “It seems the king is providing support to anyone who steals from others. Why don’t we steal from others?” So then another man stole something from others and that person was arrested and presented to the king. “Did you steal?” “Yes.” “Why?” “Because I couldn’t survive.” Then the king thought, “If I provide support to anyone who steals from others, it will only increase the stealing. I’d better make an end to this person, finish him off, and chop off his head.” He’s a decisive person, strong and decisive. So he ordered his men to do so.
But people heard about this. “It seems the king is chopping the heads off anyone who steals from others.” So it occurred to them, “We better have sharp swords made. Then when we steal from others, we’ll make an end of them, finish them off, and chop off their heads.” And so they did that.
The Buddha points out: “And so from not providing material support to the penniless, poverty became widespread. When poverty was widespread, theft became widespread. When theft was widespread, swords became widespread. When swords were widespread, killing living beings became widespread.” And for the sentient beings among whom killing was widespread, their lifespan and beauty declined. These people lived for 80,000 years, but their children lived for only 40,000 years. So now we’re beginning to see the devolving not just of society, but in Buddhism, there’s a direct correlation between our lived life because of the karma that we live. The karma affects us in a dramatic way, and here it’s being passed on to the next generation.
Among the people who lived for 40,000 years, a certain person stole something from others. The person was arrested and presented to the king. “Your majesty, this person stole from others.” The king said, “Is this true?” “No, sir,” he deliberately lied. And so, from not providing support to the penniless, poverty, theft, swords, and killing became widespread. When killing was widespread, lying became widespread. And for the sentient beings among whom lying was widespread, their lifetime and beauty declined. These people who lived for 40,000 years had children who lived for 20,000 years.
Then, among the people who lived 20,000 years, it got even worse because not only did they lie, but then behind the king’s back, they disparaged him. So backbiting started to happen, and that reduced the lifespan to 10,000 years.
Among the people who lived 10,000 years, some were beautiful and some were ugly. The ugly beings, coveting the beautiful ones, committed adultery with the partners of others. And so, from not providing support to the penniless, poverty, theft, swords, killing, lying, and backbiting became widespread. When backbiting was widespread, sexual misconduct became widespread, and so then the lifespan reduced to 5,000 years.
This process continued. The next thing that happened was harsh speech came into play—divisive and harsh speech. Then the lifespan reduced to 2,500 years. Then those people developed ill will, and the lifespan reduced to a thousand. Then a wrong view became widespread—the view that you can do whatever you want and it has no impact. The right view is that if you do things which are unwholesome and unethical, it will have a negative impact on the world and on yourself. There are consequences. With the wrong view, not believing in that, people are more likely to do unethical things because there are no repercussions. So people had wrong view, and their lifetime declined to 500 years.
Then greed and a harmful culture spread, and it reduced to 200 years. From that, respect for mother and father, religious practitioners, and elders decreased. With a lack of respect, the lifespan went down to 50 years.
Then, among the people who lived for 10 years, girls became marriageable at five years. The following flavors disappeared: butter, oil, honey, molasses, and salt. Things were getting worse. People started doing more and more unwholesome, unethical things. There was no recognition of the status of mother, aunts, wives, partners, tutors, students, and other respected people. The world became dissolute, like goats and sheep, chickens and pigs, dogs and jackals. Everyone was full of hostility towards each other, with acute ill will, malevolence, and thoughts of murder. Even a mother would feel like this for her child, and a child for its mother; a father for a child, and a child for a father; a brother for a sister, and a sister for a brother. They’ll be just like a deer hunter when a deer hunter sees a deer—full of hostility, ill will, malevolence, and thoughts of killing.
Among the people who lived for 10 years, there was a middle period, this limbo period. This is the turning point. It’s called the interim period of swords that lasted for seven days. Imagine lifetimes are seven days, and also that for that period of seven days, sharp swords will appear in their hands. It’s kind of like a science fiction thing, like just being born with swords. They will take each other’s lives, crying and calling everybody else a beast. “It’s a beast, a beast!” Everyone’s called beasts.
This is the worst. We’ve come to the end of the worst. But then, some of those beings thought, “Let us neither kill nor be killed. Why don’t we hide in thick grass, thick jungles, thick trees, inaccessible riverlands, or rugged mountains and survive on forest roots and fruits?” So that’s what they did. The idea of surviving on roots and fruits is so they don’t have to kill any animal for food. They were going to live non-violently, get away from it all.
When those seven days were passed, having emerged from their hiding places, they embraced each other, maybe because they’re the only ones who survived. They come together and cry in one voice, “Fantastic, dear enemy, you live! Fantastic, dear enemy, you live!” Remember, in the seven-day period, everyone was enemies. They all went away, maybe individually. When they came out, they didn’t see them as enemies anymore. They were the dear enemy.
Then they thought, “It’s because we undertook unwholesome things that we suffered such an extensive loss of our relatives. We better do what’s wholesome. What wholesome thing to do? Why don’t we refrain from killing living beings?” And so then they slowly started to… the lifespan started to increase in reverse order as they each went systematically: “Well, let’s not kill people. Let’s not steal from them. Let’s not lie. Let’s not involve in sexual misconduct. Let’s not have divisive speech and harsh speech. Let’s respect people.” And slowly, slowly, they came back, eventually, to live happily for quite a while because they lived for 80,000 years.
And then it all started over again with the monarchs of the realms knowing what to do, knowing that they had to rule with justice, protect everyone, that they should support people, provide them with the means for livelihood, and let no one be poor. The central focus was on poverty, and that poverty was really where the source of society devolving was.
It looks like we’re moving in a direction in our society, probably for a while, of increased poverty. I don’t know what to predict for the future, but it looks like there’s going to be some people, maybe the poorest in our society, who are going to suffer the most. And what is our role in this? If this is the direction it all goes, I don’t know what to say. It’s kind of a difficult time for some of us to be in a situation like this and not know how to respond. In a sense, it’s a waiting game to see where it’s going and where the response can be.
But this kind of myth, I think, is actually extremely important because it says there is something very deeply natural that’s not part of that unnatural world that we construct of governance and things, that resides in ourselves, in the natural world within. To go into the forests, the natural world, we can do that in our own hearts. That’s why we practice. That’s why we have meditation practice and these kind of spiritual teachings and ethical guidelines, so that we can live in an ethical way, so that our standard of ethics is really high for ourselves and others. We don’t kill, we don’t steal, we don’t involve in sexual misconduct, we don’t involve in lying, we don’t involve in greed and hatred. We don’t involve in disrespect, backbiting. We don’t involve in seeing anyone as beasts, anyone as less than human.
We really want to care for ourselves. To do all those things is a way of harming ourselves. I think that’s one of the messages of this myth: that we harm ourselves and our descendants, our society, by how we do things. And we also harm, in the immediate now, others who are impacted by those behaviors of ours. So Buddhism, the Buddha, put tremendous emphasis on behavior like that and calling out the necessity of not behaving in those kinds of actions that cause harm.
So for me to say at the beginning of this that there are children being harmed, potentially right down the street a block away, unnecessarily, is to critique behavior, action, activity, effect, without saying anything about any individual or any groups of people. But that kind of behavior has to stop. I wish that I had known that the students were out on the streets, but it wasn’t announced anywhere. Maybe it was spontaneous. It was one block away; I would have joined them because I wanted to protest that kind of activity, that kind of action.
And that might be all of us. We might feel called to say no to killing, say no to stealing, say no to sexual misconduct, say no to lying, say no to specific ways in which people are being harmed. I hope that we’re not silent in speaking up. Maybe for a while, until our lifespans can grow a little bit longer rather than decrease, we’ll do it sometimes by telling myths. At least on this Sunday morning, we use a myth to say that, like the Buddha did long, long ago.
So that’s my talk, trying to be relevant for the current times, and hopefully it is enough. It’s all a work in progress, this practice of ours, this life of ours. We have tea today, and that’s going to start in a few minutes. But I think that because this topic touches current events, it’s a little bit tender for some of you. I evoked in the beginning that I’m doing these spiritual caregiving trainings, three of them that I’m involved in this week. Maybe we can care for each other just very briefly by turning to a couple of people next to you. Make sure no one’s left alone; look around, it could be four if necessary, two or three. Say hello and just offer some care, some respect, some appreciation, some welcome.
Maybe tell each other a little bit what it was like to hear this talk and what it evoked and what came up for you. And listen to the other person with care and respect. Don’t give them advice and don’t offer your opinion about what’s supposed to happen out there. Just be human together in a very simple way. And don’t tell long stories about what this talk was like, just a few comments to share who you are and say hello and break the ice, especially for people here for the first time.
In a few minutes, I’ll ring a bell so that you know it’s clearly time to stop, and then the tea will be available. You’re all welcome to stay. Thank you.
Chiasmus: A rhetorical or literary figure in which words, grammatical constructions, or concepts are repeated in reverse order, in the same or a modified form. The transcript said “kismos,” which has been corrected to “chiasmus” based on the contextual description of a story that journeys inward to a pivotal point and then mirrors that journey outward. ↩