This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video The Qualities of True Dharma - 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.
There is a famous story in Buddhism of the Buddha, supposedly when he was about six or seven. It was a springtime, apparently a nice spring day, and his father was leading the ritual first plowing of the season. They were out in the field plowing, and it was a bit of a festival. Because everyone was involved in the plowing, they left this little boy alone. He felt safe, secure, and comfortable being there. They say he was under a rose apple tree—I love that they remember the tree he was sitting under.
In the shade, watching all this happen in front of him, maybe he got a little bit absorbed in what was happening. He felt content and happy. It was engaging for his eyes, and he was following it. In the process of that, he got concentrated and entered into a relatively light samadhi1, but it was still an inner state of well-being, of unification, of being settled and peaceful. And that was nice for him.
Until he was about 36. By that time, he had spent years practicing as an ascetic, about six or seven years, trying to find a way to liberation in the systems of India at the time, and none of it worked for him. So one day, he was sitting meditating. Probably at the tail end of his ascetic period, he looked pretty emaciated; he was a kind of extreme ascetic of sorts. But he was sitting meditating, and he remembered that experience from about 30 years before. He recognized that that experience was onward-leading, that it had tastes or flavors of the liberation he was looking for. It was pointing to the possibility of liberation in a way that none of his previous practices did.
I don’t know if he got excited, but he got inspired that this was the way to liberation, and that this kind of deep state of samadhi—settled, quiet, peaceful—was not to be feared. When he was 36, he remembered this experience, and that was his entryway. Remembering that, maybe he felt some of it by memory, and so then he started his path. He got into that state again, and from there built his samadhi until he got strong enough samadhi that he was in a good state for his awakening.
So, a childhood experience of well-being, of being settled, peaceful, at home, comfortable—probably not something so strong that if some of you had something like that as a kid, it occurred to you to tell anyone. It’s just some of you maybe had something like that. As a kid in the garden, I had a spot under the kitchen table. I put a white sheet over it and made myself a little tent, and the beautiful sunlight would come in there. I was so safe in the kitchen. I think my mom was cooking, so there were nice, wonderful sounds around me that helped me feel kind of cozy. And I remember feeling so peaceful, so at ease. It was a feeling of probably purity, a very clean state, just underneath the white sheet with the white light coming in, and me just being so cozy and contented there.
Once he was enlightened, the Buddha started teaching. The way it’s classically taught in Buddhism, he taught the Dharma2. The Dharma is the closest word that probably corresponds to the English words “religion” or “spirituality.” Those are Western terms that are relatively complicated for some of us, and some of us avoid one more than the other. The comparable word in India was Dharma.
Dharma has many meanings, but two primary ones. It means the teachings of the Buddha, and it means the experience that he’s pointing to, like the experience he had as a six-year-old—something very personal, a personal process, something to be experienced for yourself. Both those meanings for Dharma are encapsulated in a very famous part of the liturgy that is chanted by monastics every day, where they chant the qualities, the characteristics of what the Dharma is. It begins by saying, “The Dharma, well taught, well spoken by the Buddha, is…” and then they describe the qualities and characteristics of this thing called Dharma.
In one way, he’s saying the teachings taught by the Buddha are this way, but as you hear these five characteristics, it’s not just his teachings. It’s the inner process, the inner connection that we are to have in doing this practice. This is what this inner connection is, this inner Dharma, this experience, this feeling we’re supposed to have. You see this play back and forth between these two meanings. What that represents for me is that to whatever degree Buddhism is a religion, it’s a religion that is based on our own personal experience.
Those five characteristics are:
As a six-year-old, he experienced something that inspired him when he was older. The word for inspiration in the ancient language literally means something like “to have a feeling for the purpose or the meaning or the goal.” The word is attha in Pali, and for some of you who know Sanskrit, it’s artha. Attha-veda3 means to have a feeling, and this veda can be an inspired feeling that is aroused, or a deep knowing. To have this Dharma-inspired feeling, this Dharma movement inside the heart.
The reason I’m giving this talk today is because yesterday, we had a daylong retreat here. It was really nice to sit here; there were about 45 people meditating. Ever since the pandemic, people coming to these daylongs seem to sit so well. They’re quiet and intent, very sincere and dedicated. During this daylong, I saw about 16 people for 15-minute meetings to talk about their practice. Every single one of them came with a certain kind of sincerity. They were coming to talk about something that was important, and something about them had gathered together. They were connected to something inside. “This is important. I’m here to share something that’s valuable for me,” even if what they were talking about was their suffering or their challenges in life. There was a kind of coming together, and I was so inspired by this, by some kind of inner something inside of them that had gathered to engage in their process of the Dharma, of practice, of spirituality.
For some of them, it was clear the nature of this gathering together. Some of them clearly had years of meditation practice behind them, and I could feel the accumulated combination of their intentionality, their sense of purpose, and what they’ve been doing for all these years. They might have had a mind that was overactivated and felt like they weren’t getting concentrated, but I could feel that there was something here. In some of them, the best way I could characterize it to myself was that there was a contemplative heart, a contemplative nature inside of them. I think the person got a little bit scared because they associated that with becoming a monastic, but I reassured her that’s not what I meant.
It’s a kind of inner sensibility, a kind of faith, a sense of being connected to something that’s really good, onward-leading. Something that feels pleasant in a certain way, but how to characterize it might be very different for different people. Something within that’s very peaceful, maybe, or warm, or a sense of “this is home,” or this is where some different quality of joy or happiness or well-being exists that’s very different than the joy of winning the California lottery. That’s maybe joyful for a little while, but at the end of that day celebrating, you’re probably exhausted or crying. But this deep peace—the Buddha called the greatest happiness peace.
Walking down here, I was trying to remember the different times in my life where I experienced this kind of thing, even before I started meditating. I described being under the kitchen table. I grew up on the water a lot, next to the water in Norway. Sometimes being on the fjords early in the morning with the water completely still and quiet, no wind—somehow that was just like that “under the rose apple tree” experience. I knew that’s where I was supposed to be, where it was peaceful, where things felt full and complete and nothing else had to happen.
When I was 10, something happened on the public bus coming home from school in Italy. They had a driver and a conductor who sold the tickets. I discovered by instinct that if I sat in a certain seat—because I lived at the end of the bus line—the conductor would sit in front of me and take out his ledger to record all the different tickets he sold. I would look over his shoulder and watch him with his pencil doing his numbers, and I would just start feeling so good. I wasn’t thinking about it or grabbing it or wanting more of it; it was just like I knew I should do this. It was almost instinctual. Years later, when I started meditating, I realized, “Oh, that’s what I was experiencing.” That was a wonderful feeling for me of being at peace, at ease, comfortable in myself, even though my life around me was quite challenging. I had moved around a lot, was in a new city, new language, new country, didn’t know anybody. But that bus ride was a refuge for me.
Then, I had begun meditating but stopped when I lived with my friends on their farm. Because I was living there for a while, they decided they could take a difficult-to-acquire vacation, as they had cows that had to be milked every day. So I could do it. I was left alone for the first time in my life for five or seven days. And again, I had this feeling that welled up from being alone that long in a beautiful Norwegian rural place with these wonderful cows that I loved so much and was caring for. This wonderful feeling grew up during this time, also with a tremendous clarity of mind. It wasn’t that I stopped thinking, but I started seeing every thought like a diamond. No matter how bad the thought was, it was like, “Wow.”
That was also something I recognized in meditation later. It was a state people can often have on retreat. But that experience was so important. When my friends came back, I lost it, but it was so important for me. I thought, “This is really something to guide a life with. I have faith in this. I’m inspired by this.” So I had this Dharma feeling, this Dharma inspiration around this experience. It became my dedication to figure out how to answer this question: “How can I be alone with others?” I didn’t want to be a hermit, but I wanted to have this experience. It felt like this is how to be alive. It may be a strange expression for some people to hear, me wanting to be alone with others, but it was the best way at 20 that I could understand what I was trying to do. I wanted to be with people, connected to people, involved in the world, but I also wanted to come from that place of clarity and peace inside.
This was an example of an onward-leading experience, in the present moment, timeless, to be experienced by someone who was attempting to be wise on his way. All these things were behind me to get interested in Buddhist practice and meditation. It was there as a kind of reference point or a guide.
As we practice, this inner feeling of what the Dharma is, this religious, contemplative, spiritual experience, can start becoming a clearer reference. “Oh, this is important, this is valuable. How do I allow this to grow in my life and develop and flower, rather than just be something I occasionally touch in meditation or on retreat?” How do you live from this deeper sensitivity, this deeper feeling, this deeper kind of peace that’s possible? Each of you will have a different way of describing it. I don’t want you to believe you’re supposed to have it like me, but to have this Dharma feeling, this Dharma sensibility, this inspiration.
Sometimes the Buddha was explicit that it can come from a variety of things, all part and parcel of Buddhist practice. It can come from living ethically. There’s something about ethical integrity that can touch into this place. It isn’t just that you’re making ethical choices, but there’s a feeling that ethics is arising out of some deeper feeling of what it’s like to have a certain kind of ethical integrity. The Buddha said it can come out of generosity. There’s a way of being generous, magnanimous, open-handed to people and to the world, rather than miserly or clinging or hoarding. There’s a movement of freedom in opening your hand and giving away, and that, done well, can also give a person that Dharma feeling, that feeling for what the goal is. Generosity is a liberation of things; it is a letting go of something, so it’s a kind of precursor of the deep letting go that liberation is.
In the letting go, at some point a very special point arises where the letting go that we experience for ourselves gives rise to a real, clear feeling of the goodness of letting go—the peace, the warmth, the happiness of the heart not being clenched or contracted or hard or crusted over or armored. You can really feel, “Oh, look at this, this is good.” One metaphor the Buddha used was an open path in an overgrown jungle. If you’ve ever tried to go through an overgrown jungle where there’s no path, it can be slow going. You’re lost, going around, and I’ve done that and ended up all scratched up and bloody because it was so dense. Then finally, the open path is there, and it just feels like now I’m sailing through. It feels so good. I know where I’m going, I’m finally safe, I’m heading home, and now it’s unencumbered. To have that feeling in your heart and to have it so clear that it represents this Dharma feeling, this inspiration.
It’s a little bit hard for people coming out of Western religions to understand this can be a form of religious experience, if so much of the religious experience is around a relationship to a deity or something outside of you. But it might be very comparable, the kind of deep experience; it just has a different kind of object of where it’s directed. Here in the Dharma, it’s directed to an experience we’re having that then grows and inspires us.
One of the reasons why this inspiration is so good is that for the Buddha, when we really get a feel for it, it gives rise to joy—a joy that doesn’t take us away from the present moment but puts us into the present more fully. It supports the practice of mindful presence. It’s a joy that begins setting in motion this onward-leading nature. A gladness that leads to joy, a joy that leads to tranquility, a tranquility that leads to happiness, and a happiness that leads to a deep version of this samadhi, a deep version of this feeling of being under the rose apple tree.
It was nice yesterday being here and feeling that there were people who were expressing, in how they were sitting and how they were talking, a wonderful sense of purpose. For some of them, it came from having something in there saying, “This is the path.” They had practiced long enough that you could see this wonderful way in which they were giving the practice a chance to really change them and open them and reshape them in some profound way. So I was inspired, and my hope was to share that inspiration with you.
Maybe you have a contemplative heart. I think everyone does, but maybe there’s a better word for you. Maybe you have a practice heart, a practice orientation. Maybe you have a liberating heart, a heart that wants to be liberated. Maybe you prefer the word love. Maybe you have a loving heart, and your feeling of what love is—a love that needs nothing, that’s so deep—maybe that’s the experience we’re talking about here for you.
Maybe this is also a nice talk before we celebrate the Buddha’s birthday next week. We’re celebrating his birthday, his enlightenment, and his death all in the same day. It’s really efficient, so we can get back to meditation and do it for ourselves.
So we have a few minutes. Let’s start by hearing a couple of comments from some of you or questions you might have.
Questioner 1: Good morning, Gil. Thank you so much for today’s talk. My husband and I are also enjoying the Monday through Friday sitting meditations with you. At this point in my life, I’m really enjoying the peace and calm. But I also wonder, I feel like I have this struggle—but I don’t know if it’s a struggle. My best and favorite memories from childhood are actions and physical, so not peace and calm. Maybe some of that was because of my family environment, but the running and jumping off of swing sets and balancing on various things and tumbling and rolling down hills. So very much a physical experience. And so I’m trying to figure out what that means to me. It feels like, yeah, that’s being in the moment, but it also feels like maybe too activated and not at peace and not calm.
Gil Fronsdal: So, fascinating. Wonderful that you see that. I’m sure that that freedom you felt in action can be a wonderful reference point for this practice. You might try doing walking meditation and seeing if a little bit of it can come alive there. And yes, if there’s too much energy involved, there can be a feeling of freedom, but it doesn’t allow the mind to settle enough to start touching the deeper places that need to be touched in this practice, where more and more of this freedom can be discovered. But it can only be discovered if the more activated actions have gotten quiet. But I wouldn’t want to dismiss this or say that you shouldn’t have it. It might be some way to use it. You know, go tumbling now before you meditate, and then maybe do walking meditation with it, and then sit down and let things get quieter. And then in the deepest places you go in meditation, you could very well re-experience that level of freedom without any action at all.
Questioner 2: When I was in seventh grade in San Francisco at a Catholic school, it was very warm and all the windows were open, and the nun was droning on and on for some 50-minute lecture like they used to do. But I very distinctly remember—I’ve never told anybody this—the feeling of kind of leaving the room, hearing the outside world come in, and then I felt connected to the entire world. That the entire world was humming all at the same time with me. And I kind of left my ego, and it was just this collective world.
Gil Fronsdal: Very nice. So, some of you maybe have had experiences like that. Some of you don’t have any memory like that, and what you remember is the opposite. Some people have had all kinds of very tragic, very difficult experiences growing up, and I don’t want to belittle or dismiss that. For some people, that’s why they come to practice. The Buddha’s mother died when he was a baby, which is a huge loss. So maybe that was also in his psyche as he was finding his way, because he was certainly motivated to try to find an end to suffering. So I can well imagine that he knew suffering well.
Both are very important for the Dharma to be honest about. What the Buddha was trying to teach, I believe, is that in order to address suffering well, it’s good to create a really good state of mind and heart that prepares you to hold it in a good way, to be able to hold it in a generous, open way without being a victim of your suffering, but rather to be a healer of it and find the freedom in it. The sense of joy and happiness that can come with practice is in the service of addressing the suffering. It’s not an escape from it, not some kind of way of just pretending everything is sweet and wonderful and you can just ignore the suffering of the world. The suffering of the world is being addressed, but with a different lens, a different approach, a different capacity to be with it than most people learn on their own.
Questioner 3: Thank you so much. I’m Lance. Earlier when you asked us what memory we have of peace, what came up for me was being in my parents’ room when I was young with my siblings, and we’re all just like enjoying our time together. You know, like we were singing, sharing pizza, and that was great. And another memory was me hiking alone in the wilderness, just looking at the mountains. How does one reconcile the sense of peace amongst others or within a community, and also in solitude? What is between peace in a community like in the family, and peace in nature or in solitude, like meditating or hiking alone? What is peace? I guess, sorry, that might be a loaded question.
Gil Fronsdal: I appreciate this question a lot. It seems like it’s coming from an important place in you. Peace can be experienced—peace is not an issue about who you’re with or not with, or where you are in the world. Peace has to do with the quality and characteristics of your heart. Some environments create the conditions that support the peaceful heart, and maybe the quality is a little bit different in different situations. But the center of focus is not the external world. It’s to be experienced by the wise, personally. So, to start discovering some of the operating principles inside—how the mind and body and heart work, how you lose the peace, what supports it—so you can begin identifying and living with it as a companion no matter where you go, and you take it with you.
Gil Fronsdal: Thank you. So, the idea is now if you would turn to a couple of people next to you, say hello and introduce yourself. And then if there’s anything from this talk that inspired you, maybe share it in a few brief words.
Samadhi: A Pali and Sanskrit word for a state of meditative concentration or absorption, where the mind becomes still and unified. ↩
Dharma: A core concept in Buddhism with multiple meanings, including the teachings of the Buddha, the universal laws of nature, and the path to enlightenment. ↩
Attha-veda: A Pali term explained by Gil Fronsdal in the talk. Attha means “purpose,” “meaning,” or “goal,” and veda means “feeling” or “knowing.” Together, it suggests an intuitive “feeling for the purpose” or an inspiration that guides one on the spiritual path. ↩