This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Earth Day Talk: Participating in Nature - 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. So, this being the closest Sunday to Earth Day, I thought it would be a good day to celebrate it with an Earth Day talk. This is a topic that’s very dear to me because of what I feel is a very intimate and close connection to the earth, to the natural world that I grew up with and have continued to be part of in different parts of my life. It seems that who I am as a person is almost inseparable from what the earth is, what the natural world is.
A little story that I like for that is when I was going to college in the Central Valley in California, in the town of Davis, they had some magnificent oak trees in the courtyards of the campus—old, massive, majestic oak trees. Somehow they had survived from being cut down. I think there was a time when these massive, great, majestic oak trees were spread out across the valley. The earliest records of Europeans coming to the peninsula, which was Admiral Vancouver in something like 1780 or so, he describes that there was like an English park literally where we are, with massive oak trees and grasslands, as he came in the spring.
So in Davis, on the campus, they have some of these big oak trees. I was studying botany and took a botany class. In the beginning of that quarter, they talked about the cycle of oxygen and carbon dioxide, and how we breathe out carbon dioxide, the trees breathe that in and convert it to oxygen, and that the oxygen that we breathe is coming from the plants around us. I was quite absorbed in this whole biochemical description of how this works on the big blackboard in the very big campus hall. I got somewhat absorbed in that topic, and my mind got kind of quiet.
The class was over, and I walked out and came into the courtyard. I was stunned as I stood there; I kind of froze in my tracks and looked at these majestic oak trees. The thoughts that went through my mind were, “I need these trees to produce oxygen for me—the plants, not just the trees, of course—more than I need both my kidneys.” There are parts of my body I don’t need as much as some kind of thing outside of me that’s producing the oxygen. And so I had this question: where do I start? Where do I end? Where does a tree start? Where does a tree end? Who are we? If I need the tree more than I need my left kidney or something, where do I begin? Where do I end? What is this connection? I remember my mind got so still and quiet, and I felt a kind of vast, sacred space just being with these massive oak trees.
Now, this is the third year I’m going to do a pilgrimage in Marin County. It’s a walking pilgrimage, this time about five or six days. We’re going to leave the Spirit Rock Meditation Center and walk over the Marin Headlands, over Mount Tam. Some of the places we go have old-growth redwood forests. Maybe you’ve been there; we go to Muir Woods early in the morning before everyone comes, and it’s very, very quiet there and peaceful. These trees are magnificent. For me, and maybe for a fair amount of people, you get quiet being there in those groves. In fact, one of the groves is called Cathedral Grove. There’s a sense of sacredness, the specialness of it, and the reverence that’s there. There’s a kind of healthy humility that comes with being a human being in the presence of these massive, ancient trees, some of them probably easily a thousand years old, if not more.
For me, it changes my relationship with all these places of me and the world. I feel like I’m in a reverent relationship to the natural world. I don’t feel like I’m someone who’s going to dominate the world; I feel I’m a small little member of this family of life on this planet. I feel more alive in this humbleness or reverence in the relationship to these groves than I do watching Netflix or surfing the web, working on my computer.
On one of these pilgrimages, I reflected about the native people of that area. There was a time before things were logged and cut down, and freeways put in, that I think there were many places that had these massive trees and redwoods. You walk along the coast there, and it’s spectacular, the Marin coastline. I’m sure that there was a very different relationship for who we are in relationship to the natural world by having it that way. I’ve imagined myself here on the peninsula before there were any of these square buildings that we have here now, and what it would have been like walking 300 or 400 years ago here, with these great massive oak trees. There was one on Pulgas, one of the streets here nearby, a massive old one. When the city decided it needed to be cut down because it was in danger of falling and was relatively close to a school, there were all these people who protested and tried to stop it, but with no success. So then they did a ceremony around the tree, and all these local neighborhood kids came and kind of honored the tree and said goodbye to it.
This way in which our relationship to the natural world can shift and change depending on how we’re in touch with it, how we live in it, and how we participate in it. So this pilgrimage that we do, it changes my relationship to the land by spending five days walking across it. We walk usually in the morning in silence, and we do some ceremony as we go along. There’s this sense of greater humility, and then for me, a kind of a renewed promise I make to try to walk on this world gently, to try to walk on this world without having such a big impact on it.
When the Buddha was enlightened, or before he was enlightened, the statue we have here depicts the moment. If you see his right hand drapes over his knee, it’s him reaching forward to touch the earth. As was the custom back then, but what has now for me become a phenomenally powerful symbolic value, the stories say the Buddha was born under a tree outdoors. He was enlightened outdoors under a tree. His first teachings were done outdoors under a tree. He died outdoors, laying on the ground between two trees. They say the trees were flowering, so it was kind of a special time.
On the night of his awakening, they say that this particular evil, trickster kind of character showed up, called Mara1, to try to prevent him from becoming enlightened. Mara came to him and said, “You don’t deserve to be enlightened. Who do you think you are to do that? You’re not worthy of this.” The Buddha didn’t reply directly, but what he did was he put his hand and touched the earth—the earth-touching gesture—and called upon the earth to be his witness for his right to be awakened, to be free, no longer caught in the traps that Mara the tempter was setting up to trap him in. The primary thing that Mara uses to trap people is sensual desires. Occasionally, you’ve probably been caught by that. Mara’s last wish is for someone to escape his realm of sensual desire, so he really wanted to stop the Buddha.
So the Buddha touched the earth, and they say the earth then shook, bearing witness of all the compassionate things the Buddha had done through his many lifetimes, all his practices he had done, that yes, he was worthy of it. I love this, that we call on nature to witness. We call on the earth to be our witness. So if you’re meditating or if you’re walking on the earth, what can the earth be a witness for you? What does the earth say about you? What is it there to show you about yourself? I’ll leave that question hanging there for now.
One of the things is that we live on the earth, and it’s so easy to forget it. We live with the earth. In the case of the Buddha touching the earth, they had this idea that there was the earth goddess, so Mother Earth, as some people like to say. Historically, nowadays maybe the parent earth, but this kind of parental source of life that the earth has been for all of us. It wasn’t so many years ago in the scale of time that apparently there was no life on this earth. There’s been a longer period of time with no life on this earth than there has been life on this earth.
And then if we think about how long humans have been on this earth, it’s a much shorter period of time. I’ve read—I don’t know the latest research on this—but I read some time ago some idea when they do genetic testings of human beings, they can kind of look back in time through the genetic evidence that survives. They think that all humans are descended from a small group of people, a tribe that was probably just a few hundred large, somewhere on the plains of Africa at some time, a few hundred thousand years ago or something. I love this idea that we all have common ancestors. It makes us all kin; it makes us all family. To call on that, that we’re all family in some ways, we all have shared ancestors. If we could trace it back, we would be able to all walk up maybe to the same little group of people and say, “Hi, I’m the result of what you started. Thank you for my life.” And we’d all kind of be gathering around the same group of people to thank them.
There’s a story that’s told in the Jataka tales2 that also goes back many, many millennia, millions of years, which tells stories of the Buddha in his previous life before he was the Buddha. Some of these are like Aesop’s fables. The fable here is that the Buddha was a deer; he was the king of a very large herd of deer, and he was called the Banyan deer, banyan being the Bodhi tree.
The story goes that there was a new king in the land, and this king loved to hunt. So he took a royal forest, a very large forest that had lots and lots of herds of deer, and he put a large fence around all of it to keep them all there. Once a day, he wanted to go hunting; he wanted to kill one deer a day so he could have food and enjoy his sport of hunting. But his hunting that way, he would come with his entourage and soldiers and elephants, and it was a big to-do. The deer would get afraid and they would start rushing off this way and that way to get away, but they were trapped inside this large area, and so that made them panic even more. He was successful in killing one deer a day, but a lot of deer got injured in the process. They would trip over each other, trip over logs; those who had antlers would run into others and stab them. It was kind of a mess.
So one day, the king of the Banyan deer, after the human king had hunted one of the deer, went up to the king and said, “Excuse me, sir, you have to realize what you’re doing here. You’re injuring a lot of the deer, you’re harming them. More are dying than need to die because of the way you’re doing this hunting. I’m here to ask you to please try to do an act of harm reduction.” He wasn’t asking him to not kill, because maybe that was asking too much, but as an intermediate step, he asked for harm reduction. The harm reduction was, “We will provide you with one deer. We’ll choose by drawing lots who has to present themselves to the king to be killed every day. That won’t create all this other harm from people running and trying to chase them.”
And so that’s what they did. These compassionate deer, who wanted to prevent so much harm from being done, were willing to sacrifice their lives for the greater good, in a sense. Then one day, it fell upon a pregnant doe to be the one to offer herself as a sacrifice. But she was pregnant, so she went to the deer king and said, “Please, can I not do it until after my fawn is born?” The king said, “Well, I can’t really ask someone else to do it in your stead, but don’t worry, you don’t have to do it.”
So when the human king came to hunt that day, the deer king offered himself in order to save the doe and the pregnant child. The deer king was very majestic, had a strong presence, and stood there in all his dignity, ready to be killed. But this got the king’s attention. The king said, “I can’t kill another king, you know, in this kind of majesty.” And so he said, “What are you doing here?” The deer told the king the story about the pregnant doe and that he was taking her place to save the doe and the child. The king was so moved by the compassion, the care, and the sacrifice that the deer king was willing to make that it changed his heart dramatically. He said, “Okay, from now on, I’m going to stop killing any of the deer.” The deer king said, “Dear king, that’s not enough. Can you make a vow not to kill any animals?” And the king said yes. So in that realm, from then on, no animals were ever killed.
It’s a fable. And it’s said, or I’ll say, that the moment the king promised yes, he would no longer kill any animals, that’s when the forest started to heal itself.
We’ve harmed so many places in our world, in the natural world. When are they going to heal? Some of them maybe never will heal. When I was in high school, I went to hear a talk by Richard Leakey. Some of you might remember him. He was one of the first, or a really important anthropologist of ancient humans. I think he was the one who found, at the time, the remains of the oldest human in Africa, the skull of an oldest human. So that was a big deal. He knew a lot about evolution. In this big auditorium, he explained that what he had seen is that a species that overspecializes dies out. He used the example of the woolly mammoths. Apparently, their tusks got so big they couldn’t function very well anymore to defend themselves, and so they were easy to hunt and died out because they overspecialized. He was saying that back then, this was the late 1960s, that if we overspecialized as humans, we were going to have the same fate.
In some ways, we already have. We’ve had civilizations come and go over the millennia. I saw some of that growing up in Europe. One of the places I grew up was on the Adriatic coast. In my eyes, there were some really beautiful islands that we would visit and go on vacation. We would go sailing sometimes along these islands, and part of their beauty was their starkness of just being rock. But they weren’t always just rock. There had been a time when they were filled with olive and grape orchards. You could still find back then in the 60s, if we went diving into the water in these little bays, you could find clay vases that had fallen off the boats and a lot of pottery shards left over from that time when the Roman ships came to get the olives and the grapes. They overfarmed, and all the soil washed away, and the islands can no longer bear a lot of vegetation because all the soil washed away. So the people who were surviving and lived off the land had to move because they could no longer survive. That’s happened to whole civilizations in Mesopotamia, where they overfarmed, overused the water, and then the civilization collapsed.
So it’s what Richard Leakey said: if you overspecialize, do too much, things collapse. I grew up partly also in Los Angeles in the 60s, and I remember still very well the amazing amount of smog that LA used to have back then. We would get sore throats just by breathing the air, and runny eyes. I remember sometimes flying back to Los Angeles from being in Europe and going out of the airplane, and the smell of this thick smog was quite something. The direction it was going, I don’t know if anybody would have survived in Los Angeles. But that’s one of the relatively good stories of cleaning the air. The catalytic converters, all kinds of things happened that cleaned up the air enough so it’s not as bad as it used to be. I don’t think people get sore throats anymore in LA from the smog.
So what kind of harm reduction do we do? Are we the king who goes around killing the metaphoric deer by how we live in our lives? How much dies, how much is killed and destroyed inadvertently by the lifestyles that we have? What’s the equivalent of the king hunting and then the secondary effect of all the other deer dying? What happens to us? What are we destroying?
One of the very clear teachings of the Buddha is that he distinguished between the natural world and what he called the synthetic world. He made a very strong distinction between the natural world and the humanly constructed world—what we can build and make and think that doesn’t exist in the natural world itself. It’s not natural in the sense that it’s not produced by the natural world, and it doesn’t participate in the natural process of regeneration, of self-healing, of self-replication.
I saw that when I went to Spirit Rock last week. A little representation of it for me was, it’s so great to be at Spirit Rock, this meditation center in Marin County. It’s designed to be outdoors; anytime you go between different buildings there, you really feel like you’re part of the land in a nice way. I’ve been going there for over 35 years now, even before there were any buildings there. In about 1993, the person who started IMC before I got involved, a man named Howard Noodleman, who started it with his wife Ingrid in 1986 in Menlo Park, died. He had been president of the Spirit Rock board. So when he died, we went and bought three oak trees and planted them near Sir Francis Drake Boulevard as you go into Spirit Rock, in his honor. Well, those three trees are still there, and they just look more grand every year I go to Spirit Rock. They’re growing, developing, and now they’ve been growing there for over 30 years.
In 1998, they opened the big residential meditation hall, which 27 years ago was shiny new. I remember what it was like. This time when I was there, I looked around and wow, it’s aging. It’s beginning to rot, the wood on the side of the building, and rust here and there. This is not going to last so well for another 27 years, but those trees are doing just great.
We build things that don’t exist in the natural world and don’t participate in the natural process of life because they don’t replicate, they don’t reproduce. Some of those things that we create that are not natural, the synthetic things, cause a lot of harm. So now we have all these microplastics that we’re finding deeply embedded in our body, in our brain. I think I read this last couple of days that they’re finding microplastics in the fallopian tubes. It’s not going to be long before we find microplastics in embryos. Is that what we want to have in our life? We have to be very careful about the synthetic world that we’re creating, and forever chemicals.
The Buddha didn’t know about all the things that we create synthetically now, but he made a very clear distinction between what’s constructed—and in his mind, it was really the things we construct in the mind that don’t exist in the natural world. A lot of the concepts, ideas that we live in, ideas about me, myself, and mine, greed, hate, and delusion that we construct. These constructions, these ideas, these worlds that we move into that our fantasies create, can create so much harm. The Buddha kept pointing us back to the natural world in ourselves. He used metaphors of the natural world outside as a representation of how the natural world works so we can find it in ourselves.
I think the most dramatic use of these kinds of metaphors, using part of the natural world that’s in us to represent the natural world that’s in us in terms of spiritual practice and life, was he referred to something profound within us that arises from something that he called the yoni3. Yoni is the source of life for humans; it means the womb. The profound attention, profound contemplation, the profound engagement with life that’s womb-like, coming from this deep place within. It’s a generative place. The Buddha talked about spiritual life as a life we’re growing.
I want to say something I’ve said a few times. In English Buddhism, we use the word “practice” a lot to describe what we do. We practice meditation, for example. A lot of people who practice meditation, so the common question in the Buddhist circles in the West is, “What is your practice?” And then people usually reply with a technique: “I practice mindfulness, I practice loving-kindness, I practice Zen,” this and that. That’s nice, but it’s usually describing it by technique.
From the time of the Buddha, the equivalent word to the word “practice” that kind of fits in the same context, that word means to grow, to cultivate, to develop something. So what happens if you were asked not “What are you practicing?” but instead you’re asked, “What are you growing?” What would you answer then? If you say what you’re practicing, I think it’s easy to say, “Well, I’m practicing something else, you’re practicing that, I’m practicing the better thing.” But what are you growing? Now we’re talking about the natural world within, and something we all have. We all have inner growth. We all have this natural world inside that can grow. We all are nature.
It’s hard to imagine that they’ll ever have a human being who’s not born in a womb. Will they ever be able to incubate or gestate a human being in a lab? Is that possible? I hope not. It’s amazing what our natural world is like, that which is within us. The natural world within us that can think, that can feel, that can heal to some degree, that can replicate—all kinds of things that arose out of this earth, came from this earth, that is part of the earth’s natural processes. We’re sharing this in a profound way that makes us kin, makes us family with all life on this planet.
The earth, all the things we see in the natural world, are not just decoration for our pleasure. It’s a participatory natural world that we participate in. It participates in us. It provides us with oxygen, it provides us with food, it provides us with so much in order to be alive. We need the natural world, and then our naturalness has a chance to grow. For the Buddha, we’re learning to tap into, to support, to generate, to care for, to preserve the natural world in ourselves so we don’t get caught up in the constructed, synthetic world that humans have been very clever in creating over these last centuries.
The Buddha also saw the constructed world of ideas of self, ideas of status, ideas of dominance, ideas of right and wrong and good and bad, that are causing so much harm in this world. So the idea is we’re all kin, we all belong to this world. What the redwood trees remember, what the deer remember, we just need to re-remember, reconnect to that, how much we’re part of this natural world, how the earth cares for us. And if the earth cares for us, shouldn’t we care for it? Can we walk on this world lightly? And what would that look like, at least in terms of harm reduction?
The idea of stopping causing harm might not be natural. Just as I saw at Spirit Rock last week, there’s a white egret that has kind of taken up residence there. Now it doesn’t seem to be very afraid of people. You can’t get too close, but you can get 10 feet away from it. It’s been there for about a year, and so it’s kind of cool to see this white egret. They named it Paul. But one day I was standing 10 feet away, and it was doing what it does, and suddenly it just kind of snapped at the ground, and in its bill was a lizard that it had caught. I was told there are very few lizards around Spirit Rock right now because of this one egret. On one hand, at first I thought, “Wow, this is like an amazing natural thing to watch.” But then I thought about the lizard, and I felt for the lizard. But you know, some of that is not going to stop. That’s going to continue. But can we at least do harm reduction for ourselves, so we don’t hold ourselves above nature? We are nature.
May we be like the king of the deer. May our compassion spread out into the world so that everyone is cared for, everyone’s respected and valued. May we have forests that are sanctuaries, cathedrals, sacred places that we go to to remember who we are in some deep way that we can’t remember so well, so easily on the freeways in the Bay Area in rush hour traffic.
And perhaps this earth is not something to be saved. Maybe it’s something to come home to. And if we come home to it and live with it as our home, then maybe it will save us. The natural process of this natural world, the regeneration, the self-healing of the natural world has the ability to heal us, save us, if we allow it to, if we connect to it in such a way. The earth, I think, will always continue. Life as we know it will be radically different. Maybe the human race will disappear, but the earth will be here, life will probably be here in some form or other. But it looks like we know now, since the 20th century, that we’re quite capable of destroying this world as we know it. And if we do that, we destroy ourselves. But if we come home to this world and touch the earth, let the earth be the witness to our own naturalness, maybe the earth will save us. That’s my hope on this Earth care week 2025.
So thank you. We have a few minutes, maybe we can take five minutes if anyone has any comments or questions you’d like to ask.
Maybe that means you’re all eager to go out to Edgewood Park or go out for a walk on the trails here in the peninsula. That would be nice to believe. Oh, yeah, Morgan.
Morgan: Hi, my name is Morgan, and I wanted to just mention that there is a cemetery in Santa Cruz that, for ecology, they sell redwood trees for burial. And so if you have loved ones that you want to have a family tree, you can buy a tree and you can bury them in the redwoods in Santa Cruz, and it’ll be there for as long as redwoods last.
Gil Fronsdal: Great, thank you. It’s a beautiful… I think it’s called Better Forest, that’s what it’s called. Yeah, thank you. I didn’t know there was such a thing in Santa Cruz, but there’s a number of places now that have green burials where sometimes they plant trees as part of it. We’re going to maybe walk by it when we do the pilgrimage this year. It’s in Tennessee Valley in Marin County. So thank you. May you love this earth.
Mara: In Buddhism, a demonic celestial king who personifies temptation, sin, and death. He attempted to distract the Buddha from his path to enlightenment. ↩
Jataka tales: A voluminous body of literature native to India concerning the previous births of Gautama Buddha in both human and animal form. ↩
Yoni: A Sanskrit word that literally means “womb,” “source,” or “origin.” In this context, it refers to a deep, generative source of wisdom and contemplation within oneself. ↩