This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Gateless Gate; Doors of Liberation (1 of 5) In Harmony. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: Gateless Gate; Dharmette: Doors of Liberation (1 of 5) In Harmony - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 10, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Gateless Gate

Hello and welcome.

Many years ago—when I was young, about 40 years ago—I went to practice at a Zen monastery in Japan. I was already a Zen monk, and I went to one of the more serious training monasteries where they did things fairly traditionally. One of the customs there is that when a new monk arrives and asks to be in the monastery, they have to stand in front of the monastery gate. They have to stand there until someone comes and checks them out.

Sometimes the custom is that the aspiring monk is ignored and left to stand in front of the gate, partly to show his sincerity, his dedication, and his persistence that this is really important. I've been told that sometimes they have to stand there for three days. I think they're allowed to go sleep somewhere at night—I don't know how that works—but they have to stand there for a long time.

There is this idea of standing in front of the gate, waiting. Maybe they are waiting to see how the person is. Is the person mature in their practice to be able to really stand there in a comfortable, relaxed, upright way? Not impatient, not collapsing, not giving up, not pounding on the gates yelling and screaming to be let in, not arguing the case that they should be let in. Not blaming the monastery for being cruel, thoughtless, inconsiderate, and unwelcoming to require the monk to just stand there as if it is going to be forever.

The paradox is that they are standing in front of a wide-open gate. It’s wide open; they just can't walk through it.

In Zen, they also have a famous question that practitioners live with and struggle with, called the "Gateless Gate."¹ What is the gateless gate that we're always standing in front of? And how do we need to be in order to step through that gateless gate?

In my circumstance in Japan, it turned out I only had to stand there for about an hour. I have no idea why. I never asked. Then they came out and asked me a Dharma question to see how I would do. Maybe because I was a foreigner they didn't expect much from me, so it was a relatively easy question. Then I was invited into the monastery to practice there.

We stand in front of this gateless gate. One way of understanding it for our practice of sati—mindfulness or awareness—is that we're always standing in the middle of a gateless gate. The gateless gate is the great gate that we stand in the middle of. Wide open is our awareness—the capacity to know, to sense, to feel, to be present here. When we're fully conscious of the present moment, that is the gate.

We will only be let in when we are in harmony with that gate. We are only let through when we adjust ourselves in such a way that we are attuned. We show up not complaining, not protesting, not demanding, not collapsing, not arguing the case that we should be let in, and not getting distracted and wandering off. We need to be here at this gateless gate with sincerity and presence. At some point, we'll be invited in.

Invited in where? Through the gate of the present moment to here. In a certain way, it is where we've always been, but in another way, it is a place that we have never known.

So here we are, always at the gateless gate. How do we attune ourselves? How do we show up? The present moment invites us in.

Assume a meditation posture and gently close your eyes. There is a way of being here, showing up here, being established here.

Take a few long, slow, deep breaths. As you exhale, settle into here. This is the place. Become attuned to the present moment. Here is where you stand in front of the gate.

As you exhale, feel the stability of whatever chair, cushion, floor, or mattress is holding you up. Taking some gently fuller breaths. On the exhale, relaxing the shoulders. On the exhale, softening the belly. Let your breathing return to normal.

As you exhale, soften the muscles of your face. Relax tension. The tension of wanting. The tension of worry. The tension of aversion and not wanting. Softening around the eyes, the jaws. Maybe letting the teeth fall away from each other slightly.

As you inhale, feel the thinking mind—the pressure, the tension, the agitation of the "thinking muscle." Feeling it on the inhale. Softening the thinking mind on the exhale.

Feel the thinking mind on the inhale, and imagine that the thinking mind expands and opens into space as you exhale.

As you inhale, feel your whole body. As you exhale, imagine that your whole body opens up wide into the space around you. A 360-degree awareness of the present moment. All that's here in all directions, and you sitting in the middle of it, open, available. Available to be invited in.

Sitting at the gate of the present moment. Content to be aware. Content to be aware and available for how the present moment invites you into knowing it.

If you're fully here at the gate of this present moment, you'll be invited into a different future depending on how fully you are in harmony, at ease, and present to the vastness of this gate.

To the degree that you're a little calmer or more settled than you were before, can you now open your awareness to the vastness of the present moment? It's almost like opening up to the vastness of space. Or the vastness of whatever feels like stillness here. Or the vastness of silence between and around the sounds.

Here, the gateless gate. Here we stand.

What would it mean to be here in harmony with all things? To be in alignment with the river of time as it runs through the gateless gate.

As we come to the end of this sitting, everything that arises, everything that comes our way in this vast gateless gate of the present moment is something to be in harmony with. To be aligned with in a particular way: to meet it with friendliness and goodwill. Meet it with generosity and a willingness to create a wholesome future—a good future—by the care and the friendliness we offer.

May all beings be happy.

May all beings be safe.

May all beings be peaceful.

May all beings be free.

And may each of us be available to be friendly and supportive of all beings everywhere. Perhaps one at a time.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Doors of Liberation (1 of 5) In Harmony

Hello and welcome to the beginning of this week's series. In a sense, it continues from last week's theme of emptiness, because emptiness is part of this current theme. The topic for this week is "The Three Doors of Liberation."

This follows what I've been doing much of this year for these YouTube presentations. First, there were many months on Samadhi². With Samadhi as a foundation, we transitioned to insight practice. As insight practice develops and grows, at some point, it brings us to the gates of liberation.

There are three gates of liberation. The language in English is a little bit funny. They are: the Signless, the Wishless, and Emptiness.

• Signless (Animitta) is that which has no signs.
• Wishless (Appaṇihita) is a state free of all wishes and desires.
• Emptiness (Suññatā) is this glorious absence that we talked about last week.

They are called doors, but perhaps that's a bit prosaic. In the guided meditation we just did, I was using the word "gate," thinking about these marvelously large, inviting, stately gates in front of monasteries and temples in Japan where I practiced.

The gate marks the location of here and now in a majestic, sometimes strong way. You show up, and it’s like, "Whoa." Stepping through this means something. If there was no gate there, it would be fine and open and relaxed, but probably I would just keep talking with my friends, absorbed in a conversation. But the gates command attention. There you are. You're stepping into a new zone, a new atmosphere, a new place that has significance and value.

Perhaps the word "door" is prosaic. Maybe in modern English, the better reference point is "portal." A portal is not just a door from one room to the next; nowadays, a portal is almost like a Star Trek term. A portal is something that carries you into a whole different dimension, a whole different world, a radically different way of being.

How these three portals work is that as mindfulness becomes stronger—meaning we become more and more at home, stable, comfortable, and settled here and now—the distracting mind is quieted and put to rest for a while. There's no pull out of the present moment. We've arrived here and now. Then the work starts; the momentum of insight starts because we're so present. Now we can start being attuned or pay attention to the deeper ways in which we experience and perceive the present moment.

That has a whole pattern that goes on. Often what is emphasized is that over time, the practitioner has a very deep experiential insight—experiential participation—with three things:

1. Inconstancy, change, or impermanence (Anicca).
2. Suffering, unsatisfactoriness, or stress (Dukkha)—really deeply seeing something going on here in the foundations of experience.
3. The deep insight and participation in the experience of not-self (Anattā).

These three characteristics³ are considered to be intimate aspects of our experience of how we perceive and live in the world. The idea is to become aligned with those, to be in harmony with those, to be attuned to them in a deep way.

As practice deepens, the ancient language of Pali⁴ uses an equivalent of our English phrase "with the grain." To be with the grain of these things. Not resisting them, not debating them, not trying to make it different. Not trying to hold on to something as permanent. Not trying to deny that the suffering is here or that there is the suffering of clinging. To be aligned or in harmony with that creates a really deep kind of freedom that comes when we're no longer attached to or oriented around concepts of self: me, myself, and mine.

In English, we say "with the grain." I like the Pali idiom quite a bit more. It translates to "with the hair." You pet the cat in the direction that the hair lays down. It'll be completely out of harmony with the cat if you pet the cat against how the hair is laid down; the cat will probably get up and leave. But if you do it with the hair, then the cat begins to purr.

So at some point, as the practice deepens, we go "with the hair." We are in harmony. We are aligned. There is a feeling of intimacy, kind of like purring with the flow of experience, with the truth, with the experience of here and now. Rather than having impermanence, suffering, and not-self be distressing, debatable, or questionable—and rather than resisting them or just believing them as a philosophy—we begin to see that there's something to be in harmony with. To be attuned and aligned is so satisfying that it creates a kind of equanimity, a peace of all the hair lying down the same way. We are participating in the way that maybe the hand of time is stroking us, petting us.

The idea is that as practice deepens, the mind gets quieter, calmer, and more settled. We're not resisting anything. We're not asserting anything. We're not pulling away from anything. We're not collapsed. We're not caught up in "me, myself, and mine"—what's in it for me and what I want. We are not ahead of ourselves into the future. We're not behind ourselves in stories and memories of the past. We're right here.

I liken this to the experience that I had in the Zen monastery in Japan. As a new monk, in order to be able to enter the monastery, you have to stand at the gate. The gate is open, wide, large, and expansive. It is a gate that marks nothing—it doesn't need to be there in a sense. But at the gateless gate, we stand right here, right now.

In Zen, you had to stand there, and you had to be there in harmony with the purpose of why you are there. You have to be fully in that gate, standing there, sometimes for a long time, showing that you are capable and interested in entering the monastery to live with everyone else. So you can't collapse. You can't be assertive. You can't pull back. You can't be distracted. You have to be there in a relaxed way. You can't be tense. You have to be there as if it's forever. You have to be in alignment and in harmony with what it means to be there waiting peacefully for someone to come out, check you out, and see if they would like to invite you into the monastery.

In that way, we sit. We become attuned. We become in harmony with what's here and now, and we stand in the awareness, the presence of the present moment here at the gateless gate. At this place that doesn't have to have a door or a portal but is always here for us.

But we are different because now, after deep practice, we've come into harmony. We come into alignment, into attunement in a deep way with how things are unfolding here in the present moment. And so any clinging, grasping, or pushing has been settled with deep equanimity.

The way I was taught this in Asia is that depending on one's personality or personal dispositions—something unique for each person—one of these three portals or gates will open up. It will invite us through or will somehow pull us into this new dimension of life that is called liberation and freedom.

Some people will go through the door of the Signless. Some people go through the door of the Wishless. And some people go through the door of Emptiness. On the other side, once they come through that door, they all end up in the same place: freedom.

In the next three days, I'll go through each of those three doors and talk about what they might mean and how to be aligned in harmony—to be "with the grain" of reality rather than against it.

Thank you very much, and we will continue this tomorrow.