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Stories & Buddhism: Sakka, The 5 Hindrances, and More - Gil Frondsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 27, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Hello everyone, welcome. And welcome also to the people who are participating on YouTube. I appreciate how wide a field the audience is now.

I would like to tell a story that comes from the ancient Buddhist tradition. The reason I tell the story is to participate in one of the most important features of all religions, which is to tell stories. Some people have said that what's more important for the popularity of religions is not their doctrinal beliefs, but the stories they tell. Stories touch people's hearts. They guide people in how to behave and what's important for them and their imagination. That's certainly true with Buddhism as well.

Stories are so important for human beings in general that I think it's maybe a mistake to have given us the species name of Homo sapiens. There are other creatures who have a lot of understanding, and to use that as the primary characteristic of humans doesn't really highlight what's unique about us. I think that sometimes we should be called homo storyos. That's what's unique about human beings. All this understanding and knowledge we have, and imagination and creativity, gets poured into creating stories. We create stories about the future, the past, the mythic times.

The thing about stories, and this is a kind of dramatic teaching that Zen Buddhism tends to give, is that there are stories that kill and stories that give life. There are stories that undermine us and there are stories that enliven us. Rather than just dismissing stories outright, part of the idea is to understand how to engage in the storytelling aspect of our mind so that it benefits us rather than undermines us.

It's said that one of the primary causes of depression is rumination. People tell stories all the time in their minds, and some of those stories that we tell ourselves repeatedly are actually debilitating. We don't think that we're storytellers. And maybe if you speak out loud, you would see that your stories are not that clever. But when they're being said quietly in our own mind, they seem really important and valuable. It doesn't matter that they're not clever; they're real. Sometimes they're more real than the reality we live in because of the way we relate to them.

Stories & Buddhism: Sakka, The 5 Hindrances, and More (link)

Religions tell stories, and Buddhism does that. There's a story it tells that's meant to be more liberating than not, and it uses some of the best techniques of Indian storytelling. If you really went into the original text, you'll see that it's quite a wonderfully crafted story. It comes from the middle length discourses, so it has a certain kind of scriptural status.

I studied it recently because there's one teaching in there that's been very important and inspiring for me. Sometimes I even quote it or paraphrase it, and that teaching is: "Nothing whatsoever is worth clinging to." Wow, that's a big statement. Nothing whatsoever is worth clinging to. Some of you might immediately want to protest, thinking, "No, but we have to cling. We can't live without clinging." And some of you will argue and debate. That's okay, but that's not what we'll do today. This teaching exists as a very important feature of the story.

This is how the story goes. I think of the story in my mind, and I embellish it because my mind is a storyteller too. I think of it as almost being operatic, and maybe it was even performed in the ancient world. One of the ways that I think some of these ancient stories and suttas were performed was that different storytellers or monks would be the different characters in the story, and they'd go back and forth with who was speaking. Maybe one person was the narrator.

The story involves the Buddha sitting quietly, meditating perhaps, and he's visited by one of the most grand, wonderful, most powerful ruling gods of the heavens. That's quite an honor, to have this great god come down from the heavens to see the Buddha. But he comes to ask the Buddha a question, which also then elevates the status of the Buddha. This great god, Sakka¹, comes to the Buddha. Part of the context for him coming is that he's heard the Buddha's teachings before and was really deeply impacted by them. He had something awakened in him, and so he came to ask a really important question. He asked, "How does a person become liberated?"

Okay, now we're talking about important teachings. So now we should all be on the edge of our seats. You're sitting there in a wonderful forest clearing with a full moon, and it's all peaceful and quiet, and the storyteller is telling the story of Sakka asking, "How do you get liberated?"

I'll paraphrase the Buddha's answer, but the key thing he says first is, one hears the teaching: "Nothing whatsoever is worth clinging to." And hearing that teaching, a person becomes disinterested in clinging, begins to let go of clinging. Their mind gets less and less agitated until it becomes peaceful. And there's a deep, deep release, a liberation of letting go of all clinging. That's how it is. So it's a relatively simple teaching.

And Sakka says, "Thank you. I have a lot of things to take care of up in heaven." And so he goes back.

Well, listening to this is a monk who's sitting in meditation nearby named Mahā Moggallāna². He's one of the two senior disciples of the Buddha, and he has psychic powers. He wonders, "Did Sakka really understand what the Buddha said? Is he going to remember what the Buddha said?" So he uses his psychic powers, and as quickly as it takes for a strong person to flex their elbow, he goes up to heaven.

In Sakka's heaven—he's a big ruling god of a whole corner of the heavens himself. There are lots of levels of heavens in Buddhism. So Sakka is the ruler of one of the great levels, and it's a vast realm. Sakka is in his wonderful, huge, majestic, unbelievably large palace. He has gardens and pleasure gardens, and he has this great pond or lake where he's cavorting or resting with all these celestial ladies, with music being played. He's having a good time.

Mahā Moggallāna comes along, and Sakka recognizes him, gets out of the pool, and goes up to him and says, "Oh, how wonderful that you're here." And Mahā Moggallāna says, "Yes, I'm here to ask you. Do you remember what the Buddha said to you when you asked what the way to become liberated is?"

And Sakka says, "Oh, I have too many important things to take care of being the ruler of this heaven to remember that right now. But let me tell you about how I was recently in a war with another part of the heavens, the Asuras³, the Titans, and how I conquered them. Because of that, I came back and built this huge, extra-big palace to celebrate that victory in battle. The palace has 700 towers. Each tower has 700 turrets, and each turret has 700 rooms. And each of the 700 rooms has 700 celestial maidens, and each maiden has a hundred celestial female attendants." I mean, if you do the math, it's millions of these celestial ladies in his big palace.

So here's this guy who heard this wonderful teaching from the Buddha. The monk asks him, "Do you remember?" It's a relatively short teaching. And he goes on and on to say, "Let me tell you about all the details of my palace and how wonderful it is." And he says, "Let me give you a tour."

And so, Mahā Moggallāna says, "Okay." And he starts giving him a tour. After a while, Moggallāna thinks, "You know, this guy, he has no sense of spiritual importance, no sense of spiritual urgency. So what if I do a psychic feat to awaken a sense of urgency?"

So remember, they're walking through this amazingly massive, celestially solid palace. Moggallāna takes his big toe and he taps it onto the floor of the palace, and the whole palace starts to shake. Palace quake. And that gets Sakka's attention. "Wow, if my solid palace is so fragile, can shake, can be inconstant, is so impermanent from just this monk tapping it with his foot... I mean, he's really powerful. And this world maybe is more fragile than I realized. Maybe I better not just take it for granted that this will be here forever and that I'll be here forever and that I'm so powerful myself." Now he's been humbled.

So then the monk realizes, "Okay, good. The great god has now awakened a sense of urgency and spiritual importance. Let me ask him now. Do you remember what the Buddha said to you when you asked him how to become liberated?"

"Oh yeah. He said nothing whatsoever is worth clinging to. And a person who realizes this will become disinterested in clinging. Their clinging will relax and quiet. Their mind will be less agitated, because clinging is agitating for the mind. And when the mind is no longer agitated, something will let go very deeply, which is a synonym of liberation."

The story goes on a little bit more, but that's the key part. In my operatic imagination of this full moon night, people are listening in awe. Maybe back then, people believed in Sakka and his heavens, and maybe they believed this was a real story that really happened. So they're sitting there absorbed, because storytelling was one of the primary entertainments of the time. Remember, there was no Netflix, no movies, no TVs, and no novels to be read. There were stories, songs, poems, and an oral culture. The storytellers were really good and painted a picture that pulled people in. For them to hear that the palace of even Sakka was impermanent and shaking, maybe that awakened their sense of interest in spirituality or the teachings.

And then they hear, "Nothing is worth clinging to." Maybe it was told in grand storytelling techniques with a pause and an emphasis, and maybe it touched their hearts. Maybe it touched something deeper than where their neurotic rumination lived—that ordinary kind of storytelling mind that we get caught in with our resentments and our desires and our greeds and our fears. It quieted as they heard the story, and so they were ready to receive something. "Nothing is worth clinging to." Boom. Then something maybe happened to those people listening.

So that is an example of storytelling that's meant to be liberating, enlivening, freeing.

The Five Hindrances as Stories

Stories that are entrapments, stories that we get stuck in, take many forms. But one of the primary forms of how we get stuck in stories is through what Buddhism calls the five hindrances⁴. The five hindrances are obscurations. They are stories we tell ourselves that are rooted in:

1. Sensual desire
2. Ill will
3. Sloth and torpor (resistance and shutting down)
4. Restlessness and remorse
5. Uncertainty (specifically, uncertainty about how to find our way to freedom)

Part of the reason they're so powerful and why they're called hindrances is that the literal Pali word for hindrance means "to cover over." It covers over our capacity for wisdom. It covers over our capacity for clarity. It covers over our capacity to understand how we're caught. We're so distracted by distractions, we don't know we're distracted.

The reason the hindrances are so powerful and why it's so hard for people to get out of these mind states is the stories that we tell around them. Desires, especially sensual desires, are sometimes very pleasant, and the pleasure of the story keeps us addicted to them. Sometimes the promise of the story is so compelling. Stories of sensual pleasure usually put us personally into a good place. Maybe it's part of a delusion of grandeur. Maybe we have a lot of lack in our lives, a lot of challenges and problems, and maybe a lot of pain and distress. And so fantasies of pleasure and wonderful things somehow fulfill and compensate for how we feel. That's what keeps us caught in these wonderful stories. They're a balm. They feel like reassurance for ourselves. "I'm okay after all. Look, I have a hundred celestial maidens attending to my every desire."

Or ill will. Stories of anger, hostility, and resentment are powerful. Part of the reason people are so attracted to them is that some people feel a sense of personal power and a sense of rightness and righteousness. That's what keeps us locked in. We tell the story over and over again because then we feel like we're important, like we're taking care of ourselves. We get something from the story, so we'll tell it over and over again. Sometimes we get a sense of identity. This is how we create a sense of self around resentment, like, "They're wrong and I'm right."

Resistance, shutting off, giving up. The story might be very simple, maybe just three words: "It's too much," or "I can't do it." That goes over and over again: "I'm overwhelmed." We tell ourselves these stories, and they're draining, discouraging, and distressing. They reinforce a certain way of understanding ourselves: "I am this way." And we tell it over and over again. The repetition of it slowly begins to drain us, creates a mood, an atmosphere inside that can be quite difficult to live with.

The sad thing about the way these unfortunate stories work on us is that they disconnect us from a deep connection to ourselves. They keep us in the story-making world, creating more distress, more bad feelings. And then the only way the mind knows how to compensate for that is to tell more stories. It's like what happened when I was in my mid-20s. I was working in a bakery, and I loved baguettes. It was my comfort food. What I didn't know was that I had developed an allergy to wheat. I would feel bad from eating wheat, so my comfort food was to eat baguettes, and I'd feel worse. But I didn't know that, so I ate more. There were times my mind went into a stupor because I was so affected by this allergy, until finally I realized the connection. Some people's minds work that way with their stories. We don't even know it.

Then there are stories that cause us to be restless, stories of regret and remorse we say over and over again. And then there are stories of uncertainty, stories of doubt we tell ourselves. The Buddha said the primary, most dangerous story of indecisiveness, uncertainty, and doubt is when we don't know what is healthy for us and what is unhealthy. We can't recognize when the stories we tell ourselves are helpful and useful, maybe liberating, and when they are debilitating. If you don't see that, then we can tell ourselves stories of doubt on and on.

So, what stories do you tell? Are you a storyteller? If you're a Homo sapien, you are a storyteller. I guarantee it. You might think you're very logical, very reasoned. There are very logical, very reasonable stories that have been put together with a lot of building blocks. They're still stories.

What effect do these stories have on you? What is the state of your mind and heart? What's your inner mood when you're telling yourself these stories? Is it a state that is healthy? Are the consequences of these stories, these ruminations you have, healthy? If they aren't, don't tell a despairing story about that. Don't add unfortunate stories on top of unfortunate stories. At some point, realize what you're doing and see if you can tell a better story. Not one that's just fantasy, but something that is freeing, creates clarity, openness, and a sense of aliveness. Not because you're telling a story of winning the California lottery, but rather a story that inspires the best in your heart to come forth.

It's okay to tell some stories. Maybe the story that helps you is, "I've heard once upon a time that being mindful is a good idea." That's a good story. Let me live that story. Let me be mindful of all the storytelling I'm doing. Maybe you've heard once upon a time the story, "Nothing whatsoever is worth clinging to." Well, I'm not sure it is a good story, but I don't have any better at the moment. So, let me try that out. Maybe there are a few extra things I'm clinging to today that I don't have to. What would happen if I let go of that? Maybe I'm telling the story one more time of this partner I had 50 years ago. Maybe I don't have to cling to that story anymore. Maybe it's safe to let go of it. In my case, she probably doesn't even remember me, so why am I caught in this?

That's the talk for today. The story behind this talk is that I'm going off this afternoon to teach a week-long retreat, and part of the retreat will be about the five hindrances and how story-making is integral to how strongly they hold us. So I'm kind of warming up here.

We have about 15 minutes before the official end and also before the potluck will begin. So maybe if you'd like, you can turn to one or two people next to you. If you don't want to talk, you're welcome to just sit quietly. But if you're willing, turn to one or two people, introduce yourself, and if there's something about this talk that made it a good story for you, maybe share what was inspiring or meaningful or useful for you. In a little bit, I'll ring the bell, we'll come back together, and have some last words before the potluck.

Q&A

Questioner 1: Thank you, Gil. I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit about my interpretation of "nothing is worth clinging to" being very different from "maybe everything is worth cherishing or loving." I think sometimes hearing "nothing is worth clinging to" seems like a very depressing story. But I hear it now to say something different, that moment by moment there's always something to cherish, to love.

Gil Fronsdal: I think that's more nuanced. In Buddhism, generally, there are not these world-affirming teachings that everything should be cherished. There's also not a world-negating teaching. "Nothing is worth clinging to" is not meant to negate anything. It's not a judgment about the world. If it's a judgment, it's a judgment about the pain we're causing ourselves by clinging. The world is what it is, and we make the whole world worse if we cling. Mostly what we read about in the newspaper that is so awful has to do with someone clinging. It would be a phenomenally different, good world if there wasn't any clinging.

The orientation in the Buddhist teachings is not to replace freedom from clinging with some clear positive statement like "everything should be cherished now." Part of the reason for that is that it's too easy to get attached to that, and it's kind of limiting. What's better is to just let the heart be free from all these views and ideas, and then give room for the heart to give birth to whatever is needed in a particular time. Sometimes cherishing is not what's needed. Sometimes compassion is what's needed. Sometimes something else is needed. Early Buddhism believes the heart is really good deep inside, and if we remove the obstacles to that goodness, then that goodness will come forth in all kinds of different ways as needed. Does that make some sense to you?

Questioner 1: Yeah, no, that makes sense. And I think maybe "cherishing" was the wrong word, but what it brought to my mind was thinking about the Brahma-vihāras⁵ and thinking about how there can be joy even in the midst of suffering. The not clinging doesn't require a retreat; it can involve this deep engagement with whatever is going on. So maybe it's about engagement or really being there with whatever is going on, and maybe cherishing that you're alive, whether you're suffering or you're joyful or you're watching the world burn. I just wanted to respond to that feeling of not being detached.

Gil Fronsdal: Yeah. I think maybe we come to the same results that you're trying to say, but in this early Buddhism, we're not making a statement about the world out there, but rather a statement about how we can be in this world. It's a 180-degree turn. And maybe to make a statement similar to what you said: at all times, it's good to love. At all times, it's good to care.

Questioner 2: Almost all cultures that I know of have stories that help guide the members of those societies through stages of their lives. And often they're like fairy tales or mythological stories that are concerned with guiding through this life. I'm wondering if Buddhism has stories like that.

Gil Fronsdal: It is full of stories. All religions are primarily storytelling traditions, and Buddhism is full of stories. One that's quite famous is the Jātaka tales⁶, which are like Aesop's Fables. There's the story of the Buddha's life, which is really engaging and informs some of the values of Buddhism. That's told over and over again. There are particular incidents in the Buddha's life which are repeated a lot. And then there are stories of his disciples that are told. There are mythic stories, fables that are created. Buddhism has an origin story for the world. So there are lots and lots of stories.

What I think has happened in the Western convert Buddhist circles that I'm part of is that, for the most part, many of the teachers don't do a lot of stories. It's much more of a rational discourse and a technique-focused, practical orientation. Sometimes only a few of the stories are told, like the top five are told over and over again. But a brilliant storyteller in our tradition is Jack Kornfield. He uses stories all the time and even co-authored an anthology of stories.

Questioner 2: Can I ask a follow-up question? I'm talking about stories that take people through the stages of life, like becoming a man, becoming a woman, marriage, having a child. Those are all encapsulated a lot in mythologies and other cultural tales. I'm wondering if Buddhist society has stories like that.

Gil Fronsdal: Not the stages of life that way, I don't think so. Hinduism has some ideas of clear stages, but a clear set of stories that goes through that... I mean, we have the story of how the Buddha went through his life, and I don't know that that works as a model for too many people who are householders with kids.

Gil Fronsdal: Okay. So, thank you very much. You can continue your stories at the potluck if you want. In a few minutes, you'll be over there. Maybe there's a little statement made, a blessing or something first, and then you help yourself and please enjoy your company.