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.

Release and a Life of Vow

So there are two things I want to talk about today. I want to talk about the relationship between them. The first, in simple language, can be talking about freedom or liberation. Many people understand that this is really central to this Buddhist practice. But the one that is not mentioned very much is the idea of vow—the idea of a commitment. These two go together.

Vow has a very interesting part in the unfolding of practice for some people. When people first come to practice, they're interested, and the interest is what engages them. That interest might be driven by a need, so we hope that somehow this practice will make a difference for the need and the suffering that people have. As people practice, at some point, something in the family of commitment happens. A decisiveness or clarity arises: "This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to meditate every day. I'm going to give myself over and make this a priority for my life." Exactly how strong that priority is, or how big the commitment is, is very individual, but at some point, it becomes more than just an interest. For some people, it becomes a life.

At some point, the commitment changes into something else, where it becomes something like a vow. Many religions have vows. People who are ordained take vows, people who get married have vows. A vow is something that affirms an aspiration, a wish that arises from within. It's not something we take from the outside and put on like a coat. Rather, it's a recognition that there is a call from the inside—a recognition that there is something flowing, animating us, and energizing us from the inside out. The vow is the recognition that "This is where I'd like to live. This is my orientation. This is my direction."

This points to how we change over time with practice. With freedom, there is correspondingly a three-part step that goes on.

First, in the beginning, a lot of the practice has to do with relaxing. For some people, relaxing is not "spiritual" enough, so we can call it calming—a settling, a tranquilizing, a calming of all the agitation and the busyness of the mind and heart. Calming and relaxing have a lot to do with healing that which is fragmented, hurt, or wounded inside of us.

As the relaxing deepens, at some point, there's a letting go. There is a clarity that some things we've been doing are not something we want to do anymore. That letting go is a choice. You come to a point and say, "Okay, enough of this. I'll stop doing this."

With enough letting go, there is release. Release is a whole different animal than letting go, because release is not something you can do, but rather something we allow for. I want to talk about these two different things: the freedom side and this vow side.

On the freedom side, letting go sooner or later becomes very important. Some of the letting go just happens. Some people are surprised as they meditate how much of their ordinary life and concerns just settle away and recede into the background. If that's done clearly and strongly enough, people experience themselves being alive in a very different way than they've ever done before. For some people, it's like, "Oh, I haven't felt this way since I was four or five."

That's one of the things that happened for me. As I started sitting and meditating more, I started having a sense of well-being that I hadn't felt since I was a little kid. I said, "Oh, I know this. I recognize this." It was a bit of a homecoming. The busyness of life, the challenges of life, all the different preoccupations that I'd slowly acquired and built up to make a complicated world for myself to live in—it wasn't so dramatic, I didn't even know I was doing it. But as I meditated and stayed with the breathing, let go of my thoughts, and sat quietly, these things slowly receded. They receded far enough away that I started to experience myself in a radically different way.

One of the consequences of that is that when some of those things came back—which they almost always did—the usual daily tendencies, the attachments, the selfishness, the conceits, and the stories I had about myself and others just didn't seem so important, valuable, or even healthy to have anymore. There became a desire to let go of them and not live by them. Some of them I was able to put down. For some of them, I changed the way I lived so I wouldn't be caught in them as much. My very lifestyle supported certain attachments, so I shifted my lifestyle so those attachments wouldn't be so easily supported.

As this practice deepened, it became clear that the letting go that sometimes happened on its own, without me trying, was something I could also choose to do. I learned to let go of certain things. Some of those were things of the world which were not healthy to do. But what I learned more and more was that it wasn't about the world and anything in the world; it was really letting go of the clinging, the holding in the mind. That was a big revelation, to realize that that's where the real issue is—to let go of the holding on.

The advantage of seeing that is you don't have to let go of things in the world unless they're unhealthy. Some people who are into this Buddhist practice of letting go let go of things that shouldn't be let go of. What we can do instead is, rather than clinging to them, we can hold them with an open hand. The advantage of holding things with the equivalent of an open hand is that some things are worth keeping. They are appropriate to care for and have in our lives, and there's no need to let go of them. They're valuable.

But reality sometimes has other ideas, and sometimes they go anyway. If we're not holding on tight, it's a lot easier when things go. It wasn't your choice to have them go. It wasn't because you wanted them to go—maybe the opposite, you didn't want them to go. But still, with this life that we live, sometimes they go. People die. All kinds of things just happen. We don't know when the San Andreas fault is going to blow here in California. If it goes, there are a lot of changes coming about. Things will go away, but the freedom from clinging makes a huge difference in how we navigate that and work with the changes in life.

So we learn to let go. But we come to a point in this Buddhist practice where it's clear that we have to stop doing the letting go. Letting go can still represent having control: "You're in charge. I'm the one who's letting go." That can only go so far before we feel that it doesn't make sense to do that anymore; it's actually not possible anymore. One of the places of holding on is control. To let go of control is to stay in control—it's a paradox.

So at some point, letting go becomes letting be, allowing. This can feel like a very profound part of practice, especially when practice is quite subtle and strong. There's a form of letting go that involves no letting go at all, but just letting it be. It's stepping back and having a wide, spacious perspective of the situation, of ourselves, of what's going on, and learning how not to be troubled or irritated by what's happening. Even our clinging, we let it be. We allow it. To constantly be involved in letting go of our clinging is to somehow be going in the wrong direction, which becomes clear as we go along.

It's like sanding rough wood. You sand it with coarse sandpaper first, but then you have to stop using the coarse sandpaper to use finer and finer sandpaper. At some point, if you keep using sandpaper, it doesn't work. You have to just use a cloth. The same thing applies to letting go. It can work for a period of time until it's no longer the right grain of activity. At some point, there is letting be, allowing, and letting go of control.

Only then can release happen. Release is very different than freedom. We can talk about fighting for our freedom, asserting our freedom, demanding our freedom. You can't fight for release. You can't fight for your own release, for the release of the heart or the release of the mind. You can't lobby for it. You can't assert it. It involves an allowing. We let go enough to be, and allow for something that's not in our control.

Different people come to this place of letting go of control at different points. Some people struggle with this early on; for some people, it's quite well advanced in their practice. But the idea of controlling is trying to keep everything safe, trying to get what we want, trying to know certainty and avoid uncertainty. There are many things we're trying to avoid with control. We're trying to avoid feeling our fear and our distress. We have to let go, and that makes room for something to happen that's not our doing. All we have done is put the conditions in place for a deeper release.

The deeper this letting go happens, the deeper this release happens. It influences the other movement of practice, which I'm referring to as interest, commitment, and vow. As we practice, there's interest in the beginning, and then somehow the practice begins to show that it works. Something begins shifting and changing in us. For each person, that shift and change is a little bit different—it's very personal. But at some point, we recognize, "Oh, I'm different because of this."

One way for some people to recognize this is if they're able to meditate every day for some time—maybe a few years, or even six months to make it a more manageable goal—and then stop for a week or a month, and see how life is different. Some people say, "Wow, I didn't realize how important meditation was, because without it I'm not so calm or I don't see so clearly." I remember suggesting to a long-time practitioner who had done a lot of retreats that he should stop meditating for a month, and he started crying. It was so important for him. I think it was important that month to really see what was going on in a deeper way. It wasn't necessarily seeing something difficult; it was seeing something very profound and important within himself that he hadn't quite understood.

So there's a shift that happens. With that shift comes a commitment. Maybe a commitment to let go of the things which are unhealthy that we do, or a commitment to do the things that are healthy for us, especially spiritually healthy. But that commitment belongs more to the world of what we do, where we have some control. As important as commitment is, it can only take us so far.

At some point, when the release is deep enough, when the letting go is deep enough, and we're very connected to what's happening here in ourselves and the world, there's a source for an aspiration, a wish, a dedication. It is almost impersonal in that it doesn't belong to that part of the mind or ego where we rationalize things out or try to improve the self. It's not really about the self anymore. It arises from some place inside that's not exactly personal. It is personal in the sense that it's within us, but not in the usual way that we think about ourselves.

Some people talk about a calling. I love the word "aspiration" because it's connected to the word "breathing," like respiration. It's something deeper that wells up. There's something that begins flowing or rising, a feeling of, "This is what is important. This is what my life is about. This is what I want to do."

When I was a Zen practitioner in the monastery, I spent a year living close to this junction, this place of the vow. I was trying to grapple with what was most important for me, what was the most meaningful thing I could do with my life. I didn't do it continuously; I did it every five days. The monastery had a five-day week, and the fifth day was the day off. I would go for a hike in the mountains on most of those days, and that's where I checked in and grappled with what I was going to do with my life.

What arose surprised me. It arose within, and it was like, "Oh, of course, this is what I'll dedicate myself to." But the decision was made before my mind said it. The decision happened in the heart. Something shifted and changed. The decision for me was to dedicate my life, a vow, to work for the ending of suffering in this world. That's what my system had come to. There was nothing else that was more important. The vow was not something that I took on as new. The vow was simply the expression of what was already happening to me—this movement, this dedication.

The idea of a vow came to me because in Zen practice, vows are a very important part of the tradition. They have something called the Bodhisattva vows^[1]. There are four of them. It goes something like this:

Beings are innumerable, I vow to save them all. Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them all. Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them all. Buddha's way is unsurpassable, I vow to become it.

It's like the impossible dream. Beings are numberless, I vow to save them all. It's ridiculous, right? I mean, who's going to do that? In some ways, that could be seen as a phenomenally egotistical dedication—you're going to try to save all beings? You have some kind of messianic complex.

But it's not. The way it was understood was in two different ways. One was that you're going to keep coming back to a mind that's liberated, and so we're freeing all beings in our minds, freeing them from our attachments. The other understanding is that yes, it is impossible to do this, but succeeding is not the point. The point is: this is what we're going to do. This is the task. This is the dedication. This is the life that we're dedicated to, without concern that we're not going to get to that many people before we die.

The same thing with delusions. Delusions are inexhaustible. It's very humbling to realize that. To have this idea that someday you'll come to the end of all your delusions is maybe a conceit or a problem. But to always practice, to always be looking at the ways that we have delusion—those of us paying attention to our society these days will appreciate how many delusions we live with unconsciously. The unconscious bias that we live with in our society is something we're slowly beginning to get a handle on. Maybe there's no end to understanding them; they're endless. But the dedication is, "Yes, I'm going to keep looking, keep discovering my delusions, keep working." A willingness to look at these difficulties—that's the task.

Dharma gates means the Dharma practices, the Dharma experiences, the Dharma openings that we can have are endless. The point is not to come to the final one. The point is just to keep practicing. That's the dedication.

And Buddha's way is unsurpassable, I vow to become it. Become the Buddha? Well, it's impossible, but that's what my life is about.

I don't know if this is satisfying to hear, but this idea of vow is not about succeeding at anything. The vow is that orientation, the dedication of a lifetime, what's most meaningful. For some people, it finds something very clear, and it can be wide-ranging. As a Buddhist teacher who made a commitment to this Buddhist practice the way I did, it can sound like this is what everyone's supposed to do. But no, there are all kinds of ways of living a life. Many ways are not so obvious, or are very subtle, or very personal in different shapes. There's room for all.

The point being that as we practice, we might discover more and more what is most meaningful for us, because what is less meaningful or not meaningful begins to be shed. It begins to settle out, to recede. When our distracted mind, our preoccupied mind, our fear, and our ambitions and desires get quiet, tranquil, and settled, what is left here? What is left as being the most meaningful, the most important for us that we want to live by?

I have faith that this practice we do—as much as it involves a settling, a letting go, a connection, a showing up here in a very full way—does not lead people to be couch potatoes. That's not the point. We don't just end up being someone who has no desires, no wishes, and just sits here on the couch to smile and breathe. I think that is not possible. I think that as we connect and drop deeper and deeper into what's here, the heart is set up in ways that are very different than you probably would have imagined if you're caught up in the social constructs and values that we inherit from our society and our families.

Discover what that is in your heart. What is most meaningful? What is most animating? What brings you alive? What is it that gives your life the most meaning, that is enduring, that really helps you sing or helps something come forth?

I call that the vow. The vow that we can live by, what we're devoted to or dedicated to. For some people, it involves making choices between different things that are good things to do. I had to make that choice myself, because in my youth I had dedicated myself to going back to graduate school to work on the issue of soil conservation in this world. I had studied agriculture and soil science, and I knew that one of the huge challenges of our world was the amount of soils that were being devastated and eroded. We needed to do something about it, and not too many people knew about this huge issue. That was the direction I was going, and that's still a very worthwhile thing to do. So I had to choose between this Buddhist path at some point and doing that. I chose the Buddhist one. That was part of what I was doing that year—reflecting on what is most important here.

The advantage of having a vow, or even a commitment and dedication, is that you wake up in the morning and you know what you're doing. You know what you're about. There's a clarity. In this world, it's very, very hard to know what to do sometimes. Sometimes it's hard to know what's meaningful and what's important, hard to know what to choose to do. When there's a vow, it's like, "Oh, this is what I'm about. This is what I do. This is what I'm dedicated to." It's a ballast. It's a foundation.

It's a teacher. When it's difficult to live by the vow, then you have to look at it more deeply. It's a protection, an inspiration, a guide for a life, a purpose. To live the vow.

So the question is: what is that for you? What might it be for you? Some of you might not be ready for that question in the way that I'm talking about today. Vow really comes at the end of a series of practices and real development. But at some point, you might come to that place. It might be a very natural stage that you come to. It's not like you have to rush ahead now because I talked about it, but you'll just feel and sense inside of you that something is moving you, something is becoming so important for you that something is going to shift. Some choices and decisions can be made, some dedication.

Some of that is not a choice. Some of it is not you controlling the situation, but allowing something that is maybe a surprise to you to surface, to call you, to speak to you, or animate you. And if you want to listen to that, it might call on you to make big choices and decisions—what you let go of, what you stop doing, and what you change and do differently.

I think that becomes an important stage for some people. What's important to keep in mind is that the more deeply we go into this practice, it's not just a practice that helps us to cope and manage more effectively with the life that we're living, but one that really helps us to question the life we're living in a deep way. If you look across the country and across the world at how many people live their lives, you probably wish a lot of people would question in some deep way what they're doing, how they're doing it, and why they're doing it. There are a fair number of dysfunctional things going on around us. But it's also probably true for ourselves in some way—that we start questioning, what is the calling? What is the new way of living that really has meaning and purpose and is right here?

This practice that we do is not only stress reduction; it's also something that sooner or later hopefully will challenge you in some very deep way. And you're willing to be challenged by it because you're not being challenged by something external. The challenge is really coming from the inside out. It's coming from yourself. Some better part of you is beginning to flower and come forth.

At that point, maybe it's not a matter of bringing your practice into your life, but rather bringing your life into your practice. Rather than finding a way to live your life as it is, it's a way to live your life from this place that has been freed and released through this practice.

Release and vow.

Questions and Answers

We have a few minutes. Some of you would like to ask questions, clarifications, or concerns you have about what I've talked about, or how what I've said sits with you. Is it difficult to hear, is it inspiring, or nice? Over here, I think.

Audience Member 1: The vow is a wonderful topic. In Sanskrit, it's called vrata^[2].

Gil Fronsdal: Yeah, and I'm actually using the word adhiṭṭhāna^[3] in Pali, adhiṣṭhāna maybe in Sanskrit.

Audience Member 1: I'd like to draw an analogy with Yoga philosophy, where the first of the eight limbs in Patanjali's sutras are the yamas—ahimsa (non-violence), satya (truth), brahmacharya, and all these things. Patanjali calls them the sarvabhauma mahavratam^[4], which means irrespective of place, time, everything—it is universally valid. And there is a fact called shraddha—it is faith, but faith from a very deep source, which makes people take these vows. The power of this is enormous. In the Mahabharata, there is a character called Bhishma. He is known as the one who made the terrible vow of celibacy, and the powers he gained were so much that he could give up his life when he chose to. That is the power of these mahavratas. I just wanted to bring that up. Vows of power.

Gil Fronsdal: Yeah, great. Thank you, Ganesh. Talking about what goes on in these early Indian texts, it's so common in so many different religions that people come to a place where they do something like a vow. It's kind of interesting to reflect on how this is a common phenomenon in religious practice, at least if we distinguish religion from the practices. It certainly is worth reflecting on, considering, and understanding a little bit about what it points to in the heart, what it points to in our nature that people go in this direction. Yes.

Audience Member 2: For me, this path has not involved so much of a commitment or a vow, but rather a knowing. I can tell that, oh yes, these Buddhist teachings are great, and they mean a lot to me. I think they're very beautiful, and they've made all the difference in the world in my life. So just knowing that has been a great thing. But my discipline... there's something sort of resistant or stubborn in me, so that my discipline when it comes to practice has been poor. So maybe I do need a little bit of that vow or commitment quality that I have been missing. This has been wonderful.

Gil Fronsdal: I can imagine that. The knowing is one thing, and deciding to live accordingly by that knowing is a different thing. So maybe commitment, intention, and vowing would be important for you to look at. Yes, it could be. Ideally, at least the way I understand these things, is that it doesn't become an act of brute force to say, "Okay, now I'm going to do it." Rather, you recognize that there's an animating force within, and it's like, "Of course I'll do it now. I'm going to ride this wave of intention, of commitment, of vow."

Audience Member 3: Thank you so much, Gil. You helped me understand something about futility with your Dharma talk today. The image I had was of the cellist on the Titanic. The notion of, is it kind of crazy to go and try something that's obviously sort of futile? You're on a sinking ship, and we often use that as an analogy for something useless. Why would you go? You're going to drown. But in some sense, what else would you do if you were a cellist on the Titanic? You might as well go play, and those last moments are your way of organizing a little bit of the universe that, in every other sense, is quite chaotic and even hostile. I'm no longer going to use that as a notion of futility, but rather it is a little bit of a way of organizing your hostile world. I don't know if that's useful or not, but at least to me it helped me rethink what we often think of as just futile attempts at calming.

Gil Fronsdal: Wonderful. I think what you're saying is actually quite important. Some of the ways in which we respond to crisis are actually not that useful. It might seem essential to panic. It might seem essential to get angry and bark at someone, like, "It's what people do, it has to happen this way." But if it's your last day alive, is that really the best thing you can do with your time—to be afraid or to bark at someone? Isn't there a better alternative? If you have a few hours left, isn't this the time to do something really different in your life than the usual anger, desire, and fear? Isn't that a time to kind of play the cello, or smile at your neighbor, or do what you enjoy, or put your mind and heart at ease?

Because now you don't have to prove yourself anymore. You don't have to accomplish anything. So one of the questions for us practitioners is: what's the best option that's available for us? I think there are a lot of better options available for us than some of the ones we choose. Choosing to play the cello might be the best option for that person given the alternatives that were available. So what's our best option? It's an exercise of thinking, "If this is my last afternoon alive, what really is the best option?" Then you can reflect, "Well, actually, maybe I have a few years—maybe that's still the best option."

Being connected to something deep inside, to have released and let go in a deep way, and really touching something that's meaningful is to touch a higher quality of living, a higher quality of mind and heart. Then it becomes less and less interesting to succumb to other forces where we lose something that's so meaningful and so important.

I appreciate your idea that what might seem futile sometimes has a lot of utility. It could be very inspiring to see. I've been with a lot of people as they're dying, and it strikes me how much of an influence it has on the people who are there, their friends, and their family who survive. How people die matters. For some people, it's beautiful to watch their peace, their letting go, and their equanimity. It's inspiring. It's like people go there for darshan^[5]—they want to show up and be with them because they haven't experienced so much peace in someone. Other people die afraid and anxious. This ability in this practice to discover the better option, the better alternative, to really know it for oneself and then choose to live by it, is this vow. Okay, so maybe one more and then we'll stop.

Audience Member 4: Thank you for this. I'm sitting thinking about the dichotomy between advocating for myself in situations where I see or experience unfairness versus allowing things to let go. I just experienced a week ago a situation in the medical arena where I felt that I had to really push to advocate for what was right for me. But I also recognize where that was very much about survival, a sense of ego, or a sense of just wanting to survive. There's a continuum with that. There are times where it's probably egoic to push. But how do you navigate through that sense of advocating for what feels right for you versus allowing things to let go?

Gil Fronsdal: It's a very good question, because as I said earlier, you shouldn't let go of some things. Some things need to happen. Being an advocate, holding your ground, saying no, insisting, staying present—it's not a spectrum. It's not like there's just a range; it's more like these things can coexist.

It's possible that part of our motivation is a clear, wise intention to care for our well-being so we can care for our family, and some of it is pure egotism. Both can coexist. It's really a pity for us, if part of it is a good intention and part of it is unhealthy, to sacrifice the good intention—to give it up because there are some bad intentions as part of it. We have to weigh these things, their impact, the harm we might cause, or the benefit we might cause.

It's a complicated world what you're bringing up. I don't have a simple answer for you except one. The simple answer is: learn how to be really mindful of yourself so you can track all the different component parts of what's going on for you, and recognize the tension, the stress, the clinging, and the contractions that are unnecessary. Generally, the physical tension and the stress that builds up in the system, you can take that as being unnecessary. Whatever is driving you that causes that stress, that probably is not useful to have.

But if you can be motivated, activated, and engaged in a strong way without that tension or contraction that brings you suffering, go for it if it's the right thing. My hope is this practice actually makes us more courageous, more willing to stand up and fight for a good cause—not less—but to do so at ease, to do so with peace.

Okay, great. Thank you all very much for being here. Those who would like to stay for a while and chat more, there are folding chairs in the cabinet just outside in the other hall. Grab one and bring it out to the parking lot. We'll sit in a circle there, we can take off our masks, and continue. Thank you so much.