This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Is Buddhism a Religion, Art, or Science? -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. If you have a cell phone, kindly silence it or turn it completely off. We’re going to start with a period of silent meditation. At 10:00, I’ll ring the bell. Then there’ll be a couple of announcements. Gil will teach until about 10:45, and then today we have a potluck. If you’re seated on the floor and you feel comfortable to move forward, that would be great. The reason is people do arrive late and they just don’t feel comfortable sitting up here. Thank you so much.
Good morning everyone and welcome to IMC. I know we have a few announcements.
Hi everybody. Well, it’s the last Sunday of the month, so it’s the best Sunday of the month because it’s potluck Sunday. So if you can, after the talk, please stay and have a delicious meal with your Sangha.1 After the talk, we’ll need a few minutes to finish setting up, and then the bell will ring. When you hear the bell, even if you’re in the inside hall, please come out and join the circle. Have a look at the Sangha that’s here today, and there’ll be a little blessing, and then we’ll have our meal. And if people can stay at the end and help put the chairs and tables away, that’s really appreciated. Thank you.
Good morning everyone. Can you hear me all right? Loud enough? Speak up if it gets too soft, or wave your hands.
There was a time when I was in conversations where the question was, “Is Buddhism a religion or not?” And it made some sense to have those questions because, oddly enough for me, my background is I have a PhD in religion. So that’s the area where that question comes up, and I was there studying Buddhist studies. So was I in the right place? And oddly for me, because I did not grow up religious and oddly enough, maybe now you’ll all abandon IMC, but in some ways, I’m not so interested in religion.
So is Buddhism a religion or not? There are all kinds of debates about that. The funnest, most humorous way I think of referring to that is that in the United States, it definitely is a religion because then you get all kinds of tax benefits. Whereas I was told in the Soviet Union, it was definitely not a religion because there were benefits to that, as they were anti-religion back then. So Buddhism is quite flexible that way.
But what’s more interesting for me, as I’ve navigated my own practice in Buddhism and practiced in different schools of Buddhism with different philosophies of what Buddhist practice is, is the question: Is Buddhism more an art form, or is it more a form of medical research? Is it more medical science?
The reason for that distinction is that there are forms of Buddhism where the emphasis, the rhetoric, is predominantly about just being in the present moment and allowing some deep expression to come out of us. Some people will often refer to something like the Buddha nature, something profound within us that gets freed and can move through us and respond to the world. It’s more like the response, the expression of an artist, like a dancer who dances just to dance, to express something in the dancing, allowing something from inside to come forth. Or a singer just singing for the singing, not in order to do something else. Some painters are that way, some are not. Some painters are painting to have a perfect picture for the results, but some people are painting just for the expression that’s there. In Japan, close to Buddhism, the representation of this is sometimes in the tea ceremony and associated arts, where it’s really the beauty and the art, what gets born, what arises in the care, the love, the attention to detail, the quieting of the mind and the heart to be really there for the activity itself. That is the purpose of it. It’s more of an art than it is in order to do something.
Medical research or medical science has a bias or a preference. It’s doing it for a purpose, to have a result. When people are unhealthy, the purpose is to find a way to help people become healthy. There might be some deep upswelling of compassion that wells up from the Buddha nature of the researcher that inspires it, but still, the research is all about looking for understanding something in order to bring health to someone.
So is Buddhism more an art, or is it more a kind of personal research into yourself to understand how you live unhealthily? Maybe in a spiritual way, if you prefer. I once got criticized when I was a Zen priest for never using the word “spiritual.” Now I use it more often. I don’t know if that’s better or worse, but it kind of touches something in the heart to use that word. So is it some kind of spiritual health? Some people have an unhealthy relationship to spirituality because they’ve been betrayed by their religion. There are spiritual or ethical wounds that people carry because of how they’ve lived their life or how people associated with them have lived. So sometimes there’s deep psychological healing, repair, and correction that people are involved in.
To simply say, “Just kind of express your Buddha nature, just sit here and just be,” can be challenging. The school of art often has the wonderful and challenging instruction, “just be.” That’s a wonderful antidote for people who are over-doers, who are always straining and working and doing. But you don’t tell a medical researcher, “Just be. It’s okay. Just sit there in your office and just be, and everything will work out fine.” The researcher needs to be in the lab, needs to engage. There’s something they have to do.
Sometimes the “just being” school is a wonderful correction for some people. They finally relax and settle, and then at some point when they really settle into the being, they’re ready to do in a beneficial way. But sometimes, with the overemphasis on being, I’ve seen the emphasis become, “Well, it’s completely okay just to be neurotic. I’m so glad I found Buddhism because now I can just go along and keep thinking and fantasizing. For me, that means just daydreaming and thinking and planning and worrying, and that’s what I’m supposed to do because that’s what being is for me.” And that’s a little bit unfortunate. It’s kind of like saying if you have a scab, just be with picking the scab, and everything will be great. But the wound just gets bigger and bigger the more you pick it.
Then there are the people on the medical research side of Buddhism. Some of them just research all the time, and they never get around to taking the medicine. There’s never any real healing from being human. It comes with its challenges, its tensions, its difficulties. The classic difficulties that Buddhism highlights are that a few people will eventually experience sickness, old age, and death. That’s a challenge. So how do we live with that and find our way with it? If you’re constantly looking for the cure for those things, then you never really get to the heart of the matter, which maybe has more to do with the metaphorical heart.
So both directions can be problematic, but also, both approaches I’ve seen in Buddhism can be at odds with each other: “We’re the better way, you’re the lousy way.” But I think maybe they need each other. Maybe they really should go together. That’s really the best of all possible worlds. I love that I put my hands together when I said that. This anjali is kind of symbolic of how I see these two coming together, maybe in a reverent or respectful way. They both need each other.
The school of Theravada2 Buddhism that we teach here at IMC is more in the medical research direction. The core teaching of this tradition, which goes way back to the Buddha, is very simple—so simple that some people would look and say, “Is this really a religion? This can’t be enough.” And that is: to not cause harm. A radical life of non-harming. The Buddha defined a wise person as someone who doesn’t harm themselves, doesn’t harm others, doesn’t harm self or others, and doesn’t harm the whole world. An unwise person does that. A wise person is someone who does the opposite: who benefits themselves, brings about the welfare of oneself, is involved with the welfare of others, involved in the welfare of both self and others, and the welfare of the whole world.
Is that religious? What is that? Maybe Buddhism is a form of therapy, medical therapy, psychological therapy. Maybe that’s what it is. It shouldn’t be a religion if that’s the heart of it. Everything follows from that. The core ethical principle in Buddhism is don’t cause harm. This is a beautiful way that this is expressed, I believe:
“Abandoning the taking of life, one abstains from taking life. This gives freedom from danger, hostility, and oppression to limitless numbers of living beings. In giving others freedom from danger, hostility, and oppression, one gains a share of unlimited freedom from danger, hostility, and oppression. This is a great gift.”
This is the first ethical principle. All of Buddhism, in a sense, follows from this one principle: don’t cause harm. We learn in meditation how not to cause harm to ourselves. In some ways, the Four Noble Truths are often held up as the primary Buddhist teaching. They usually have this very big, complicated, confusing word “suffering” in their wording. But maybe if it’s worded differently: the first noble truth is a truth of harm. The second noble truth is a truth of how harm appears, how it arises. The third is that it’s possible to stop harming. And the fourth is the way to not harm: the Eightfold Path.
So we learn not to harm. Meditation is a phenomenal place to learn how not to harm ourselves. One of the things that I learned primarily through Vipassanā3 practice when I first started doing it in Thailand was that if I wanted to harm others, I was harming myself. It became so glaringly obvious as the mind got quieter and stiller, as I started sensing and feeling more embodied, sensing what was going on in deeper, quieter, more peaceful ways. If there was a thought of being angry with someone, or lustful for someone, or resentful to someone, I could feel that I was harming myself directly. I hadn’t been able to feel that earlier in my life because my whole sense of self was so activated with all my preoccupations, concerns, desires, and a busy mind that I wasn’t that sensitive.
But meditation taught this deep sensitivity that sometimes I like to call ethical sensitivity. You feel so deeply the impact of certain ways of being—that if there’s greed, hatred, or delusion, it limits us, it harms ourselves. Not to speak of if we act it out and harm others. And with this deep ethical sensitivity, we’re much more attuned to others. We much more closely feel their pain, how they are. It kind of harms ourselves; you feel the pain in a certain way when we harm other people or are around people who have been harmed, who suffer, and to care for that.
What I discovered through this deep subtleness in meditation was that from this place of just being, from this deep sensitivity, there came compassion. And to my surprise, that started to become who I am more than any other way I had ever thought of who I was as a human being before. If someone had asked me—I think nobody’s ever really asked me this—but if one of you asked me, “Gil, who are you?” I could sincerely say, maybe I don’t want to say it because it sounds a little bit conceited or too much, so I’ll kind of whisper it… [Laughter] I’m compassion, the compassionate response. Or if I want to make it a little bit more simple, I would say I’m the appropriate response, the beneficial response.
When I was at the Zen monastery, I found myself spontaneously saying to my Zen teacher when we passed each other on the path one day, “I’m becoming a response machine.” You have to forgive the word “machine” because that doesn’t sound so human, but it was just what came out, expressing how this change had come over me. I was becoming just a response, and that response is very much centered in compassion.
But that response of compassion and care is both something that just is—it’s a beingness, it’s the art, it’s the dance, it’s the song that we sing. But built into it is the medical researcher, the medical scientist. Built into it is, “Well, if there is harm here, if there is hurt here, if there is suffering here, let’s understand it. Let’s see how it can come to an end.” We don’t just say, “Oh, you’re suffering. Just be suffering. Just suffer better.” That’s kind of what we don’t say, even though I do tell people that sometimes. I’ll explain why in a minute. The idea is not just to continue perpetuating the suffering. The idea is, what does it take to end it? What’s the medicine? What’s the cure?
There are things that Buddhism teaches, things that therapists can do, lots of things people can help with. The reason I chose Buddhism in my youth is that I knew nothing that went as deep into the human heart as Buddhism. I knew nothing that addressed the issues of being attached to self, self-attachment, as Buddhism does. I saw that when I was young as the deepest attachment we have. So I wanted to be able to come with that medicine to the world or have that medicine for myself. We want to bring suffering to an end. It’s not just, “be as you are,” but there is a way that being as we are has within it the movement, the desire for the end of suffering, the end of causing harm and experiencing it. And that’s phenomenal.
Is that religion? If it is, that’s my religion. The Dalai Lama said, “My religion is kindness.” So if he could say that, I can say that my religion is the end of harm.
The reason I sometimes tell people, “You need to just suffer better,” is kind of outrageous, right? But the reason is sometimes we actually need to understand and feel and experience our suffering to really understand it, to really be motivated to bring it to an end. I usually say this to people if they’re struggling with something they know is not healthy for them, and I get a sense that they’ve never stopped to look at it. They’re always recoiling from it or trying to find a solution away from it, but the solution is by going through it rather than avoiding it. So if the idea is to go through it, I say, “You need to suffer better. You have to really experience it fully.” Then I usually explain what I mean. It’s kind of cruel to just say, “suffer better.” But Buddhist teachers have a certain permission to say certain things.
So is Buddhism a religion or not? Is it an art or a form of medical research? I kind of like to think of it as both an art and medical research. If you understand it as art and you really do it well, if you really become a dancer or a singer, I think it requires a deep sensitivity to oneself, to one’s emotionality, to one’s expressivity, a deep ability to let go of the inhibitions and preoccupations that get in the way of really being the art. This hopefully provides a deep sensitivity that what lives in us is compassion, is care, is the desire for health, for wholesomeness, for our goodness, for freedom. And then it becomes a bit more the medical research side of Buddhism: “Okay, now let’s work for that.”
Conversely, if you start with it being medical research and you do that really well, you start finding the cure for your hindrances, for a preoccupied mind, and you settle and relax and get de-stressed. That reveals this place of deep inner sensitivity. That’s the birthplace of this deep, healthy, wholesome source within us that in our school we don’t call Buddha nature, but sometimes we can call it the womb. The literal word for it sometimes in our school is the womb. So that’s kind of nice, that there’s this profound place within us that something beautiful and wonderful can be born and expressed.
So we have these two approaches. It’s interesting, I’ve been involved with different Buddhist traditions, and it seems like the rhetoric can be one or the other, but in practice, they both kind of come together. They both contain both within them. In practice, they are not so separate from each other. But it’s kind of nice to know both and to appreciate both so that you don’t become overly complacent and you don’t become overly striving, and you find the middle way between complacency and striving. The over-striving is the medical approach; the complacency can be the art approach. But if we have neither, they come together. So that’s my hope for how we practice.
So it might be interesting now, for either the art approach or the medical research approach, for you to have a chance to say a few words about where you fit in this spectrum. Where do you fit? How do you understand yourself? If there is a spectrum between art and medical research, where are you in this spectrum in your practice or your life? Or what struck you about this talk?
You’re welcome to sit quietly and not participate in a conversation with someone. You’re welcome to leave if you’re more comfortable with that. But the idea is to take about 10 minutes for a conversation with maybe a couple of people next to you, in little groups of three perhaps. The idea is not for any one person to tell a long, 10-minute story to make your point so that no one else has a chance. The art of this kind of conversing is to say just one thing. Don’t say all that you could say. Just make one point, make it well but somewhat succinct, because the fascinating thing about these conversations is not what you say but what you hear. So you have to give a chance for others to be heard, but you don’t want to speak too long because you want to be impacted by what you hear from others. Then you might learn more about yourself and find yourself, when it’s your turn again, saying things you never would have dreamt you would say. Something new arises.
So we’ll do that, and then we’ll come back to the whole group for a few minutes and maybe have a little more discussion. At 10:45, we’ll stop for the potluck. So, if you’re up for it, turn to someone near you. Look around, make sure no one is left out.
(Group discussion period)
Well, that felt like a lot of energy in here. It felt like happy energy for the most part. I hope that was nice for you. Maybe given all the energy, we can take 30 seconds to sit quietly.
(Silence)
In the silence, I’ll read two quotes from the Buddha.
“If, desiring happiness, you use violence on others also desiring happiness, then you won’t find happiness.”
“One who neither kills nor makes others kill, who neither steals nor makes others steal, is one who has love for all beings.”
So it’s a religion of love, a religion of non-harming, of happiness. Or it’s not a religion; it’s about love and happiness and non-harming. Whatever that is, it’s good.
We have a couple of minutes. Any last words, any questions or comments that anyone wants to briefly make before we break for the potluck?
Question: What’s the Pali word for womb?
Gil: Oh, it’s yoni.4 It doesn’t literally mean womb for humans. It’s the source from where life comes from. So like the egg is the yoni for a chicken. So for humans, yoni happens to be the womb.
There’s a wonderful story, but I’ve told this maybe too many times. The Buddha said something like, “If a chicken sits on its eggs properly and incubates them just like they’re supposed to, even if the chicken does not want the eggs to hatch, the eggs will hatch. In the same way, if you live properly with the Eightfold Path, even if you don’t want to be enlightened, you will become enlightened.” So in that metaphor, it’s not a womb, it’s your eggs. Sit on your eggs. Incubate. Let something gestate, let something be nourished and supported.
Question: Thank you, Gil. Could you say a little bit about how you think about, or how you would recommend that we think about, not doing harm when we feel that we’re embedded in a system that is either intended or designed to do harm? How do you think about not doing harm when embedded in a system that feels like it wants to push us towards doing harm or is built to do harm?
Gil: Many years ago, I was a panelist at a conference about Buddhism and ethics. The panelists were all asked a question about our biggest ethical challenge as a Buddhist teacher. There was a Burmese monk who lived in the Bay Area for a long time named U Silananda,5 a lovely man. He said, “My biggest ethical challenge is that when the Burmese immigrants come to the United States, it’s hard for them to find work to take care of their family. Some of them can only find work in the military-industrial industry. They come to me and ask me if this is ethical or not. I know it’s unethical, but I know how hard it is to find work and take care of their family, so I don’t know what to say to them.”
This is a challenge many people have, and I just want to appreciate the challenge. I don’t know if I have a good answer. But that’s a kind of question that’s really important to keep and reflect on and analyze. Certainly, a small solution would be to ask, “Can I make a difference within it?”
Many years ago, I was teaching an academic class on Buddhism, and one of the students was a police officer. He said, “My department is kind of corrupt.” I said, “Well, why don’t you leave?” And he said, “No, I feel like I have to be there and try to make a difference, make it better.” So that’s one answer, one end of the extreme. I guess the other end is to leave it, find another way to have a life, and then everything in between. I want to thank you for that question. I appreciate very much that sensitivity you have.
Okay. Well, thank you all very much. We have a potluck, which means that everyone’s welcome to stay. It really doesn’t matter how much food there is or isn’t. It just matters that we’re here together in a friendly way and have a chance to hang out. We’ll serve the monk who’s here, Aggadhamma, thank you for being here, first, as is the custom, and then I hope you enjoy your company. Thank you.
Sangha: A Pali word meaning “community” or “assembly.” In Buddhism, it refers to the community of practitioners. ↩
Theravada: The “School of the Elders,” the oldest surviving branch of Buddhism. It is the dominant form of Buddhism in countries like Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar. ↩
Vipassanā: A Pali word that means “insight” into the true nature of reality. It is a form of meditation that involves self-observation to see things as they really are. ↩
Yoni: A Pali and Sanskrit word that can mean “womb,” “source,” “origin,” or “abode.” In this context, it refers to the source from which something arises. ↩
U Silananda: Original transcript said “Yucil Ananda.” Corrected to U Silananda, a well-known Burmese monk who taught in the Bay Area. ↩