---
ai_generation_date: '2026-06-06'
ai_model: gemini-3-pro-preview
audiodharma:
  talks:
  - date: '2022-10-09'
    mp3_url: https://audiodharma.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/talks/17057/20221009-Gil_Fronsdal-IMC-support_what_supports_us.mp3
    speakers:
    - speaker_name: Gil Fronsdal
      speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1
    talk_start_time_seconds: 0
    title: Support What Supports Us
    url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/17057
    video_unavailable: false
location_city: Redwood City, CA
video_unavailable: false
youtube:
  id: QDt7CLaXF0A
  imprecise_upload_date: '2023-05-04'
  title: Support What Supports Us
  upload_date: null
  uploader_str: Insight Meditation Center
  uploader_url: https://www.youtube.com/@InsightMeditationCenter
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDt7CLaXF0A
---

# Support What Supports Us - [Gil Fronsdal](https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1)

*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.*


## [Support What Supports Us](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/17057)

So, thinking about Earth care, I love the word "care" because it has so many connotations. To have care for something is to be concerned for its well-being. It doesn't have to be limited to animate beings. We care for objects; we care for all kinds of things that are inanimate that are important for us in various ways. To care for something is to be concerned for its well-being, to keep it in a way that makes it sustainable, honored, respected, kept clean depending on what it is, and kept healthy or functioning.

Caring for your car just means making sure that it runs well enough. I suppose some people care for their car and it means waxing it every Sunday. There are all kinds of things that people do. But care also implies not only a concern but also actions, like cleaning the car or caring for a neighbor.

Those actions in that care can be overlapped with the idea of compassion and loving-kindness. To offer care is to offer some of the most important ways that human beings care for each other, connect to each other, and support each other. We have child care. When my first son went to preschool, I was one of those parents who was in tears, so appreciative of the preschool teachers caring for my son. It was such a profound thing for me to feel someone else's care.

I felt somewhat similar last week, or two weeks ago, when my mother died. I accompanied her with the mortician who came to put her on the gurney, wrap her up, and accompany her out to the van to take her away. Thinking about where she was going—the funeral home and for cremation—I felt tenderly moved. I was entrusting her to their care, and it meant something profound for me that they were caring for her in her last times in this body.

This idea of care is very touching. Parental care is necessary for children to grow up well. Children growing up who don't feel the care of their parents grow up kind of askew; something goes a little bit dysfunctional there. I like the word "care" because more commonly we talk about parental love, but there are parents who love their kids who don't care for them, or the care is a little bit askew. To limit it just to love is maybe not the full equation.

So, Earth care—what is it all about, all the things that implies, and what is the Earth? What does it mean to care for it? One of the things that it means for me is this very profound Buddhist principle: to support what supports us.

Whatever supports us is something for us to support in return, whether it's our community, people around us, the natural world, or the Earth itself. The whole Earth with all its people—somehow we have this very profound connection. Where is the limit? Where are the boundaries of what supports us as individuals? Where are the boundaries for what supports us as a community? You notice Redwood City has boundaries. Is that it? Is that all of my community that supports me, and I'm not going to care about anybody else? Obviously not.

The support circles extend outward, and outward, and outward. These days, it's pretty clear it extends to the whole world. So much of what we consume, receive, and are influenced by comes from anywhere on this planet. We're supported by this wide range, and so do we support it in return? This idea of mutual support—what does that look like, and why would we do it? Why would we care about the Earth? Why would we care about natural resources? Why would we care what happens to the species on this planet, whether they go extinct or not?

You can give an argument that is very logical, lay out the data, and really lay out why in a practical way. But that's not the specialty of Buddhism.

When I was new to practice—actually, this just occurred to me, before I started practicing, when I went to college. In my first months in college, we had a communal bathroom we shared in the dorm. I had a friend who would brush her teeth next to mine sometimes, and she did a really strange thing: she turned the faucet off when she wasn't using the water. She'd wet her toothbrush, turn the water off to brush her teeth, turn it on, get it wet again, back and forth, but she was always turning it off. I was like, "What's that about? Why would someone turn off the water?" That was mystifying to me. At some point, she said, "I'm conserving water." But why would someone do that?

When I first got interested in Buddhism, I went to a Zen Center in Los Angeles. The way they did the evening schedule, you did a period of sitting meditation, a short period of walking meditation, another sitting meditation, and then a Dharma talk. The walking meditation was all done together in a circle, and it's really slow, so you're walking behind someone, being really attentive and present. There was someone in black robes—maybe a priest or a monk—in front of me. We sit on these black meditation mats. In Zen, they all have black mats, and they're lined up in the room. One of them, as we were going around, was slightly askew. The priest or practitioner in front of me matter-of-factly bent down and straightened it out. And again, why did she do that? Why bother? Why would you straighten something out? I was mystified by this strange behavior. I was strange, right? You have to appreciate that. Who knows what influenced me growing up, but anyway, why did she do that?

Just a little while later, there was a senior practitioner when I was at the San Francisco Zen Center who was in an administrative role. He received a fundraising letter from a neighborhood non-profit that was doing good work in the neighborhood. He showed me the letter, and then asked me, "What do you think? How much should I give?" I was kind of mystified. To give? Why? What's this about? It didn't quite compute. He thought, "I'll send fifty dollars," and I said, "What? Why?" It feels very strange to even say this, that I'd be so mystified by these simple things.

Then, I was practicing during a Zen retreat, and I was having tea in a formal way with a visiting Japanese monk sitting next to me. People came around and collected the teacups when we finished having tea. Before he handed his teacup back to the people receiving it, he bowed to the teacup. Why would you bow to a teacup? It's inanimate; it's just a thing. Why would you bow to a teacup?

That's how clueless I was at some point in life. But what Buddhism reveals as you practice it is how deeply we're connected. How deeply we're a part of and intimately related to teacups, water, and our neighborhood community. In some way, we're actually related—we're almost like kin to the mat down on the floor. Straightening it out is not just straightening out the mat; it's maybe straightening oneself out. What is going on there? What is this connection we have?

Then you come to Buddhist teaching, and we have this very important word: Dharma[^1]. It often represents the Buddha's teaching, but Dharma is also the word in the ancient language that is the best match for the English word "nature." I don't know of any other word that fits as well, and it's used that way sometimes. In the dictionary, you see that it's one of its definitions. It has other meanings as well, but that's one of its important meanings. If you make the word Dharma into an abstract noun, translators will translate it as "natural." It's part of the natural order of things.

But what is Dharma besides it maybe being nature? It's kind of abstract. There's a very famous little slogan from the early tradition: to see the Dharma is to see how things are interrelated, and when you see how things are interrelated, you see the Dharma. The way this interrelatedness is discussed is the way in which things arise, occur, exist, and depend on other things. Depending on the support of other things, they rest. We rest on things. When it gets a little bit more sophisticated, they recognize that some things co-arise; they arise together, mutually supporting each other.

If Dharma is nature, where is nature? Is nature found in the trees outside? In the squirrels? Is it found in the weather? Is it found in the whole shebang of everything born from natural conditions? What is nature? One very profound way of understanding it that turns things around for us is that nature is not found in a tree, or the squirrel, in things, or even exactly in you. Nature is found in the relationship between things—the relatedness, how things exist in kinship with each other.

That relationship is a little bit invisible. You can't touch it. I can hit the bell, but is the bell nature? Is my fingernail hitting the bell nature? For people who like to focus on the world of things—"I'm here, and things are out there"—it makes sense that "out there" is nature. "Just beyond the edges of the city is the natural world," some people will say. I used to say that as well.

It was quite a surprise for me when I spent three years practicing at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center[^2], which is really in the wilderness in Los Padres National Forest, inland from Santa Cruz and the coast of Big Sur. After almost three years living there, I went back to live in San Francisco. One of the big surprises after that experience of deep monastic practice was that I started seeing nature everywhere. I saw it in the asphalt in the city, in the cars of San Francisco. I saw that as part of nature too. But it was still a little bit outside of myself. What I didn't see then was that the reason I could see it as nature had to do with the way I was relating to cars, and how everything had changed. 

Rationally, I explained it by saying everything comes out of nature, everything is co-arising together, and we can't really point to anything which is not nature. That's kind of how I explained it to myself. But I think what was really happening was the way in which I was relating. The relationship I was forming, or that was being formed—because a relationship is not something that only comes from me; it's mutual, it happens together. That relationship is maybe what nature is, at least in this Buddhist idea where Dharma is called nature. So what if that relationship is so important to pay attention to? What's the nature of that relationship?

That's where, in Buddhism, you come up with the idea of karma[^3]. Karma is our contribution to that relationship. The actions, the things we do, the things we say, even the things we think and believe, have an influence on the relationship that we are in with everything—with the water that we get from our sink, with the local neighborhood, with the teacups. Whatever it might be, that relationship is influenced. We contribute to the nature of that relationship.

In a simple way, if we hate something or hate someone, that relationship has qualities of that hate in it. I've known people who have a predisposition to being angry. They get angry at all kinds of things and they're upset with the world; the world's not doing the right thing. I could watch and see how the world responds to those people. Of course, people don't like those people, because they're coming at them expecting and mistrusting them, already suspicious, thinking that they're wrong. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that relationship gets formed in a certain way that's shared. It doesn't have to be. I've watched and seen how people who are kind, supportive, or friendly disarm people who are angry or hostile. Sometimes you see that you bring something to the relationship, and it helps shape the relationship. Of course, there's no guarantee just because you're kind that it's going to change it, but it can make a huge difference.

I was once saved from a violent attack—I don't know how serious it would have been—by my friend who was so amazingly kind, friendly, and funny that he disarmed the people who wanted to attack. I didn't have that ability, but that was quite impressive to see.

So, what do we bring? Karma has to do with our contribution to that relationship. And it gets even more interesting: the karma that we bring, the attitudes, the approach we have to what we do and what we contribute, is also the Dharma of ourselves. Meaning, it's also the relationship we have with ourselves. You can't hate without it affecting you. You can't be kind without it affecting you. In Buddhism, they have dramatic language for this: hate is a poison. Guess who it is poisoning? It's poisoning you, and it can poison the world, but this is where it really is the biggest poison. Craving and greed are considered poisons. 

It's dramatic language. Maybe some of you won't like it this way, but what it's pointing to is the way in which the karma, what we contribute to the relationship, actually has an effect on us as well. If we live with greed and craving, then it comes back and bites us. It also creates a skewed relationship out in the world. But it's invisible, right? So who cares? It's not obvious. Probably most people don't think that they're rampant consumerists. But we have a society as a whole that is, and that does it to a lot of people all over the world who do it without much thought.

There's a lot of conceit. There's a lot of this idea of "me," and "I want my things for myself." There is an acquisitional quality of, "I want this," and then when I don't want it anymore, I throw it away, and someone else is going to take care of it. I mean, I pay people. I pay the trash collectors to take it away, so it's not my responsibility. There's a kind of ignorance there; there's a kind of forfeiting of responsibility. Maybe it's okay in some kind of abstract way to do it that way, but it's a lost opportunity. The most precious thing we have, the most valuable thing we have, is the contribution we make to how we relate to this Earth, to this world, to others. That's the real treasure.

You can feel it, I hope, if you meditate enough. I've been meditating now for about 50 years, so I have a little bit of experience around it. The main reason I say it is that I still, to this day—literally this day when I meditated this morning—was going around the kitchen, getting ready to meditate, doing stuff, and I didn't get into too much trouble from the time I woke up and sat down. But when I sat down to meditate, it was so good to sit down. I noticed that my mind had already begun spinning a little bit. There was a compelling feeling, like *I'm on the right track, this has to be done, I should do this, and this is important.* It was a little bit self-centered in my little universe.

Then I sat down to meditate, and that just kind of dissolved. What was left was so much better. This is real. I felt free. I felt warm. I felt centered. I felt at peace, at ease, in a way that I felt healthy. Everything was present. In contrast, what I saw was that I was deluded for those few minutes in the kitchen, ignorant in a certain way. I was being swept away by the things I had to think about and do, and I didn't see how I was losing my ease, losing being connected in some deep way. It's that easy.

Imagine if someone never has a way of disconnecting from that. They believe their minds, they believe the momentum, they believe the desires, the wishes, the conceit that it's about me and what's best to happen. It's radical to shift that, to move out of that and come into a place where we have a chance to relate from a place of health, from a place of being centered and easeful, being at peace.

So when we talk about Earth care, it can come across as duty, as obligation. *We have a responsibility to do something: let's go out there and fight the good cause, and let's shame everybody else into doing it too.* Something like that can happen occasionally. But I think from a Buddhist point of view, my hope is that we tirelessly care for the world, for the Earth, but not because it's an obligation. Because it's the most natural thing to do in the kind of relationship that is the healthiest, most meaningful, most inspiring way to live in this world.

Anything short of that probably doesn't come from this natural place where we're creating a healthy relatedness, where we honor the relationship, respect it, and understand it. Where we have this cup of tea, and I don't think the cup itself responds to the monk bowing to it, but what a radically different relationship that monk has to the cup of tea than someone who just tosses it in the trash can because they don't want to bother cleaning it. "There's so many teacups at the Zen Center, so I don't have time." It's a very different relationship.

I heard this beautiful story yesterday of a Native American, a Lakota man who is a professor of Environmental Studies. He told my friend the story of having an undergraduate class. The first day of class, the students came and sat down. He stood in front of the class and said, "I have an unusual request. I know you just sat down, but could you get up, go outside, and touch a tree?" The people looked at each other and apparently weren't so enthusiastic. "What's going on? We came to learn." But they went out and touched a tree.

They came back and sat down, and he said, "I know you touched the tree. I know this is a really strange request, but I'm going to ask you to go do it again. However, this time, before you touch a tree, wait until the tree gives you permission to be touched."

So they went out and did it. When they came back into the class, the students were in a whole different state of mind. They were quiet, reverential, and ready to learn. Something had softened in them. Their relationship to learning had shifted. From that simple exercise, he had them enter into a relationship with the trees. Whether trees can really give us permission is maybe less important than that something transpires in the relationship between the trees and you—that you feel there is an invitation, a permission, a request.

When I was an undergraduate, I took botany, and I was amazed by the beautiful circles drawn on the chalkboard of the oxygen-carbon dioxide cycles that go on with the plants. They make the oxygen that we need, and we make the carbon dioxide that they need. It's this wonderful cycle. Then I went out into a courtyard in Davis, California, where they have these majestic old oak trees. I stood in the middle of the courtyard stunned by the trees, wondering: where do I end and where do the trees begin? Where do the trees end and where do I begin? I could give away one of my kidneys, my hand, all kinds of parts of my body that I don't really have to have to live. But I need those trees to be alive. Where am I? Who am I? What's going on here?

I stood there in silence, just in awe of it all. That was a very different way of relating to the trees than saying, "That looks like firewood. I need to be warm, so I'm going to take my ax and chop it down."

We are supported by what supports us. I say, what supports us is what we want to support. If we don't support what supports us, we just destroy our support. That's what we're seeing. Down through history, through the centuries, we've seen this. I lived right on the Adriatic Coast for a while, in a city in Italy called Trieste, right on the border with what was then Yugoslavia. We used to go down the coast of Yugoslavia. Beautiful islands, stark and stony. They used to be covered with soil and trees, but they were denuded and all the soil washed away because they harvested all the trees to build Rome[^4], and things like that. We've seen down through the ages that human beings have overextended their agriculture, their woodcutting, their farming, all kinds of things, and destroyed the place of support. It's not a new thing for us to be doing in our generation, but perhaps what has changed is the scale of it.

So we come back to Buddhism. What we have to offer for this is the beautiful principle that we want to live attuned to our relatedness, our relationships, because that's the heart of where nature is found. We contribute to that. To the degree to which we have agency, we contribute to that relationship. We want to be careful that we contribute something which is healthy, something that is really healthy for us as individuals, as a community, and healthy for the natural world itself. That is represented by the slogan: *support what supports us*. We support what supports us; it would be the ideal.

Here we have this Earth Care Day, which is celebrating this possibility, celebrating the dual meaning of Earth care. It could also mean that we're recognizing the Earth cares for us. Earth Care Day is recognizing how we're cared for, how we're supported. It can mean the day—or the week—that we consider and reflect on caring for the Earth.

In saying all this, to summarize now, at the heart of it, Buddhist practice is caring for the attitude, the motivation, the contribution that we offer to that relationship. If we care for that, then I think we'll find how to care for others, for the world, for people, and everything in a way that doesn't drain us, doesn't oppress us, but rather we'll learn how to do it in a way that feels natural. It feels like this is what we were built to do; this is how humans were made to be.

It is something that's very hard to appreciate unless you have some way of connecting to the deeper sources within us, to the places of real health that go on inside. Or connecting to the tree that we ask permission to touch. The strawberry plant—we wait to pick the strawberry until we recognize that the plant says it's okay now. Why would you do that? Maybe because there's a shift, a change. There's a receptivity, an openness, a caring, an attentiveness in that. It brings forth something deep within ourselves that we then contribute to our kinship with all things.

So, Earth Care Week. In a few minutes we'll have a chance to have tea and talk with each other, and meet with the Earth Care Committee. But before we do, we ended a little early, and I'd like to just start doing what we used to do before the pandemic. For those of you who are comfortable with this, simply turn to someone who's near you, say hello, and introduce yourself. There's a lot of people here who have been here for the first time today. Also, if you care for it, you might want to say—oh, Hillary wants to say something. [Laughter]

---
[^1]: **Dharma:** A Sanskrit word (Dhamma in Pali) with multiple meanings in Buddhism, most commonly referring to the Buddha's teachings, the truth, or the natural order of things. It can also refer to individual phenomena.
[^2]: Original transcript said "tosahara," corrected to "Tassajara" (Tassajara Zen Mountain Center).
[^3]: **Karma:** A Sanskrit word (Kamma in Pali) meaning "action." In Buddhism, it refers to intentional physical, verbal, or mental actions that have ethical consequences and shape future experiences.
[^4]: Original transcript said "build room," corrected to "build Rome" based on the historical context of widespread deforestation around the Adriatic Sea (Dalmatia/Illyria) by the Roman Empire.