This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Buddha’s Birthday Celebration - 2025 - 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.
Well, welcome everyone to IMC. Thank you for bringing us the baby Buddha and decorating this wonderful pagoda with flowers to celebrate. We celebrate the life of this amazing person from long, long ago that we call Buddha, which means “the one who is awake.”
The statue that’s right here closest to me, some of you can’t see it, but he’s walking. He’s walking with his hand up. Walking represents that he’s actually in our world, and the hand up means two things. It means that he carries no harm for others; he intends to cause no harm. He’s said to be walking in the world harmlessly, with a radical commitment to non-harming. The other thing this open hand means is that he’s everyone’s friend. He’s saying, “Hi, I’m friendly,” meaning he has no weapon in his hand. He’s open-handed, available, and friendly for everyone.
His most important teaching, the heart and center of it all, is to live a life of peace, both inside for oneself and outside by promoting peace in the world, starting by going into the world without any hatred, without any conflict, without any war. And so, he taught how to live a peaceful life.
We celebrate when he was born. There’s something very special about when humans are born. I think all of you were born at some point. Is that right? I think everyone here had that experience, though you probably don’t remember. You have to take some people’s word for it.
But something happens when we’re born. I think there’s a deep instinct in the human being to see, when a child is born, a brand new baby, that we’re all kin. That baby is family with all of us. All of us love, care, and are tender and soft about a new baby, regardless of where in the world they were born, what gender they are, what race they are, or what ethnicity they are. Our common humanity, our common bond, is that we’re all family together when we’re born.
There’s another time that this can happen a lot, and that is when it’s time for our life to come to an end, when we die. For those of you who have ever had a chance to be with someone who comes to this wonderful, sometimes difficult, time of life, there too we start seeing each other in our commonality, our humanity, and we’re family together. We’ll care for someone like that.
The statue on top represents the Buddha when he was dying. And one of the great things, because he was a man of peace, was that he was at peace dying. He had fulfilled his life. His heart was at ease. The reason his heart was peaceful is what happened here in the middle. This is a statue of him becoming awake. He’s called the “awake one.” What he realized there is that he came fully into himself. He became himself in such a full, complete way that he could be at peace with himself and at peace with the world.
To know yourself so well, to celebrate yourself, to appreciate yourself, to value yourself as an important, valuable person as you are, then helps a person to walk through the world peacefully. It helps a person to come to the end of their life peacefully. Each of those steps along a life is a gift to their community, to our family, to our friends. We’re here to celebrate this person who demonstrated this and taught this for us.
For the kids here, I don’t know if you know this, but did you talk about the baby Buddha? What’s he doing there? For the adults then, he was a little bit of a prodigy because when he was born, he was already born with a skirt on. And he immediately took seven steps. Does that sound a little bit unusual? And then he pointed one finger to the sky and one finger to the earth and he said, “The heavens above and the Earth below, I alone am the world-honored one.”
That sounds pretty conceited, you know. You don’t go around like that and say, “You guys know I’m the best.” But how this works, this kind of fable about how he was born this way, is that there’s something very profound if each of us can say this for ourselves and appreciate it’s true for everyone else. It kind of puts everyone on the same plane, on equal footing. So no one’s better than anybody else, but each person is special. Each person, in their own way, fully themselves, is the world-honored one. To really become yourself by letting go of all the ways that you’re not yourself and all the ways in which you’ve been told by society and other places to be someone different than who you are—it’s a remarkable achievement. That’s one of the reasons we meditate: to let go of all the voices, all the messages we get that tell us we can’t be at peace just being ourselves as we breathe.
So we celebrate this Buddha. The tradition is that when a baby is born, and I suspect it happened to each of you, someone cleaned you. I don’t know if it was needed, though, because if you’ve ever had a chance to be with a brand new baby just born, they have a heavenly scent. I didn’t know this until my son was born, and I kind of missed it. I got it at the end. When the second one was born, then I knew to appreciate it for about 24 hours. A brand new baby has a scent because it hasn’t yet digested any food, like from the mother’s milk. There’s something very different that comes off; that purity is a heavenly scent. To me, that represents that when we’re just ourselves without anything extra, our hearts can be pure. Our hearts can have a beautiful scent. The scent that the Buddha emphasized the most was the scent, the smell, of being harmless in this world, wishing no harm on anyone. And he said that smell travels freely in all directions.
So we’re going to celebrate. The way we’re going to do it is we’re going to chant an ancient little chant in Pāli1, the Buddhist language. I’ll teach you enough of the language; it’s four words. The words say, “May all beings be happy.” This idea that we’re all kin, we’re all family, and to have this wish that everyone would be happy.
So it’s: Sabbe means all, sattā means beings—all beings. Sabbe sattā sukhī means happy, and hontu means may they be.
Sabbe sattā sukhī hontu.
Great, you caught on. For the kids, once we start chanting it a little bit, then at some point I’ll invite you to come up here with the two little spoons, and you can begin the bathing of the baby Buddha. That will be our welcoming into this world the intention to live a life of harmlessness.
So, Sabbe sattā sukhī hontu. Sabbe sattā sukhī hontu.
Okay, you guys can come offer.
Sabbe sattā sukhī hontu. Sabbe sattā sukhī hontu. Sabbe sattā sukhī hontu. Sabbe sattā sukhī hontu. Sabbe sattā sukhī hontu. Sabbe sattā sukhī hontu.
I think that was enough for all of us to get clean. All of us to get clean. Thank you for bringing us the baby Buddha. What’s your name? Clara. And what’s your name over there? Jr. Sam. And Theo. So, thank you all for coming and doing this for us and helping to clean all of us, because we’re all always being born. Every day we have a chance to be reborn into a life dedicated to being kin with all beings. Thank you very much for coming.
We’ll have a little bit of time here now for the adults, who often need a little bit more help to realize how beautiful they are. Thank you.
For many years, I taught the family retreat at Spirit Rock, and that song, “Love Makes a Family,” was kind of the anthem for the kids who grew up coming every year. Some years, the most senior Buddhist monk in our tradition in the United States would come, his name is Ajahn Pasanno. He wasn’t really allowed to sing in his monastic rules, but he would sit there—a wonderful man—with a straight back, very stately, while Betsy Rose was singing this song, and tears would stream down his cheek, but he wouldn’t move. It was so beautiful to see that even he was touched deeply by the song and by all the kids and families there.
So I want to say a few words about the Buddha and his significance, through his life story. His life story is taught in different ways; people will pick different points out from the ancient records to emphasize, and I will do that too.
The story goes that at some point as a young adult, about 26 or 27, he felt that the life he was living was not helping him deal with his deepest existential issues—the suffering of the world and the suffering of himself. There were no universities to go to. He couldn’t go down the street to the local therapist. There was very little there. But the one thing he could do was join the spiritual seekers who were wandering around India, practicing all kinds of different practices, sometimes in community, sometimes alone. They were the closest thing to a wisdom tradition where you could go and learn and find some answers to the deepest existential issues that human beings have.
He went down from the foothills of the Himalayas to the plains of India to explore this. At first, he studied with the greatest meditation teachers of his time, who taught a practice to go into such deep meditative absorption that the world disappears, you disappear, and there’s almost no conception or even perception happening anymore. Consciousness is completely removed from the world that we live in. He mastered that but felt it wasn’t answering his questions.
Then, for many years, he tried the alternative route, which we call the ascetic route. Asceticism in ancient India was based on the belief that to be liberated, you had to be liberated from rebirth, from the endless cycles of being born again and again. To do that, you had to stop the creation of karma, the momentum of desire and wanting that perpetuated you into the next life. The way to do that was not self-flagellation; it wasn’t forcing yourself to have pain. The idea was to eat less and less, to live a completely harmless life where you wouldn’t even harm a living creature in the water you were drinking. They would live very, very simply. Some of them walked around naked. They would eat less and less, because any inclination to want to live was considered perpetuating the desire to live, which you had to stop. In some of these traditions, if you could stop eating and drinking entirely and just die that way, that was the way to end the cycles of rebirth.
The Buddha did this, as the ancient texts say, as far as you could possibly go without actually dying. The depictions of him are pretty graphic; people actually thought he had died, he was so emaciated. But he went so far that he realized this was not the way; this was not going to work.
Then he had a memory. The memory was from when he was about six years old. He was sitting peacefully at the edge of a field where his father was plowing during the spring plowing festival. It was a big event with pageantry and many people, but he was kind of forgotten, sitting under a rose apple tree in the shade. He was just watching in a peaceful, quiet way, absorbed and settled. His self-concern as a six-year-old disappeared, and he entered into a very deep state of well-being.
It was a kind of well-being that some of you might have experienced as a child. I have a variety of reference points for such feelings. One of them was covering the kitchen table with a white sheet, with sunlight streaming into the kitchen, and going under the table behind the sheets. There was this beautiful white light coming in that felt very clean. I felt so safe and comfortable, and everything in me settled. There was this feeling of very deep contentment and happiness, something I’d never known before in my life. That became a reference point for me when I started doing meditation practice, and then it started coming back, and I thought, “Oh, this is good.”
The Buddha remembered that experience he had and said, “This was really good. You can trust this. This is not a problem. This is not indulging in sensual pleasure, and this is not asceticism. This is a way of becoming more peaceful that must be the way to awakening.”
So then he followed that opening. It was meditation, but it wasn’t a meditation where you checked out, where there was no consciousness or connection to the world at all. He only followed it as far as the deepest kind of sense of peace and well-being that you can experience in meditation and still be connected to yourself and to this world. He discovered how to live in harmony with this deep peace and happiness, which allowed him to let go very fully of his clinging and attachment.
He came back then to teach. The first teaching he gave was to his companions in the ascetic life. They thought he had given up because when he realized there was another way, he started eating again, which they thought was indulging. But he came and found them and said, “No, I wasn’t indulging. I discovered a different way of living, a different purpose.” It was a way of being in the world. It was not checking out of the world, and it was not indulging in worldly pleasures in such a way that we lose touch with ourselves.
He said what he discovered was the Eightfold Path. When he first taught it, it wasn’t so much a way to awakening; it was the path we live when we are awakened. This is how you live in the world. You don’t check out, and you don’t dive headlong into Wall Street to make as much money as you can. You have this very middle way that is the clearing in the forest between being lost in sensual desires and being lost in asceticism and self-denial. In that middle way, what makes a path is this freedom and clearing where you can walk in this world.
And how you walk in this world is with Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration. For his time, this was a remarkable teaching that was saying we can live in this world. We don’t have to check out. We can live in a simple way, but this is how we live it.
And how do we live in the right way? Not by knowing the rules and then following them to the letter. The word “right” here, sammā in Pāli, means something that comes out of our wholeness, something that becomes complete in ourselves—complete view, complete intention, complete speech. It’s consummate, something that has come into its fullness.
You see this represented by the story of his own awakening. He discovered it when he sat very, very peacefully. His mind and heart were soft, malleable, workable, free of hindrances, free of distractions. He had attained this beautiful state of heart and mind that we’re capable of attaining when we’re not distracted and not in conflict with ourselves and the world, fully present. But the point wasn’t to be in that state. The point was that the state was a wellspring, a source from which he could think in profound ways. He started asking himself profound questions about the nature of suffering and where it came from in him. This wellspring of profound reflection and investigation then became the source from which he understood how this wise new life could be lived.
One of the metaphors he used for this is a natural spring of water at the base of a lake. You have this image of something flowing out like a spring, fanning out into a lake with refreshing, clear, clean water. This represents that there’s something inside of us, from a source, that can fill us with goodness, with wholesomeness, with purity, that allows for this way of living in the world that’s free, that’s liberated, that’s awake.
When he taught mindfulness, the key pivoting issue is when we can be aware of the distinction between the shallow or surface feelings that we have versus the profound feelings we can have. The surface feelings are, you know, you don’t like it that it’s cold or warm, or you want more massages, or you don’t like it that people are insulting you because that affects the image you want to project onto the world. These are all more surfacy from the point of view of Buddhism. But to discover that there’s a distinction between what’s shallow and what’s deep within, that has an integrity—meaning it can’t be touched (literally, in Latin)—this deep wellspring within cannot be hurt, offended, or destroyed by anyone, no matter what happens around us.
And then came the time to die. It says that he died outside under two trees, and the trees were flowering at that time, which must have been quite beautiful. He was laying on his side, like he is up there. He went back into these deep meditation states, starting with the one he had as a six-year-old, and fulfilling it until he went into the fourth stage of these deep meditations, the fourth jhāna2. And in the fourth jhāna, this beautiful, peaceful state where he had let go to become awake, he let go again in a deep way. And with that, he passed away.
He passed away in one of the most sublime, beautiful, fulfilling states of mind and heart that anyone could experience and still be connected to this world. It’s such a beautiful message that this is possible for us. The idea that each of us has within us this profound source that can lead us to our own profound peace, that we can become awake here in this life. We can live a wise life, participating in the world with a life that’s being filled out from this source. And that filling out is Right Intention, Right View, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Mindfulness, and Concentration.
Do that enough, and chances are high that you too will find a very fulfilling life that originates from deep within, that’s not dependent on failure and success in this world, not dependent on things in the world going the way that you want them to go. There’s a peace that’s unconditioned, independent, that is just its own fulfillment. If you’re in touch with that, there’s a fair chance that when it’s your turn to die—because rumors are that not only were you born, but you will one day die—that if you connect to this source that you are, maybe you too will die peacefully.
I know that for me, one of the gifts this practice has given me is that I have a lot of confidence that, if I’m lucky enough to die slowly, it can be just a really wonderful experience. One of the deepest, most satisfying, and meaningful experiences a human being can have. Not the dead part, but the dying part—the part of letting go, letting go, letting go, so that the source within can fill us in those last moments of our life.
So, thank you for coming. What I’d like to invite you to do, those of you who would like, is you can come up here and bathe the baby Buddha. If you like symbolism, it symbolizes washing yourself so that the baby awakening in you might come forth into this world and be welcomed here.
So thank you for being here. May all beings know that they’re beautiful. Thank you.
Pāli: An ancient Indo-Aryan liturgical language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is the language of the earliest Buddhist scriptures. ↩
Jhāna: A state of deep meditative absorption or concentration. In Buddhist practice, there are traditionally four successive jhānas, each more refined than the last, leading to profound states of tranquility and insight. ↩