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

Discovering the Jewel of Who We Really Are

So, on my mind this last week has been some Buddhist allegories, some stories that are meant to be interpreted. They come from the Mahayana^[1] Buddhist tradition, the East Asian Buddhist tradition, from a very large scripture called the Lotus Sutra^[2]. And I'd like to tell you these allegories, these stories.

And as I said, they're meant to be interpreted. I think in the original text, there's a particular context for the interpretation. We can ignore that, but rather, what interpretation would be useful for us to have?

One of the interesting approaches to Dharma^[3] teachings and Dharma stories is to listen to them from the point of view of how they're beneficial for you. Because if you discover how they're beneficial for you, then you'll benefit from them.

Some people are very strongly oriented to find what is wrong, and to have opinions that "that doesn't work, this is bad, this is wrong, this is the wrong thing to do." That has its place in life; I don't want to discount the value of that at all. But it can be overdone. And in a Dharma situation where we're trying to actually benefit and become a better person, improve, and practice, sometimes you're better off considering, "How is this useful, this teaching? How is this useful, this story? How can I understand it so I can develop, I can grow, and it can support me in my practice?" And leave the critiques of it for another time.

Even if it's like, "Well, that's a crazy story. There's no way that that's going to be a good story. This is completely a disaster. And boy, I'm going to write a letter to the president of IMC." I mean, that's maybe useful, important maybe. We'll see. But if I think about it deeply, this is never going to be a useful story except maybe in a specific kind of situation. Maybe then it's useful. Maybe I should remember that story then. So then you have some use for it. Maybe that situation happens and you're ready with your little story.

So, that is the preface to these stories.

The first one, from the Lotus Sutra, is a story of a man who is hanging out with his friend. I think one of them is going off on a trip. Maybe both of them are going off on a trip. And they're having a nice time together, drinking and getting drunk. But before they go off, one of them gets so drunk he falls asleep. Deeply asleep. But the other one, while the first one is asleep, finds a very precious, very expensive jewel and sews it into the travel coat of the one who's sleeping. I think the drunk part is always important.

So in the morning, the person who is really drunk still sleeps while the other one has to start on his travels and goes off. And then the one who wakes up later goes off on his travels. With the jewel that he doesn't know about in his coat, he travels around and ends up being in poverty, destitute, has a very hard time, is not always in his right mind because of hunger and poverty, and just wanders around for a long time.

After some maybe 20 years, he happens to stumble back, almost accidentally, to that hometown where his friend is. This friend sees him and they're happy to see each other. The friend—the one who didn't go traveling for those 20 years—is surprised to see his friend all in rags and emaciated and poor and just stumbling along. And he says to him, "Didn't you realize that you had this jewel in your coat and that that was enough for you to live well for the rest of your life?" The man said, "No, I didn't know. I was ignorant of having this jewel."

So that's the first story. It is a story of wandering around impoverished, not knowing that we have a jewel somewhere in our inner lining, maybe, that would make us quite wealthy and be well for the rest of our life. Maybe not financially well, but maybe spiritually well, maybe psychologically well.

The second story is about a father and a son. Some people compare it to the story of the prodigal son^[4] in the Gospel of Luke. In this story, the man grows up with his father, but when he becomes of age, he decides to go traveling and heads off for himself. His father, too, goes off to some other town or city.

This time, the traveling son has the same experience of poverty, destitution, struggle, and hunger. He's mostly able to get a few menial jobs working hard for people and hardly making any money or food. But in this case, the traveling son, living this kind of life, forgets who he is, and does this for 50 years.

In the meantime, his father has moved to a new city and done really well for himself. He has become phenomenally wealthy, has a huge estate, beautiful gardens and stables, and lots of people working for him. But he misses his son. He's been looking for his son, he thinks about his son a lot, but for 50 years, he hasn't seen him.

Well, one day, the son, stumbling along in the world, stumbles into that city, walks by the estate of his father, and looks at it. It is amazingly wealthy. He looks at it from a distance and thinks it has nothing to do with him, and is actually kind of frightened of it, because people like him, being so poor and destitute, are often not treated well by such people.

But the father sees him and clearly recognizes his son. He sends some of his attendants to go and find his son and bring him home. But when these servants or attendants come with all their wealthy servant clothes on, the son gets really frightened because he thinks he's either going to be captured and enslaved for menial work or he's going to be killed, so he runs off.

The father understands that his son is frightened of this whole thing and doesn't know who he is, doesn't recognize his father. So he comes up with a plan. He gets some servant, maybe the superintendent of the stables, dressed really shabbily in rags to go out and find his son and say, "Oh, we need someone like you to come and do some difficult work. We need someone to come and shovel the manure in the stable. Is that something you know how to do? We can pay you a little bit. And there's a place on the edge of the property where you can live while you do this job, and you are welcome to build a little hut there."

So he's not treating him like he's special, but treating him according to how his son has come to think of himself. The son feels lucky to be given a job with anything at all, and so he's quite happy to go and shovel the manure. And so he does this for some time.

After a while, the father puts on some shabby clothes and goes out there and shovels with him. They get to know each other a little bit, and so the father then invites him, "Why don't you come, I have other work for you. Why don't you come and work in the garden now? We'll give you a raise." The son goes into the garden, gets a raise, is given nicer clothes to put on, and works in the garden for a while, and then gets promoted to be the head gardener.

Things go well, and so there is a 20-year process. Slowly they trust each other and become connected, the father and the son, though the son still doesn't know it's his father. And then the father invites his son to come into the household and work there as a close assistant, and eventually become his accountant and his treasurer, and run the estate and be responsible for everything. After a while, the son knows everything, he's able to handle everything, he is trusted and trusts the father, and they have a good relationship.

And then at some point—by this time the father must be really old and is getting close to dying—he invites the local king and important people in the community to come, saying, "I have an important announcement to make." Everyone comes together, and his son now is like his main assistant, his main person, so of course he's going to be there. And he announces to everyone that in fact this man who is his senior assistant is actually his son. He had forgotten who he was, and now when the father dies, the son is going to inherit it all.

And that's the happy ending of the story.

Here is a story of someone who is impoverished. If we apply it to ourselves, are there some of us who feel impoverished? Spiritually, emotionally, psychologically. And is there something about seeing who we really are that's frightening?

There are not a few people who get a glimpse of what it's like to be free—psychologically, spiritually, emotionally free. To let go of certain attachments, to show up for what's difficult in life. That is really frightening, almost unacceptably challenging. To realize we have to let go of something to really be free, some people run away. "I'll die if I do that. My world that I know of won't exist anymore." Some people are so frightened they run away from their own freedom, their own beauty, their own inner treasures, a treasure house that they have inside.

In both these stories, the idea is that there's something very special about who we are. There's a treasure, there's a jewel. There's a state of being that is present for us, available for us, but that we don't know. In the first one, he just takes the jewel out of his lining and he knows he has it. That's like an instant enlightenment kind of thing.

In the second one—and this is why this story touches me and why it's evocative for me—it was a slow process of trust, of growing, of cultivating, learning, learning how to do the heavy, difficult work of dealing with our manure. Some of you might be a little bit nicer, maybe you'll call it dirt or something. Sometimes we have to do that. We have to work with it. Some of us have a legacy of challenges that we have to really come to terms with and work with. And it's difficult work, it's painful work. And there's maybe no circumventing that. Sometimes the very reason why those things are there is what makes it frightening to look beyond it.

And then at some point maybe we are finished dealing with it, and we are ready for something else. Maybe it's learning skills, learning to garden. Maybe it's developing ourselves in certain capacities that we have, but we never developed them. Certain strengths, certain capacities for attention.

For a gardener, I think one of those capacities is care. I like to think when I was a gardener in the monastery, it was such a wonderful job for me that I kind of did not do the best job I could, because I would spend the first half an hour every day going around and just communing with the plants, just checking in. I felt so parental, just looking at them, seeing how they were doing, and we were quite close. So, I could have done a better job just working, but maybe the plants liked that I came and cared for them. Who knows?

So this is developing in care, developing in compassion, developing in relationships with other people. And then the accounting part: he became the accountant of his father in the treasury, learning how to count, learning how to really understand what's there, understand what the treasures are. To be able to track them and know them, and develop beautiful qualities like joy, happiness, peace—these beautiful aspects of being a human being as well. To really know how to track them and be responsible for them and develop them further is part of the task.

As we develop and grow, maybe there's some kind of understanding of letting go, some kind of understanding of trusting this life, some kind of understanding of being willing to show up and really be fully present as we are without apology, without trying to hide something, without doubting ourselves, without feeling insecure or inadequate. There's something about letting go deeply into something about being a human being that feels like a treasure, feels like a wealth, feels like we're complete or that we're full or happy or liberated in a wonderful way, and we've let go of all the things that interfere with having that deep sense of peace with who we are. Who we are is enough, who we are is a treasure.

And who would have believed it, that we are a treasure, that we're beautiful, we have something profound? But, of course, hearing that is not going to be the message some people will be willing to take. They might be willing to say yes, there's really important work to be done. We understand that you're suffering, we understand that you're afraid, we understand that you're angry. We understand that you're hurt. And there are things we can do for you that support that, that help you work through that. There is simple mindfulness and simple meditation, and simple conversations with a teacher or a friend. If you learn how to have those conversations and really begin understanding that side of yourself, it might be that there are unresolved feelings and emotions that need to come to the surface, and it can feel awful. It can feel unfortunate. This is just more of dealing with what's in the stables that we have to do. Maybe it's been in the stables for a long time.

And then maybe there's also cultivating and developing ourselves. It's been quite marvelous to see here at IMC or being a teacher to watch people over the years and watch their growth. Watch how they change and transform, their faces, their stance, their posture, their speech, their capacity to be present, their eyes. It's really something to watch them slowly, slowly change. And to look back, to be able to compare from when I first met someone to where they are now.

Some people I've seen grow and develop as volunteers. Some people have ended up in leadership roles at IMC and they'd never had any leadership roles before, and I could watch them grow in certain capacities in relationship to other people and confidence in themselves that became really important when they sat down on the cushion to sit with themselves, to sit with that confidence. So there are all these things that are developing slowly and growing, and not just working with unresolved issues, but actually developing and growing as a human being that's important, maturing.

At some point that we're mature enough, developed enough, we've grown enough, we have enough sense of well-being, enough confidence and trust not in the so-called father, but in ourselves. That's where it is. We're beginning to see, "Oh, I think it's okay to let go now. I don't have to hold on to that security. I don't have to hold on to that identity. Maybe there's another identity that's better."

So the story of the son who didn't know that he was the son—his identity was one of being an impoverished, unwanted person. And he couldn't just let go of that. That does not work. But he had to grow into the time where he could see his true identity as the son of a wealthy family. We also sometimes have this way.

So those are the two stories. And perhaps I did a disservice by offering an interpretation for them. But maybe I get away with it because of the role I have here as a Buddhist teacher to offer a Buddhist interpretation. But now it's your turn. Do you have any different interpretations that would be beneficial for you? Later, when we finish, you can come up with your reservations: "Wait a minute, this is terrible. Let me tell you why." Let's wait until afterwards to come up personally and talk to me about that. But for now, are there beneficial interpretations, or what was meaningful for you in these stories? Or do you have any questions or clarifications?

Q&A

Speaker 1: This second story hit me that the father met the son where he was. I think often we don't meet people where they are. We try to continuously pull them up or pull them down, we're always trying to pull them instead of just showing up with them, being with them where they are, and then allowing them to move at the speed that works for them.

Gil Fronsdal: Yeah, it's very true, and since the story has to do with fathers and sons, what triggered in my mind was when my son was quite young, I had all kinds of worries about him and wanted him to be better and manage with things. And it was really important that we had these play dates. I started meeting other kids the same age, and I started seeing my son was very age-appropriate. [Laughter] And so my job at certain times was to tell myself, "Okay, Gil, relax. Just meet him where he is. Let him be who he is." He is in fact part of a process of growing up. I couldn't believe they were ever going to grow up. But I had to accept them for where they were.

Speaker 1: Agreed. I have an 18-year-old, and meeting him where he is right now has been difficult for me, and I feel really excited about allowing him to be free.

Gil Fronsdal: I think yes, when some of them become teenagers, sometimes it becomes almost impossible except by biting your tongue. There are challenges. And I was so surprised when my kids went off to college, and then I went to visit them and they would talk to me. [Laughter] Well, this is different. [Laughter]

Speaker 2: Just a quick 10-second thing if I may. My brother-in-law has a phrase: "Everyone in their own way and in their own time." And that's really important to me and kind of relates to what we're talking about.

Speaker 3: Hi, Gil. The first story about the jewel reminded me about this research paper I read from a Harvard professor last week. He was saying that he didn't want to say that meditation is a panacea, but actually it's kind of the closest we can get to a panacea. That reminded me that when I started, maybe 10 years ago, I was thinking the same thing, and I was very enthusiastic, like, "Oh yeah, meditation can fix everything." So, I wanted to ask you, do you think meditation is a panacea?

Gil Fronsdal: What is your definition of panacea?

Speaker 3: He explained that... I don't remember, but they did some sort of study of the brain and how it all works, and they were saying like, as far as they are now, that's the closest thing. If it's not a panacea, that's the closest it can get.

Gil Fronsdal: Okay, good. So, my understanding of panacea means a cure for everything. [Laughter] I don't think we should see meditation as a cure for everything. I don't think that's good. But when I was in Burma and Thailand, my Buddhist teachers were always ready to say it was good for all kinds of things. They loved telling dramatic stories of people who got sick and had cancer and this and that. I think we have to be very careful with it.

But I'd say two things in relationship to that. I think generally mindfulness and meditation is not necessarily a cure for things, but is a tremendous support for things. So it might not fix things, but it can make things better. And one way it can be better has to do with this stupid story... maybe I'll say it that way so that you forgive me.

There was this great executive, and he did a lot of wonderful work for the company, and the company was successful, but he had one problem: when he stood in front of big crowds to give speeches, he would get so nervous he'd pee in his pants. So this was a problem for the company, and the board suggested, "We'll pay for therapy, you have to go see a doctor and try to get help with this issue because this doesn't work." So he did that for quite a while, and he came back and said, "Yeah, it's good now, thank you for the therapy, it worked really well." And they said, "Oh, don't tell us you stopped peeing when you're in front." "No, now I don't care." [Laughter]

So mindfulness can always be good. [Laughter] But the second point is... I'm not finished, you can sit down. [Laughter] ...is that meditation... I don't know if it's a panacea, but it's a really great placebo. [Laughter] And the more we speak it up as a placebo, the better it is as a placebo. [Laughter] And I say that with respect for placebos. We're learning that even when people are told it is a placebo, it seems to help.

The whole psychology, the whole inner life, how it works, what affects it, is something you have to have a lot of respect and care for. It's kind of sacred, the whole inner mental life, how it works. And we have to be very careful and wise about it. So I'd rather not say it's a placebo or a panacea. I would like to actually try to meet the specificity of the situation, the specific conditions, the specific circumstance, and see how mindfulness, how meditation can support this. And maybe we'll find our way. But to make blanket statements, I am kind of reluctant to do. I'm probably guilty of it, but...

Speaker 3: Talking about placebo, I learned recently that there's also nocebo, and it also has a scientifically proven negative result. So if you think there's black mold there, but it's not, still 15% more people will get a negative effect of thinking it. So that relates to your original remark that you made, try to find the positive instead of the negative. So finding the negative is not innocent, it actually does have scientifically negative results.

Gil Fronsdal: Great. I think that's an important point.

Speaker 4: What resonated for me in the first story was that wherever the traveler went, the jewel was there, whether the traveler knew it or not. And in the second story, the father reminded me of the Buddha crafting or pitching his message to the need of the people he was talking to.

Gil Fronsdal: Yeah, yes. In the classic story in the Lotus Sutra, that's one of the messages, and it's called skillful means^[5]. In the Lotus Sutra, it's a little different than our tradition, but it's the idea that it's being crafted for what the need is.

Speaker 5: Real quick. It struck me that in both stories there was no one to kind of force the idea on either party. In other words, he didn't point out the jewel. He didn't force him to try to see it to know he had it. And the same with the other story, it wasn't as if the father was trying to impose this vision of what he saw that he wanted him to see. And that resonated for me. It was really a personal process and it could take a long time.

Gil Fronsdal: Okay, very nice. If you're willing to answer my question, how is that interpretation beneficial for you? How does that fit for you?

Speaker 5: Patience. And also recognizing that I really can't be that useful to point it out to somebody else.

Gil Fronsdal: Great. Thank you.

Speaker 6: Hi. I was touched by the second story because the father took plenty of time to approach the son and have the son go through his difficulties. I've had to accept recently... last fall I had someone who was important in my life pass on. And then I talked to someone else, and he said, "Yeah, it's like when you're in grief, you're trying to move, but you're moving through water." And just coming to accept this is going to take some time. The thing about trying to move through water... So I was touched by the second story, that the father recognized the guy had stuff to go through.

Gil Fronsdal: Yeah. I think that's very important. Thank you. So, it applies in all kinds of situations, that as a human being things are in process. We can't expect to force some of these issues, and so grief is one of them. We have to go through it.

Speaker 7: I first saw the second story as a relationship between the father and the son, but then I thought about it as a relationship between the self. I saw the father and the son as one, and it's your relationship with yourself going through the process.

Gil Fronsdal: Yeah. I think that's my favorite way of interpreting it. The relationship to yourself.

So, part of the value of stories like this is if you keep thinking about them, keep reflecting on them, and living with them and seeing—not that there's a fixed answer or right answer, but rather there are new answers that come along. And given that this is a scripture of a whole wing of Buddhism, one of the key scriptures... apparently it's considered very important for a large segment of the human population. This story. So, it's nice you know it now, this Buddhist story. But maybe it's worth revisiting from time to time. What's your jewel that's in your lining? And what identity do you have that limits you? And what are you growing into? Do you have a feeling or a sense or intuition that's growing into a truer identity, a truer way of being?

Speaker 8: It's a story about me and a jewel here at IMC. Years ago, I used to help with the tea, and the person who was doing it with me would say, "Would you like to make the announcement?" And I'd say, "Oh, no, I don't want to talk into the microphone." And then some years ago, as you know, Inez Freeman said, "Well, Martha, I think you could be the Sunday manager." I thought, "I could? Me?"

Gil Fronsdal: Fantastic, she saw the jewel. Wow. And then after you started becoming a manager, at some point you did our chaplaincy program. Maybe that prepared you for being a chaplain.

Speaker 8: So...

Gil Fronsdal: Maybe so. So keep growing. May you all grow. Thank you.