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audiodharma:
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  - date: '2023-03-26'
    mp3_url: https://audiodharma.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/talks/17979/20230326-Gil_Fronsdal-IMC-the_equivalence_of_generosity_and_letting_go.mp3
    speakers:
    - speaker_name: Gil Fronsdal
      speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1
    talk_start_time_seconds: 0
    title: The Equivalence of Generosity and Letting Go
    url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/17979
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location_city: Redwood City, CA
video_unavailable: false
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  title: The Equivalence of Generosity and Letting Go
  upload_date: '2023-03-26'
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  uploader_url: https://www.youtube.com/@InsightMeditationCenter
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# The Equivalence of Generosity and Letting Go - [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.*


## Introduction

Good morning, and those of you online who are also attending, good morning to you, or good day.

I'll start with an announcement. Over time we have changed some of the COVID protocols from when we first opened up, and it feels like we're ready to do another small change—or big change. Sunday morning here has been by registration; you were supposed to sign up ahead of time in order to keep the numbers within about fifty or so. It seems like things have changed enough that it's time not to require sign-ups anymore or to limit the numbers. Starting in April, that's the way it works.

I don't know if any of you have already signed up for next week, but there's no longer a need. For the time being, we'll keep the room set up the way it is with the chairs, because it does create a little bit of social distancing. We'll maybe put out more chairs in the outer hall. You can get a pretty good view in from the other side. Some people used to, before the pandemic, prefer to sit out there; they thought the sound was better. At some point, we'll rearrange the room the way it used to be pre-pandemic, which puts the chairs closer together.

That's a change. We're still requiring N95 masks. I can very much appreciate that some of you feel maybe that's not needed anymore, and feel maybe even a little annoyed that we should still be old-fashioned this way. But I think it's still very helpful. For the most part, the discomfort that comes with wearing them makes for great practice. We have a practice that's supposed to help us with this kind of discomfort, to find our comfort with this discomfort. If we were some other kind of place—maybe if we were a bowling club—maybe there's no practice for that kind of discomfort. But we have one, so hopefully, we can just fold it in and work with it for a while longer. At some point, probably the masks will become optional. But when that is, it's not so clear. We're just feeling our way step by step as we go along here.

I think the need for a level of inner safety, inner comfort around not being afraid about COVID, is actually quite important for people who are meditating. As we get quieter and quieter, stiller and stiller, we become in some ways more tender, more sensitive, and more impacted by very subtle things. This level of safety around COVID can have an effect on people's meditation, I think.

## [The Equivalence of Generosity and Letting Go](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/17979)

Yesterday I was doing my taxes. That seemed to go fine, more or less, until I tried to submit them electronically, and then it became Kafkaesque. It was like, "You've got to be kidding me, really?" One of the things was I had to submit the first four letters of my wife's last name, but she only has three letters in her last name.

A lot of people do, so I couldn't figure out how to get around that. Later, the IRS wouldn't accept her personal information, so you have to contact the Social Security office to get it sorted out, but they're closed. Anyway, that was frustrating. I was more humbled by my level of frustration than anything I've done for a long time.

That's a long way of saying that I hadn't given any thought to what to talk about today as I woke up this morning, with a teeny bit of a hangover from that experience. I thought, "Well, what am I going to talk about?" Sometimes I'll do my early morning meditation and something comes up in that. So I was minding my own business, doing my morning meditation, and at some point, it occurred to me, "Well, I'll talk about what I've been thinking about the most in the Dharma lately. I'm kind of interested in it." That seemed obvious. Okay, back to my meditation.

Then floated up this thought later on: "Well, I need to have an example illustration to talk about this Dharma thing." Back into my meditation. And then at the end of it, the thought floated up: "This meditation will be the example." So that's what we're doing today.

The example in meditation was that I sat down to meditate, and my mind was still, I think, a little bit in the leftover frustration level with having done the taxes. It was racing or spinning more than usual. It felt a little bit like if my mind was a car, I would still be in second gear but driving at the speed for fourth gear. It's kind of racing and really high-winding. It was like, "Wow, this is not me. There's something that's taken over here." There's a compulsiveness or drivenness in my thinking. I thought maybe it's a little bit like being in a terrible storm with strong wind, and kind of hunkering down, making your way through it, making yourself small or something. 

Because by the end of the meditation, the storm had cleared. It wasn't that I got into fourth gear; I think I got into neutral, which was even better. There was this wonderful feeling of being released from this drivenness, the compulsivity of these thoughts that went on. But that took the duration of the meditation. Part of that journey was going through it at the beginning and saying, "Wow, forty-five years of meditation, and this is what it comes to?" [Laughter]

I thought, "Yeah, okay, well, I have to accept this. I have to let go of this. This is a bit humbling." But that's okay. Maybe it's good to be humbled, or good to kind of let go and accept this is how it is. Freedom was found just accepting: this is how it is. My mind is out of control, it's spinning, it's going fast. And okay, well, that's the deal. There was a certain kind of freedom, but it wasn't celebratory freedom. It was just, "Okay, this is the way it is."

Then as I meditated, I could feel slowly my body was tense, and that tension kind of settled. After my body started settling, I could feel my mind beginning to settle just by doing the meditation, just showing up and being present. I didn't feel like I could address the compulsivity, the drivenness, directly. It just felt like that was getting mired in the mud, just adding fuel to the second gear. So I just kind of got out of the way. I let myself be humbled or simple. Then by the end of the meditation, things had settled enough that there was a sense of relief, a release. Now the feeling was one of kind of delight, like, "Ah, this is nice. Something has let go."

Then I got to a point where if tax thoughts arose, I could just let go of them. I could release them. And now the releasing of them, letting go of them, just felt like a pleasure, like a delight. What a wonderful thing to be able to do this and come back to this much more simple, relaxed, peaceful way of being.

That's the example for what I'll talk about. In the Buddhist vocabulary, the ancient Indian vocabulary, the language that the Buddha taught, there's a whole family of words related to liberation. The different words have different nuances of associations with them. Some of them have directly to do with the word "liberation" in English, or "freedom," "emancipation," or "release"—kind of positive words we would have in English.

But some of the words are often translated into English using words which, for some English speakers, are not celebratory words like "freedom." They're actually maybe a little bit off-putting. Some words, for example, are sometimes translated into English as "giving up." Now, the tone of voice maybe has a lot to do with how that's taken. Giving up, you know, "Oh no, we have to give up again," feels like a kind of surrender, a kind of hopelessness: "Okay, this is it."

The word "relinquishment" is used for one of this family of words. I looked up the synonyms for relinquishment in the thesaurus. They're not good news. [Laughter] Most of them are not good news. You wouldn't be happy if we used these words. One of them is "abdicate." So maybe the association of relinquishment is not automatically so great.

And then there's the word "letting go." Maybe the tone of voice also has something to do with it. Letting go, for some people, is not a good idea, not welcome news: "You have to let go of that." In fact, sometimes people will tell you, "Just let go," and it's kind of infuriating. What are you telling me? As if it's easy to let go. And then people tell you to let go of things you shouldn't let go of. "Let go of everything! Let go of your house, your possessions. Just let go of doing your taxes!"

Letting go sometimes doesn't have positive connotations. But it turns out that in English, some of these words that are not necessarily good news anymore for us actually have quite wonderful etymology if you do the archaeological digging into the word. It seems like the phrase "giving up" originally meant "offer up to the altar." That's kind of a sacred act. Someone tells you, "You've got to sacrifice that," but the word "sacrifice" originally meant, in Latin, "to make sacred." Well, that's a beautiful thing. Back there in the background, there was something quite lovely.

Apparently, the word "surrender" also doesn't seem like a good idea, but originally it meant a kind of "super rendering"—a giving again. So all these words had positive connotations originally.

It turns out that in Pali[^1], the Buddhist language, the same thing occurs, but not so much in the etymology of the word as in the meaning of the word. Some of this family of words having to do with liberation means both something like "letting go" and "generosity." Letting go and giving. Depending on the context of what's being taught, sometimes it's translated as relinquishment, or letting go, and giving up, but sometimes it is actually translated as giving.

When it's translated as giving, it's directly connected to feeling delight. You're feeling the delight of giving, feeling the delight of letting go, feeling the delight of relinquishment.

In Pali, these words are kind of all the same. There's a word *cāga*[^2], which means both generosity and letting go. There's *paṭinissagga*[^3], which means relinquishment and giving. There is *vossagga*[^4], which means both relinquishment and giving.

When you hear that these words have this double meaning, translating them as "letting go" or "relinquishment" doesn't capture some of the richness or the association to it. So I've tried to use "giving" as part of it. Maybe "giving up." But then I thought, "Well, how about giving away?" But that doesn't quite work. So I'll just forget about the "up" and the "away," and let's just call it "giving." I like that.

But then you don't get a sense of what it means for the giver: that there is a beautiful feeling of release that goes on. To give with release, to give where giving is free. A kind of freedom to give. Giving feels like fresh air. It feels like the over-revved car is back in neutral and resting. It feels like the storm is over and it's gotten to be calm and peaceful. What is this release that we can have, this giving that feels wonderful and celebratory?

This is a clear association that the Buddha has with the deepest forms of letting go, of liberation, that we can have. It's clearly a release. It's clearly something disappears, is given up, is let go of. But it's not a diminishment. Rather, it feels great.

In fact, the Buddha said something like, "If relinquishing something"—and the word he uses here can mean both giving and letting go—"brought about unwholesome states of mind, I would not teach you to do so. But if relinquishing something, letting go of something, giving up something, giving away something, results in wholesome states of mind for you, then I recommend you do it."

This is not a blanket teaching: "Just let go, let go, let go, no matter what." It's letting go in a way that leads to positive states of mind. To be able to discern that is part of the criteria for knowing when to let go. You realize, "Oh, I'm actually better by not holding on to this. Something gets free, something good happens."

When the Buddha describes the things he actually recommends we relinquish, we let go of, sometimes he uses words that have no redeeming qualities. I'm trying to redeem some of these words, right? There's a family of words. Freedom you don't have to redeem; liberation, that's good. But relinquishment, giving up—you have to redeem that a little bit. That's what I'm trying to do.

But there are some words he uses which have no redeeming qualities. He uses words like "abandon." But what do we abandon? What do we relinquish? All my wealth? My friends, my possessions, my sexuality? All these party-pooping things? I'm not going to say you're not supposed to do that, but here's a list. You can leave now before you hear it. 

Here it comes: lust, hatred, delusion, anger, hostility, denigration, insolence, envy, miserliness, deceitfulness, craftiness, obstinacy, vehemence, conceit, arrogance, intoxication, heedlessness. It's a great list.

What do these have in common? All these words have to do with inner states in our minds and in our hearts. They have nothing to do with things of the world and what's out there. These are things to be let go of. But to let go of them, to relinquish, to give up, to give... how do we do that?

That's actually the full context of this quote: How do we accomplish this? What states of mind can be cultivated to make this possible? The Buddha says you want to cultivate a deep capacity for tranquility, for serenity, and insight—the practice we do here. To really see clearly, so that when you let go, you understand really deeply what you're letting go of and why.

Without seeing clearly, letting go is not wise. We want to let go in wise ways. With wisdom, it's easier to let go. We know why we're letting go, so we're not letting go of the wrong things. We can better appreciate the benefits that come from letting go. We learn how to let go, how to relinquish, how to give it all away, or how to be generous. It's an act of generosity. The movement of letting go is a movement of freedom.

When I was sitting in my meditation this morning, kind of putting up with my grumpy state of mind, my spinning mind, mostly what I had to do was say, "Okay, well, I guess I can be humbled sometimes. I have to accept this too." I probably had to let go of some kind of conceit that I'm a great meditator today. That wasn't inspiring, but it was what was needed. "Okay, I just have to practice with this."

By the end, it was an act of generosity. "Oh, there's those thoughts again." But now I had enough serenity, enough insight, to say, "Okay, I'll release those." I could feel the goodness of it. I could feel how it felt good to do it. It felt like a generous thing to do, because the alternative was not generous. The alternative was not good for me—to go back into those thoughts. I could feel what it was. It was an easy choice, like taking your hand off a hot stove. I could appreciate it. I could value it.

Part of the wisdom of letting go is learning to recognize the goodness of doing so. To recognize how we're better because of it—what gets released, the space that's created, the room it gives for beneficial states to bubble up and flow. The delight, the joy.

There's a family of words connected to freedom in Buddhism, the goal of Buddhism: liberation. Some of them more literally mean liberation. Some of them have this dual meaning of giving and giving up, relinquishing and giving something away. Where does it go? If you're grumpy, give it away, but don't give it to anyone. Give it to space. Give it to the ocean. Give it to the sky. It knows what to do with it.

Many years ago, I discovered that at the end of a meditation or a retreat, whatever calm I had would usually go away after some time. I used to be a little bit grumpy then. What I learned was, if it's going to go away anyway, why don't I set the intention to give it away? I'll just give it to the world. Just that shift made me feel so much better. Rather than holding on to it or feeling disappointed if my good state was leaving, I said, "Great, another thing to let go of, another thing to be generous with."

If you permit me, there is a children's song. Maybe it's an adult song; maybe it should be an adult song. It goes something like, "Love is something if you give it away, you only end up with more."

In Buddhism, they say the same thing for merit. If you give away all the merit from the good things you've done, that's really meritorious; you get more merit. What is merit? Merit is all the good feelings, all the happiness that comes from the good things you do. So do good things, feel the happiness, and give away that happiness. Share it with others. Don't hold on to it for yourself, and you'll end up with more.

There's an intimate connection in Buddhism between letting go and generosity, giving, freedom, and generosity. The intimate connection works the other way too, between giving and generosity and freedom. Where do we start? Do we start with freedom and get generosity, or start with generosity, and lo and behold, we get freedom?

I just left you with a big problem to figure out. Aren't you lucky that's your problem? Just start anywhere. It makes sense either way. It's a great thing, a wonderful thing, that in these two languages, and maybe many other languages, there's such a close connection recognized between letting go and generosity. May you come to appreciate that, value it, and find a way. Thank you.

## Q&A

**Gil Fronsdal:** We have a little bit of time. We can do a few questions or comments in here, testimonials about letting go and generosity. Then maybe in about ten minutes or so, those of you who want to stay, we can go out to the parking lot and take some folding chairs and sit out there in a circle. If you'd like, we can take off the masks there and just have a continued discussion. But for now, any comments or questions in here?

**Speaker 1:** My question is, when you realize that there's a state to let go of, how do you make the choice between trying to relax and do nothing to allow it to pass, or trying to engage loving-kindness with yourself?

**Gil Fronsdal:** There are so many strategies to learn what's needed at any given time, and some of it just comes from practice. You just try different things. So now, apparently, you know two things: you know letting go, and loving-kindness, right? What good fortune that you have these two tools. Now you've got to practice with them until you get the street smarts. You understand how it works, when one works, when one doesn't work, and when one feels like the best thing for you. You learn through trial and error. You might say, "Well, I'm not sure, but right now I feel more attracted to loving-kindness," and you do it. After a while you realize, "Actually, that doesn't work. That's not really working today." So I think that's the best way, rather than giving you some formula. Is that okay?

**Speaker 1:** Yeah, thank you.

**Speaker 2:** I understand the topic of today is letting go, but my question is, why acquire to begin with? You know, there's this saying that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So why be agitated about doing taxes? Why not just laugh at the IRS who has all these problems? It's their problem, not yours, right? Why do you get agitated?

**Gil Fronsdal:** Now you're asking such profound questions I cannot answer. [Laughter]

**Speaker 2:** You know, you said, "After forty-five years, this is what it amounts to." So for you, it's easy to say that, right? You have such confidence in your practice. But for us, we're looking up to you as a teacher, and we don't have forty-five years. So what do we do? How do we get the confidence in our practice?

**Gil Fronsdal:** I hope I didn't discourage you today.

**Speaker 2:** No, no, it's fine. Well, it is a little discouraging, to be completely honest. It is discouraging.

**Gil Fronsdal:** I think that forty-five years ago, what I didn't have was any ability to get some perspective on my grumpiness and the racing mind. I would have been sucked into it and caught in it, and I was not today. Today it's like, "Oh, look at that. That's interesting."

**Speaker 2:** As always, there are two sides, right? On one side, I am a little discouraged. On the other side, I'm very inspired by your ability to talk openly about this topic and be relatable to us. It makes me more willing to listen to you because you're willing to be very honest.

**Gil Fronsdal:** Great. In this regard, I might have said this last Sunday or somewhere—I teach so much, who knows where I said it—I think in this practice we do, all of us, all the time, are beginners. But what happens when you practice for forty-five years is you're just an experienced beginner. Which makes it easier, a lot easier, but you're still just a beginner. So don't expect too much.

**Speaker 3:** Hi, Gil. I really liked an analogy you used today that I hadn't heard before about letting go, which was to take your hand off the hot stove. Whenever someone says "relax" to me, I tense up. And whenever someone says—oh, I love it when they precede it with the word "just"—"just let go," I cling. So at least I've arrived at that awareness.

I thought of removing the hand off the stove, and then I thought, "Take my hand out of the fire." When I think about the thing that will grab me, it's a feeling that somebody has really wronged me, or dissed me, in a way that will have consequences. Not just, "Gee, I didn't like that." I can get that feeling. But, "Oh, twelve other people who I cared about heard that and were influenced." That's a problem. So I'm going to work with this idea of taking my hand out of the fire. But whenever I want to give up something, I need something to go to. If I'm going to give up sugar, I need to go to vegetables or something. I need to have a goal. I need to not "give up" as much as "get" something different. Can you give me any guidance around that process? What can I substitute?

**Gil Fronsdal:** You've said some wonderful things. First, I want to say that one of the functions of developing mindfulness is developing heightened sensitivity to recognize the hot stove or the fire. If it's really a hot stove, you don't need anything better to go to; you just want to get out of it because it's so obvious, so instinctual. As we get more sensitive, we feel the suffering. In fact, some of you have heard me say that I recommend we should learn how to suffer better in this practice, and that's also discouraging. [Laughter]

"Better" doesn't mean you go out to make better suffering. It means that you feel your suffering more acutely so that you can learn the lessons of it, so that the instinct not to be there, to pull back or step away, can operate. Sometimes that's the only thing that helps. 

And sometimes with some of the deepest attachments, at some point in this practice, you reach rock bottom and you have to give up. Sometimes giving up is what's called for: "Okay, I surrender." Sometimes there's no other way because you've tried every other option and none of it works. In my first retreats that I sat, I was miserable until I finally gave up. Not because I knew it was wise, but because there was nothing else. I just didn't know what to do anymore; I was hopeless. Then the retreat started. I had to let go so deeply and give up all hope, kind of, and then something was able to happen.

So that happens sometimes. But to your question, sometimes you need a reward; you need something positive. I think that's really wise also. This is where I think much of the Western Buddhist teaching that I grew up with, forty years ago or so, was so much on letting go, letting go, letting go. There was even a clear emphasis *not* to emphasize the good mental states that can come with practice, because you have to let go of that too, and not have a goal.

But if you read the teachings of the Buddha, there's a lot of carrots in there. There's a lot of emphasis on cultivating and developing beautiful states of mind, and developing them to the point of abundance. We let go of things that harm us, but things that benefit us, we let them grow and develop in abundance. What are those things? Joy, peace, happiness. Equanimity[^5] is one of them. Generosity, wisdom, compassion, loving-kindness, *anukampā*[^6] (care), and ethical integrity. These are all beautiful states that exist in us.

As we practice and clear the debris from our mind, we start feeling and getting a visceral, embodied experience of what these states are like. So then we say, "Oh, when I let go, I can return to those." A turning point for me in my practice was to start feeling feelings of peace and love—love was one of them—and they just felt like that was almost like the natural state. So the commitment in practice, the vow that I made, was to orient my life to stay true to those, because that was more who I was than the opposite.

But that was because I had learned to recognize it. Those states weren't always readily accessible, but I knew that's what the practice was helping me do. Sometimes you don't get the rewards right away; sometimes you have to wait a while for them. Does this address your question well enough?

**Speaker 3:** Yeah, it really did. You triggered a memory for me. My life coach is always saying that in these difficult moments there is a gift and opportunity, and I always groan at him. But I think now I get what you said, and I get what he said. So that's what I will look for: the gift and opportunity for all of these more beneficial states.

**Gil Fronsdal:** Yeah. One of the great gifts of this mindfulness practice is when we see that just to be mindful in a situation is its own reward. You step back, you step away, you open up, and you're really here. Yes, you're grumpy; yes, you're whatever. But wow, this is like the clouds just parted.

## Conclusion

So thank you all very much. We have about five minutes before the formal ending. What I'd like to ask of you—because I feel like community is such a hugely important part of what's happening in this post-pandemic world—is if you'd be willing to just turn to someone next to you and welcome them here. Even if this is your first time here, you can welcome them and say your name or something, and talk a little bit if you want. Then in about five minutes, I'll go out and we can meet in the parking lot.

---
[^1]: **Pali:** The language used to preserve the Buddhist canon of the Theravada tradition.
[^2]: **Cāga:** A Pali word meaning generosity, giving, or abandonment.
[^3]: **Paṭinissagga:** A Pali word meaning relinquishment, giving up, or forsaking.
[^4]: **Vossagga:** A Pali word meaning relinquishment, relaxation, or handing over. Original transcript said "vasoga", corrected to "Vossagga" based on context.
[^5]: **Equanimity:** A balanced and peaceful state of mind, remaining calm and undisturbed by the fluctuations of worldly events or emotions.
[^6]: **Anukampā:** A Pali word typically translated as "compassion," "sympathy," or "care," referring to a deeply felt concern for the welfare of others. Original transcript said "anacampa", corrected to "Anukampā" based on context.