This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Hatred ends with love - Gil Fronsdal. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Hatred ends with love - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 10, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Hatred ends with love

Good morning, everyone. For today, I would like to begin by reading a Buddhist prayer for peace. It begins with a quote from the Buddha:

"Hatred never ends through hatred. By love alone does it end. This is an ancient truth."¹

So, the prayer goes:

Only love can end the pain of hatred. May all beings everywhere be freed from the sufferings of war, violence, and hatred. May those who are injured be healed. May those who have lost their homes and countries become guests in every home in every country. May those who are devastated be fed, clothed, loved, and elevated. May those who are scared be given safety. May those who fight learn that killing an enemy does not create peace; it makes enemies for future generations. May fighters learn to fight with truth, love, and respect, which is how lasting peace is possible. Love is the best way to kill enemies because then they are transformed into friends. May we do what is more complex than war. May we create peace through intelligent and strategic nonviolent means. May we call on all our goodness and goodwill to contribute to the end of war everywhere. May we contribute to everyone's welfare and happiness with no exceptions.

By the end of this talk, I would like to address the situation in Gaza. Maybe I am addressing it already with this prayer, and maybe the whole talk is addressing it, but I want to be explicit near the end.

I grew up living in many countries, moving around quite a bit. I changed schools twelve times in my first twelve years of school. One of the consequences of that was that when I was eleven or twelve—I was a Norwegian citizen then—my wish was not to be a Norwegian citizen or an American citizen. I wanted to have a United Nations passport because I wanted to belong to the whole world. I didn't want the feeling of belonging to just one country; it seemed too narrow, too restrictive, or too nationalistic.

I loved the idea of living in a cosmopolitan area with lots of diversity from all over the world. When I moved to the San Francisco area in my twenties, it was a lot less diverse than it is now. It has changed dramatically, and certainly, this area of the peninsula—Silicon Valley, Fremont, and different places around the Bay—has become a dramatically more diverse place. I treasure it. I find it fantastic. I love the idea that immigrants from all over the world come to this country, find their way, and are included.

However, when there is so much diversity from all over the world, it is also a recipe for more conflict.

I was asked to address an issue that happened recently right here in our neighborhood, at San Jose State University. Some of you may have seen the news a few weeks ago that the police were needed for a professor of Jewish Studies who was going to give a public talk. He was going to speak about the history of the conflict and the two-state solution. He is someone opposed to the violence currently happening in the Middle East.

It seems there was a call out from Hamas that this event should be disrupted. People were informed about this ahead of time, so the police were called in to be prepared. They decided to change the venue of the talk. In fact, there were a hundred people who came to demonstrate. As it was reported to me by people who were there, there were calls for killing Jews. It became impossible to give the talk, and the speakers had to be taken out under police escort. There was a large group of campus and city police waiting nearby because they were expecting problems.

The Middle East—Gaza—is not just in Gaza. What is happening in this international world we live in is spilling over, and the divisiveness of the Middle East is also becoming divisiveness in our communities here. It is coming home. I felt, "Oh, it's here in our communities as well." So how do we address it? How do we live with it? How do we take it into account? How do we understand it?

One way to understand this—and I don't want to diminish the suffering, intensity, or difficulty of the situation—is through an analogy from sports.

Fans of teams playing baseball or football watch referees or umpires who have to make a call when someone has committed a foul or stepped offline. Sometimes the umpires make a bad call, or sometimes it is ambiguous, depending on the angle. If the umpire makes the "wrong" call, the fans of the opposing team get furious. Even if it is ambiguous, they are furious if it goes against their team.

But for the team that got a favorable ruling, the attitude is often, "Well, that's the nature of the game. They didn't really do it. The umpire got it right." It is always forgiven or allowed. There is a bias against the opposing team that elicits anger, but there is a hypocrisy in that. For the "home team"—one's own team—people are willing to forgive more, see it differently, or act as if it's not a big deal ethically.

This happens in politics, and it happens with war between countries and people. There, the issues are much more intense because it isn't simply about winning and losing a game; it ties into people's core feelings of safety and identity, and into the suffering they have gone through for generations.

My father-in-law was a Jewish man who was a teenager in the Nazi concentration camps. He was in the camps with his parents; his parents didn't survive, but he barely survived Bergen-Belsen.² That experience challenged him for the rest of his life. He died seventy years or so after being released, and I knew him right up to the last day of his life. The intensity of that experience was with him seventy years later; he carried it with him to his death.

I don't know how much of that is carried over into his children—my wife—or my children, who have a grandfather who was in the camps. I sometimes wonder if it is more intense for them to have heard the stories than it is for me, having married into the family. Suffering can be carried for many years. The suffering of Jews in Israel, stemming from what happened in Germany eighty years ago, is still alive. And the suffering of the Palestinians, for perhaps almost as long, is very alive.

One of my formative experiences was being at the Tassajara Zen Monastery,³ isolated deep in the Los Padres National Forest. Back then, there was no internet. Newspapers and news magazines would arrive days late. It was interesting to get old news because fresh news is alarming, but reading news two or three days later has a different feeling. It doesn't elicit the same level of present-moment alarm.

I was in the middle of a three-month retreat, so I was open, quiet, and receptive in a very different way than one is when running around town. I opened a Time magazine, and there was a spread of photographs—four or five pages—of the Israeli bombing of a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. I told this story here once, and a man sitting in the corner told me he lived across the street from that refugee camp at that time. He was one of the first people who responded to bury the dead and help the wounded. These things are not so far away. Innocent people were killed, and children were made orphans. That was forty years ago. That suffering in Palestinians is still there.

There are examples on both sides that are dramatic. The idea that you root for your own team and are willing to overlook what your team does makes sense when the stakes are so high.

I have been to Israel, and I was stunned to hear the animosity that some Israelis had for the Palestinians. I went into the government tourist agency in Jerusalem, and the person behind the desk called Palestinians "dogs." I wondered, How could this be? I have also been stunned by the hostility of Palestinians and Arabs towards Israelis. It is unbelievable that people carry so much hatred.

Hatred doesn't work. Hatred produces more hatred. When you hurt people through violence, they will hate. It is so obvious; it is almost a way of protecting oneself or wanting revenge. It continues the cycles. The Middle East is representative of centuries, millennia, of these cycles. Sometimes I am surprised that we haven't learned the lesson: violence doesn't seem to have worked. It just goes on and on.

Is there an alternative to hate? Is there an alternative to demonizing other people? As long as people buy into the demonization that politicians and societies create, you can't find a way forward. It means you keep pushing people away towards annihilation.

Returning to the sports phenomenon, I have done a thought experiment. I wondered if the Palestinians magically had the upper hand right now and were doing to Tel Aviv what Israel is doing to Gaza. I think many people in the United States would be absolutely horrified, angry, and upset. They would probably justify the United States coming in with soldiers to defend Israel. But the level of alarm among the general population regarding the violence in Gaza seems tamped down, given that over 30,000 people—civilians—have been killed, and they say perhaps 40% of them are children. It is astounding.

So, that is the context of where we are. What does Buddhism have to say about this?

I study the teachings of the Buddha, and he has some interesting things to say about beauty. He makes a statement asking: What is more beautiful than beautiful? And the contrast: What is harmful, and what is more harmful than harmful?

This is what he says is harmful:

• Killing
• Taking what is not given
• Sexual misconduct
• Speaking falsely
• Speaking divisively
• Speaking harshly
• Speaking pointlessly (idle chatter)
• Being avaricious (greedy)
• Having hostility

These are all harmful.

What is more harmful than harmful?

• Encouraging others to kill
• Encouraging others to take what is not given
• Encouraging others to be involved in sexual misconduct
• Encouraging others to speak falsely, divisively, harshly, or pointlessly
• Encouraging others to be greedy or hostile

Being a catalyst or support for other people to be this way is even more harmful, perhaps because the harm grows exponentially.

Then the Buddha asks: What is beautiful? The word for beauty is kalyana.⁴ It can mean "excellent," but it refers to a moral beauty or moral excellence.

What is beautiful?

• Abstaining from killing
• Abstaining from taking what is not given
• Abstaining from sexual misconduct
• Abstaining from wrong speech (false, divisive, harsh, pointless)
• Abstaining from greed and hostility

And what is more beautiful than beautiful?

• Abstaining from killing yourself and prompting others to abstain from killing.
• Abstaining from taking what is not given and prompting others to abstain.

The Buddha is championing the idea of encouraging others. Buddhism is sometimes seen as a non-violent religion, which is often interpreted as passivity. But this is not passive. The best thing to do is not just to be ethical yourself, but to encourage others to be ethical. There is nothing in here about proselytizing Buddhism; the Buddha emphasized being ethical and not causing harm as the highest value.

One of the important things about being ethical in this list is not being divisive. He describes wrong speech as divisive speech. People love factionalism; they love creating divisions. What the Buddha wants is language that is unifying, that brings people together and supports those who are already unified to be more unified.

When I talked about Gaza here in October, I offered a Buddhist point of view which was not to take sides, but to offer an alternative way. I received emails from an Israeli and a Palestinian. Remarkably, they both used almost exactly the same language to criticize me—the Palestinian for what I had said, and the Israeli for what I had said. I thought, Wow, I think I hit the sweet spot. [Laughter]

Maybe the sports analogy was at play there. These people hear it a different way and are waiting to hear something explicitly for their side. But is there a way of not taking sides?

I talked back then about the example of Thich Nhat Hanh,⁵ who was a peace activist during the Vietnam War. He wouldn't take sides. He was in the geographical division between the two warring sides, North and South Vietnam, and neither side trusted him. They were all angry with him, basically thinking that if you weren't with them, you were against them. It is hard to hold this middle line when people have a tremendous need to maintain division to feel they can defend themselves or defeat the other.

The Buddha said somewhere else that among the types of beneficent conduct, among the best is prompting, settling, and establishing an unethical person in ethical behavior.

In terms of Gaza, many people are calling for a ceasefire. Some are demanding it. Of course, we want the killing to stop. Of course, there is another way. Of course, all these people should stop being killed. But can we ask for a ceasefire—can we encourage it—not as a demand, but in such a way that the Israelis become inspired themselves? So they realize this is not a good deal, and there is a better way of doing it?

To come down with a demand can be more of the divisiveness. I, myself, would not like to be in a situation of signing things that feel like demands. But I have no doubt they should stop. I want to encourage Israel to stop. But how do we do this in a way that is effective for the long term?

For some people, it is very difficult to imagine an alternative way. It challenges the imagination that there is any other way besides violence. They believe that is the only way to get what you want. But is that really the case?

It is really important to look at ourselves: what we defend, what we feel is right, how we buy into rhetoric, and what is motivating us to take sides. Where do our "sides" come from? What is our belief system? What is our understanding of social change and the impact violence has on our societies?

Maybe Israel will get something of what it wants by destroying Gaza. My father-in-law was impacted for seventy years—the rest of his life—by what happened in Germany. What is going to happen to the Palestinians? How many years are they going to be impacted by this and not forget?

Calling for peace—of course, we should do that. But we shouldn't just do that. We should also be available. In the situation at San Jose State University, a Jewish man asked me to write a letter to the president of the university. I did. I asked the president to be impartial and to be concerned for the welfare and happiness of everyone on her campus, including the ones she hadn't been caring for yet. But then I presented myself as a local minister and said, "If I can be of help to you for this process, let me know."

How do we help? What do we do?

There have been important moments in my life where I was changed by what happened in the world in fundamental ways.

The time at Tassajara, when I saw the bombing of the refugee camps in Beirut, had a huge impact on me. Partly because I was in the monastery on retreat; partly because I had been to Beirut as a child, so I knew the place. I lived on the edge of the Mediterranean in Italy, just around the corner from Beirut. To see my own world being bombed changed me.

Part of that change is why I am here today. I decided I was going to use my life to address suffering in this world through Buddhist practice. I felt it was the only thing I knew that touched the root causes of suffering in a human being. I was going to do other things to support the world, but I felt I wouldn't be able to touch the very root of suffering—the deepest attachments we have. That took me in the direction of being a Zen priest.

Before that, the big impact on me was my first two years of college at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I was there right after a huge oil spill—one of the first big oil spills in the country. Taking classes in environmental studies right after that was a catalyst for me to want to live a life trying to address the problems of society. I was going to become an environmentalist, though I got a little sidetracked into a different kind of environment.

The next event that had a similar impact on me was 9/11. That was huge for the country. I had seen similar things happen where it seemed everyone went back to business as usual. I thought, You can't do that with this. This is so big that I have to be different. Something has to change. I felt I would do a violence to myself if I wasn't changed by 9/11.

I spent about nine months thinking, How am I going to be different? What am I going to do? I decided that we would create a Buddhist Chaplaincy training program. It didn't address the issues of 9/11 directly, but it addressed the issue of suffering in our society in a different way. The Sati Center for Buddhist Studies,⁶ which I helped found in 1997, was mostly doing classes in Buddhist history and philosophy. I said, "That's not enough. We have to do something that addresses the conditions of our society."

So we created a Buddhist Chaplaincy program. It has been going on for twenty-two years. We have trained hundreds of people. I call it a "pyramid scheme for joy" because all these people go out into hospitals, prisons, hospices, and homeless situations and do this wonderful, compassionate work. It has actually doubled in size in the last year.

The reason I am telling you this story is that I feel what is happening in Gaza right now is of the same magnitude. I feel I have to be changed by this. I can't respect the impact and value of this and just go back to business as usual. But I don't know what to do yet. I can give a talk about it, but that's not enough. It took nine months last time to know. Some people demand that I do things, but that is not how I operate. I am watching, listening, and being present for all this to see: How will I be different? What will I do? Something has to change.

So now you know "what is more beautiful than beautiful."

It may be ethically complicated to sort out exactly what is going on in Gaza. But even so, the Buddha thought that the most beautiful thing to do—more beautiful than being ethical yourself—is to promote ethical life in others. To encourage it, to support it. Not to demand it, not to proselytize for it, not to make anyone feel belittled by it.

It is much more difficult work, the work of somehow inspiring others to live ethically. I think that is the movement for the Buddha. He was never in a position to demand anything of people or be aggressive about it. How do we inspire a more ethical world?

I think it can be done, but it is a very sophisticated thing to do. It takes intelligence, strategy, and care. But most importantly, if we want to inspire ethics in others, we have to be ethical. We have to feel that this is important. One of the biggest ethical principles in Buddhism is to avoid causing harm.

In contrast to "most beautiful," the Buddha didn't say "what is more ugly than ugly." He said, "What is more harmful than harmful?" In another place, referring to prompting unethical activity, he called it "unskillful." It is very polite language, not trying to create division or make anyone feel bad about themselves.

How do we really inspire goodness in all of us? How do we inspire unity? How do we inspire people to respect each other—dare I say, love each other? How do we inspire people so they don't want to spend their lives hating?

I will read the poem by the Buddha to end:

"Hatred never ends through hatred. By love alone does it end. This is an ancient truth."

May love be at the center of our practice—for yourself, for others, and even for your enemies. This prayer is a very powerful statement. If you want to fight and "kill" your enemies, there is a way of killing them: you love them so much they become your friends. They are no longer enemies. The enemy has been "killed," but you didn't kill the person; you transformed them.

May we transform our enemies into our friends. Thank you.