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Depth of Dharma - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on February 25, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Depth of Dharma

Hello, everyone here, and hello to people online.

I thought it a little bit abrupt for me to come out of meditation and now suddenly have to speak.

What I'd like to do today is to bring in a perspective and orientation on our life, and our Buddhist practice, from another domain, another field. That can often be useful because it helps us to see what we're doing in a new way—whether it's looking at our Buddhist practice in a new way or, independent of that, looking at our own life in a new way. That's the hope for this talk.

I like to think of what I'm going to point towards as the depth of the Dharma¹. But rather than thinking of the Dharma as something outside of you, it's the depth of your Dharma, or the depth that's potentially yours—how to understand yourself in some deep way.

The orientation I'm going to provide is a set of principles, or a point of view, that chaplains use when they offer spiritual care. Especially here in California, chaplains who work in hospitals are offering spiritual care to anybody who is willing to or wants to have care from them, including people who are atheists and non-religious. Even though there might be Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, or Muslim chaplains, they're explicitly working in the hospital as an interfaith chaplain.

As an interfaith chaplain, you're not there to proselytize. You're not there to provide people with the meaning of life that you have from your own religion. You're there to discover what's going on for that person in some deep way and understand them deeply. For example, in terms of the meaning of life, you might want to discover what their understanding of the meaning of life is, or in what way the meaning of life for them has been ruptured, causing them suffering.

In a hospital setting, you might meet someone who's going through tremendous loss, sickness, old age—all kinds of things can happen to people in the hospital. Their sense of meaning might have been ruptured. What a meaningful life meant for them might be radically changed overnight by becoming debilitated, never to be the same again. A chaplain is there to meet that and care for that without proselytizing or providing them with meaning.

So, there are these orientations that chaplains use to understand people deeply so that they can support people deeply in times of great difficulty. There are five paired areas that chaplains are looking at and considering. I'd like to present them here for us today.

As you listen, what I'm most interested in is that it might support you to look at yourself more deeply. Use these five categories to really look at how this works for you. Don't just settle for your first answers. There's an art to thinking, "Well, that's the first answer, but if that's true, what's deeper? What's more deeply true around this same category?" and keep going down deep.

I'll list what these five areas are. They are pairs of things. Don't try to memorize them now because I'll go through them slowly, but for now, just listen and see what seems important for yourself. The five pairs are:

• Meaning and purpose
• Agency and autonomy
• Identity and dignity
• Community and kinship
• Healing and reconciliation

They form a very interesting list. They're kind of progressive in some ways, or they could be seen that way.

Meaning and Purpose

The first is meaning and purpose. The big question is, what's the meaning of life? A subset of that is, what's the meaning of your life?

I would like to propose that everyone has some sense of what the meaning of their life is, whether it's implicit or explicit, conscious or unconscious. Many people receive a sense of what life is about and what's important to do from their society, their religions, and their family at such an early age that they don't even know they're living that way. It's just like, "This is how things are."

I saw that with my children when they were quite young. I saw how much I was acculturating them to a certain point of view about what it means to be a human being, and what it means to be a human being in relationship to other human beings. At first, I was a little bit horrified to see the conditioning we were doing, but it has to be this way. Everyone who lives in a society and a culture has to, in some way or another, have a language to speak with people. If we don't, then how do we communicate and find our way?

It isn't that this two-year-old who's learning to speak is being oppressed because the way English words are spelled doesn't make a lot of sense. I'm one of those people who complained for sixty or seventy years about this kind of injustice! [Laughter] But you just have to go along with certain things so that you can communicate.

Things are passed on at a very early age. I saw for myself, as I started doing Buddhist practice, that those layers of conditioning got uncovered. How deeply it went, I can't tell you if it went all the way to the bottom, but I certainly saw a lot of ways I was conditioned. That's why I saw so well what I was doing for my children. I was conscious of it and tried to do it responsibly and carefully, not to limit them, but I still knew that you had to teach them language and how to be in a culture.

What is the meaning of life? As I said, in hospitals and many other places, meaning can become unfulfilled. Some people think that life has a certain meaning, like having children. Some people don't have children, and their meaning is ruptured; it's really painful because they grew up with that as their primary purpose. For other people, it was to fulfill their parents' ideas of what kind of career they were going to have, and that was the primary meaning operating in their life.

For some people, without it being called the meaning of their life, if you watch them, you'd say, "Wow, from all I can tell, the meaning of their life is to hate." That's all they seem to be about. Or the meaning of life is to be wealthy, to fulfill desires, and to have status. That seems to be what their life is about, but it's unexamined. If you ask them, "What's the meaning of your life?" they might not be able to say anything deeper than that. But is the meaning of life to live in resentment? Is that what life should really be about?

So, meaning and purpose are closely related. Meaning gives us the orientation of what we want to do with our life and what we want to accomplish. Is life just about becoming wealthy? Is it more about the quality of relationships, where there's love and community that we support and are engaged in? Is life about feeling fulfilled in some deep inner way that has nothing to do with material well-being and status?

People who have no purpose sometimes find themselves disoriented. They feel lost, like they don't fit into society or this world. They're confused, and sometimes they're depressed by it all. Some people had a meaning that they thought was the purpose of life, but something happened that pulled the rug out from underneath them, and either they can't fulfill it, or it doesn't make sense anymore. For some people, the religion they grew up with provided amazing meaning. Their whole community and meaning of life was centered around their religion. But at some point, they could no longer believe it or follow it, and then they were lost, wondering, "What do I do now? How do I find my way?"

Chaplains offering spiritual care are listening for this. They're not proselytizing or telling people what it should be. Now, as a Buddhist teacher, I'm not a chaplain in that way. For better or for worse, I'm offering Buddhist meaning and Buddhist purpose. But often what I try to do when I meet with people one-on-one is to listen first and foremost to what they want. What is their intention for their life? Then I see how this practice can support that in an appropriate way.

The exception to that is that I'm also listening for suffering. How is this person suffering? Do I have a role to be a mirror for that, to engage them around that, and to support them? Some sources of meaning and orientation around purpose cause more suffering for themselves, and maybe for other people as well.

That's one of the primary meanings that Buddhism offers: one purpose of human life is to find liberation or freedom from suffering. This can seem not so grand or altruistic compared to other meanings, but it's a powerful one for Buddhists. Freedom from suffering isn't the end of it all, though. You could ask, "Well, that's nice for you. When your suffering ends, then what? What's the meaning of life then?"

Some Buddhists will say, "The meaning of life is to help end the suffering of other people." Part of the meaning of life is that we are related to each other, and our well-being and purpose in life are related to the well-being of those around us. The purpose of Buddhist life is not just to end suffering, which seems like a neutral thing; it's also to thrive in a very deep way.

The Buddha didn't use exactly the word "thrive" because he didn't speak English, but he used other words related to what we mean by "thrive": to live in a sense of abundance and expansiveness. The purpose of life is to free this inner possibility. From a Buddhist point of view, we want to live in harmony with the Dharma, aligned with the Dharma. But the Dharma is not in a book; the Dharma is something that lives inside of us.

In the West, we often say that we want a power greater than ourselves; we want to be aligned with a higher power. I think Buddhists would say, "Yes, that's great. We do, but the higher power that we can find is within ourselves." It's not exactly "us," it's not exactly "you," but it's not apart from you. It's this inner movement that can happen when something is set free.

Set free from what? Set free from all the restrictions that we live under, all the limitations we put ourselves under. This movement towards freedom from suffering sees and feels how we limit ourselves, how we restrict ourselves, and how we oppress ourselves, because that is suffering. We begin seeing and feeling, "Look at that. Not only is it my suffering, but I can feel how this is a limitation to my growth." I see how this is a limitation to how life wants to grow and how life wants to be expressed. The Dharma wants to be expressed here.

This higher power within us is our own inner maturation and growth, set free. We're amazingly capable of living with a tremendous sense of peace, joy, strength, and wisdom that is very hard to take personally. This idea of being free from limitations and restrictions ties into the next chaplaincy orientation: agency and autonomy.

Agency and Autonomy

This means that we're not living under oppression. We're not living under things that keep us in certain kinds of prisons or restricted autonomy. Autonomy in this context means that you're not controlled by other people or institutions that have greater power over your life than they should have. You're not coerced into living the way you don't want to live. You are not oppressed. You can make your own choices, follow your own guidance, and do what you want to do.

The ultimate representation of this kind of restricted life is prison. It's awful to be in prison; so much autonomy is taken away explicitly. But I've met prisoners who have all this kind of ordinary autonomy taken away, and yet they have more inner freedom than many people who come to IMC². It's remarkable to see where they find their autonomy—autonomy about what their inner life is about, what they choose to respond to, and how they respond. They've found a certain kind of freedom to make choices for themselves that you can see when you look in their eyes.

Agency is the ability to act, to not be restricted from doing what needs to be done. For Buddhists, it's having some sense that, yes, it's possible to be free. It's possible to let this onward-leading Dharma move through me and grow. It's possible to open my heart in such a way that I can be of service to others, love others, and be connected in a deep way.

Sometimes we think, "It's possible, but I can't do it. Why can't I do it? Well, I have responsibilities. I can't go on retreat. I have to read the newspaper and have coffee in the morning. I can't meditate. I have no autonomy." [Laughter]

There are these things that keep us in check, so we don't feel like we can act and do what we want to do. Some people feel like they can't practice because they can't go on retreat due to family responsibilities. I tell them, "I learned maybe more about myself and the Dharma within the limitations of raising kids than I did in the monasteries I lived in." It's a great practice in terms of learning autonomy and agency where it really counts. For me, I learned a tremendous amount under the limitations of parenting. I wouldn't say it's like prison! [Laughter] But I do want to refer back to these prisoners who found freedom. If prisoners can do it in that setting, maybe I could learn something about it in family life.

So we have meaning and purpose, and then agency and autonomy. Next, we have identity and dignity.

Identity and Dignity

One of the ways I understand chaplains is that they dignify other people. I've coined a new English word, because I believe English gives us that freedom sometimes. I have loving arguments with friends about this—they say, "You can't do that!" [Laughter] but I have enough autonomy and agency that I can make up a new word: "dignify." Chaplains bring out the dignity in people; they respect them, honor them, and value them. Not enough people in our society are honored and respected in deep ways. Sometimes, when people are facing tremendous difficulties in hospitals, their dignity has been taken away. Chaplains come and offer identity and dignity.

Identity is kind of an awkward thing for Buddhists to talk about sometimes, unfortunately. There's been a long history of teachings on "no-self" and how you're not supposed to have an identity. You're supposed to let go of identity. It's true that there's a tremendous amount of letting go of self-definition and holding on to ideas of self that Buddhists do. But we do that only when the practice shows us that the identities we're living under restrict us and limit us. Some identities don't do that; some identities actually do the opposite and give us more space.

If someone identifies as "I'm a Buddhist practitioner," and they come and tell me that, as a Buddhist teacher, I say, "Great. I'm not going to take that away from you." That tells me that you have certain values and purposes for your life that I want to support. If there's some attachment to being a practitioner, I'm not worried about it, because the practice, the mindfulness, the Dharma, will show you sooner or later where those limitations are, and it all comes out in the wash.

Identity is very important. Identity means you know your place in society, how you fit in, and how to find your way. You know your place in your family and your role. Roles are sometimes like hats you take on and off, but you still know what hats you're wearing at any given time. You know something about yourself. You know yourself well, you have confidence in yourself, and you have an understanding of what makes you work. You understand what drives you, your values, your meanings, and your purposes. You have a clear sense of how you live in relationship to other people, how to interact with them, and how to care for yourself in relationship to other people. All of this fits under the title of identity.

Many people are deeply challenged around identity. Some people are challenged when the identity they seemingly had has been removed from them or lost. When people retire, they can feel completely lost because that role, that identity, is no longer there. Chaplains listen for where that suffering is, how to care for it, and how to support people. I can't provide anyone with an identity, but a chaplain listens to the suffering that is there and sees what can support the person to find a new identity or to let go of the identities that have been harmful to them and are no longer needed.

So, meaning and purpose, agency and autonomy, identity and dignity. Buddhism is a lot about dignity. Some of you know that the people who attain some degree of liberation in Buddhism are called the "Noble Ones³." That kind of highlights that this is an important direction we're going.

Community and Kinship

Then there is community and kinship. I think for most people, we understand how important community is—family, friends, our tribe, our village, the people around us that are mirrors to help us understand ourselves. These are people who help us feel like we belong, that we're connected, that we're not alone. Many of the ways in which we as human beings grow and develop as children are clearly in relationship to other people, clearly in relationship to our parents. We're wired for that relationship to affect us for a lifetime.

If something goes askew with a parent-child relationship when the child is young, it can be challenging for that child for the rest of their life. We sometimes call it attachment disorders nowadays. If something goes well in that relationship, the child feels secure in the world by feeling security in their family in the first five years they're alive. Then they go out and feel, "Oh, the world is a place it's okay to feel secure in." It makes a huge difference.

We learn from each other, we influence each other, and we're influenced by each other. It touches something very deep inside of us. When I was walking down here to teach today, I passed a house that I've walked by a lot. It's been being remodeled for years. It almost feels like it's a hobby house for someone; they seem to work on the weekends or evenings, and they come with all their buddies. It just seems like a nice time, and they seem to be doing a really nice job with this relatively small wooden house. I've admired what they're doing.

This morning, there was someone with a pickup truck who looked like they were going to do some work. The first time I said hello, I asked, "Are you working here?" The person was a little bit cautious: "Yeah, sometimes." So I said, "I've been admiring this for years." It turned out that he was the owner, and he's been doing it for years. We had a delightful conversation. I appreciated his work, how nice they've made the house, and what he did.

Finally, he asked me, "What do you do?" That's a little bit of a personal question, right? I thought, "What do I say?" Sometimes, when I've told people what I do here in Redwood City—like in Little League with my kids—the other parents walk away as soon as I tell them I'm a Buddhist teacher! [Laughter] So I said, "I'm a meditation teacher," because that's a little bit safer. I could say I'm in entertainment! [Laughter]

When I said I was a meditation teacher, he was like, "Wow. You must sit still or something." We talked for a while, and it was nice. I told him that I'd been a Buddhist monk for many years. He said, "You really must know how to be still. I can't sit still. I have to always be active." I said, "Yeah, I can be still, but I love activity too. Doing the kind of work you do is so much fun and engaging; I love to do that kind of work. I used to be a farmer."

What was I doing in that conversation? A number of things were happening related to community and kinship. The first thing that happened was that as I was walking down the street and saw this man, I thought, "I can't stop and talk to him. I want to go down and be early at IMC so I can be in community and kinship with some of you." But I could feel that the resistance I had to stopping—the sense that there's some other place to go—didn't feel right. That's where the strain was. I didn't want to live with that; that didn't seem right. So what happens when I let go of it? "Hi, are you working on this house?" It just seemed like the most natural thing in the world. That was the person of the moment to be in community and kinship with.

There was some commonality, perhaps because of seeing that house for years, thinking about it. He's only about ten houses away from me, so it's part of my neighborhood. Is the meaning of life for me to connect to people and community? I don't know if I would say that. Is it the Dharma in me coming forth and being expressed? I would say yes. That's just life coming forth in me.

I was in community with him, and then I felt kinship with him when he said he had trouble sitting still but liked being active. I loved it. I thought that was a beautiful thing, and I felt more connected to him. It's a kind of kinship, and I wanted to share that sense of kinship with him by sharing that I too like to be active and do work. It felt wonderful to have that connection. By the time I was ready to leave, he offered his hand to shake, and we had a wonderful little contact and friendly engagement.

Community and kinship is something that is a wonderful part of human life. It gets ruptured sometimes, it gets broken, it gets challenged. Each of these five areas relate to each other, influence each other, and connect to each other. Any one of these five areas can be broken for people, can be challenged, or can be deficient in people's lives. Each of these five areas are ways in which Buddhist practice comes alive for us.

One of the answers to the question, "What's the meaning of life?" from a Buddhist point of view, I would say, is to be alive, to live. The reason that's a significant answer, rather than kind of avoiding the question, is that when we do this meditation practice, we understand intimately, personally, and acutely how much we block our life. We see how much we restrict our living—how attachments, clinging, fear, and resentment actually limit us. Even the desires we have limit us. Rather than unfettered desires to use your credit card as much as you want, it's actually a limitation to just live for the purpose of being the wealthiest person on this planet. It probably means a truncated life; something is blocked and restricted.

Whatever the case, to the degree to which we interfere with our life being lived fully and freely, that's something we can feel. What happens when our life is being lived fully? We can feel, "This is good. This is being alive in a way that's satisfying and deeply meaningful."

There's either a study or a thought experiment I've read about, comparing two people on an assembly line doing the same mundane routine. One person is bored, and their life energy gets drained from them. The other person sees it as a game—how fast they can do it, how well they can do it. They become completely absorbed in doing it and enter into a flow state. A flow state is a state of well-being, joy, engagement, and self dropping away. It just feels so good to be in that state. It doesn't matter that it's a mundane, boring activity from an external point of view; just being alive is so great.

So, this idea that the purpose of life is to be alive works if you believe that the Dharma, our deep self, has wisdom, love, care, and community as part of it. That's what we can discover when we do this practice. In fact, there's a tremendous resource within us that can provide us with meaning, agency, identity, dignity, community, and kinship.

Healing and Reconciliation

And the last one: healing and reconciliation. For some people, that's their primary need in chaplaincy in the hospital or other places. All the other needs are what they are, but the limiting factor for the person is healing and reconciliation. Something is broken. Reconciliation is usually with other people. Healing is with something else—with oneself, or with what one takes as the purpose of life or what is ultimate and sacred. That's the task.

Mindfulness can have a powerful role in that. Mindfulness is a healing movement, to feel and see where the break is, and to allow the Dharma to move through us. A tremendous amount of healing can happen from the Dharma being allowed to move through us. The heart knows how to heal, and so we're allowing that heart to heal through this practice.

I'll name them again. As I name them this time, see if any one of them might be the one that's more interesting for you to spend time considering:

• Meaning and purpose
• Agency and autonomy
• Identity and dignity
• Community and kinship
• Healing and reconciliation

We could say these are needs we all have. Is any one of them a need where you think, "Oh, today that's the one that seems up for me?" Or is it just the whole catastrophe? [Laughter]

Announcements

Thank you for listening to this. I hope this gave you a different perspective, especially those of you who've been coming and listening to these Buddhist talks for a long time. It's a new perspective to look at yourself with, and maybe to have conversations about with friends.

In about ten minutes or so, there'll be this potluck. You're all welcome to attend, whether you brought something or not. Please don't feel like you can't stay if you didn't bring something, because that's not the kind of potluck we have. Just bring yourself. Since we're doing a potluck, maybe it would be nice for you to say hello to people here, just to break the ice a little bit. You can say hello and find out a little bit more about them, or maybe tell them what you thought of this talk in terms of your own life, or which of these five pairs was most interesting for you. As you wish. But if you can kind of turn to two people next to you so that no one's left alone looking like, "Well, who's going to talk to me?"

Thank you.