--- ai_generation_date: '2026-06-24' ai_model: gemini-3-pro-preview audiodharma: talks: - date: '2022-05-01' mp3_url: https://audiodharma.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/talks/16191/20220501-Gil_Fronsdal-IMC-action_as_the_refuge.mp3 speakers: - speaker_name: Gil Fronsdal speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1 talk_start_time_seconds: 0 title: Action as the Refuge url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/16191 video_unavailable: false location_city: Redwood City, CA video_unavailable: false youtube: id: oiJoSrBYfxI imprecise_upload_date: '2022-05-04' title: Action as the Refuge upload_date: null uploader_str: Insight Meditation Center uploader_url: https://www.youtube.com/@InsightMeditationCenter youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiJoSrBYfxI --- # Action as the Refuge - [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.* ## [Action as the Refuge](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/16191) Hello everyone, and welcome to the Sunday morning talk. I'd like to begin with a little something autobiographical. When I was in my twenties, I was living at a Zen monastery—Tassajara monastery[^1] here in California—for about three years. I had recently graduated from college and had been accepted to graduate school, which I then deferred. I was living at the monastery, living a monastic life. I spent a lot of time reflecting, thinking about what I was going to do with my life. *Should I go to graduate school? Do something else? What should I do?* I was happily engaged in the monastic life. They had a five-day week cycle, so I was following the monastic routines for four days, and then the fifth day was a half-day off. I would go hiking in the mountains there. Those days off were the hardest days for me because I was left with myself in a different way, and I had to reflect on my concern about what I was going to do with my life. I had to make a decision. I did a lot of reflecting on those walks. After about a year of these kinds of walks, reflections, and thinking about what to do, I realized I had done enough reflecting with no answers. At some point, I realized that I was operating in generalizations and imaginations—imagining a future, imagining things beyond the monastery about what I could and should do. I became acutely aware of how much I was in my world of imagination. So I made a decision. It wasn't exactly a conscious decision, but it was a decisive moment where I decided I had enough of all these reflections and thinking; it hadn't helped me. I decided that I would start my life over. I thought, *I'll just start all over again with the next step as I walk.* Looking back at it now, forty years later, I don't know if that was naive, but I did it. I just happened to be living in a Zen monastery that was a cool place to start all over again. When the bell rang, I had to go meditate. When the bell rang, I got up and went to work or did things. It was a very healthy, wholesome place to be. I just followed what opened up in front of me. To some degree, that represents the rest of my life—just taking the next step, seeing what happens, and responding to that. Eventually, it led me here into what's happening in Redwood City now and the rest of my life, and I'm still doing that. That was a nice decision to make. It turns out that each of us, every day, every moment, comes to that juncture without realizing it. Every day you start over. Every moment you start over. Believe it or not, you can start over. The way you start over is that all the things you did in the past are now in the past. The things you did in the past contribute to this moment, but whatever decisions you made in the past have been made. You don't have to make those again. We find ourselves here and now. Now is when we can decide how to take the next step. Given all the conditions that are present here and now, we're making a choice to do something. The choices you've made in the past are what they are. The place that's really dynamic, the place that's really significant for us in our lives, is today. The next step we take, the choice we make today of how we walk, how we talk, what we say, and what we do is consequential. Sometimes there are unconscious choices and we're influenced by things around us, but the choices you make have consequences that shape your future. Imagine two identical twins who grew up together. People couldn't tell them apart. They looked the same, had the same mannerisms and way of speaking, and had the same personalities. Then they decided to go to different colleges, and each of them had a different roommate. One of them had a roommate who had a strong tendency to complain. The other had a roommate who had a strong tendency to be grateful for everything. They didn't have any reference point to think anything different; they just thought, *Oh, I'm in college, you get a roommate, this is what roommates are like.* Slowly, they came under the influence of their roommates. One learned to complain, and one learned to be grateful. It wasn't exactly a conscious choice. There was a kind of subconscious choice. If you complained, you had camaraderie. But the one who was grateful had camaraderie by being grateful. Slowly, the twins were being shaped by the situation without recognizing what was happening. After a year, you could easily tell the difference between the two twins, and their lives started to change dramatically. For the one who started to complain more and more, people held their distance. But everyone liked to be with the one who was grateful, and different opportunities opened up. Complaining is an uncomfortable, stressful mental state that reinforces other inner reactivities, like annoyance and self-criticalness. It makes it easier not only to complain but to be angry at things. The person who was grateful supported other, more relaxed mental states and feelings of generosity. They both came to the same moment going to college where they started their lives over, and then things went in different ways for each of them. Today is a new day for you. Today is a new beginning. Every moment is a new beginning. You come to a fork in the road, and the question is, which fork do you take? No one is asking you or telling you which fork you should take moment by moment. But what if you really took it seriously that you're starting your life over today? Because in a way, you are. This is really the only place—today and now—where you can make the choices and engage in the activities that are going to shape your future. To whatever degree we can shape it, it's only you that can do that. Even if you get a roommate who complains, how you respond to that roommate, how you take it in and receive it, is really up to you, even if it's subconscious. When we are mindful and have this pause and ability to stay present, we have a much higher sensitivity to notice the choices we make. We have a higher sensitivity to be wise about which fork we take: the one that's healthy or the one that's unhealthy, the one that creates a better life or a worse life for ourselves. When we have this mindfulness practice, we can really appreciate that we start over. In a certain kind of way, it's very forgiving. Yes, you've been influenced by the mistakes you made in the past; that's part of the conditions that brought you here. But we don't have to be weighed down by the past. The Buddhist approach is to reflect on the past and learn from it just enough so we can aim to do better in the future. Buddhism is forward-looking. Some people think that Buddhism is all about being in the present moment. That's part of it, but the reason to be in the present moment is so we can make the choices today that make a difference for tomorrow in a good way for ourselves. Even something as simple as complaining—as innocent as it may seem sometimes—is choosing a fork. One little complaint is not going to have much impact, but once we start complaining more and more, it affects our mind states, our habits, and how people treat us. It begins creating a new world. So how careful do you want to be in the world that you create for yourself? How do you create yourself? There's an expression in English: *If you do X, you own it.* If you decide to balance all the teacups in your house on top of each other, and someone says, "That's not safe, they're so fragile, they're going to break," and you insist, "I'm going to do it, it's safe." The person walks away, and well then, whatever happens, you own it. It means that you're responsible for it. It's up to you to take care of it. It's your kamma[^2], some people would say. The Buddha said that too, 2,500 years ago. He said, "You are the owners of your actions." In a wonderful liturgy that encapsulates what I'm trying to say today, he says: "Beings are owners of their actions, heirs to their actions; they originate from their actions, they are bound to their actions, and they have actions as their refuge."[^3] We're owners of our actions. Once we do something, the consequences of that somehow continue for us. So we need to be careful with what we do, so the momentum we set in place is one that we want to live by. We inherit our actions; we are the heirs of our actions. They are passed down to us from one day to the next through habits, through conditioning, and through infinite ways in which actions carry consequences into the future. The idea in Buddhism is that there's no free lunch when it comes to action. All actions carry consequences, and we inherit them. Then we originate from our actions. That's the powerful one: all beings originate from their actions. Who you are today is partly the consequence of all the actions you've done in this lifetime before today. These things are so subtle and small in how they come into play and build up over time. I was told once that Abraham Lincoln said something like, "By the time a person is forty, they're responsible for their face." I think what he meant was all the little gestures and expressions we have on our faces build up over time to create a certain kind of face. From the Buddhist point of view, it's not about our face, but about our hearts and minds. So much is shaped by all the choices we make. Then we are bound to our actions. You can't get away from the fact that actions are consequential. Even if your action is to do no action—just be a couch potato and do nothing—that's an action too. We're human beings. There's very little time we spend just being; sooner or later, you have to pee. We're more like human actors, with constant activities that we're doing. Because we're bound to action and can't get away from acting, let's look at action and activity in a serious way. And then we come to the last part: beings have action as their refuge. The Buddha said that you can make yourself a refuge. We're not trapped in creating problems for ourselves by what we do, what we say, and how we act. We can engage in the world and behave in ways that become our own refuge, our own support. "Refuge" in Buddhism is a very powerful word. Rather than the refuge being outside of oneself, or finding some essence inside yourself, the refuge is our actions, how we live, and what we do. It makes a huge difference how we live and what we do. We can do the things that are supportive and nourish us. We can live ethically, by the precepts. It makes a big difference for your heart whether you kill people or don't. It makes a big difference whether you steal or don't, whether you engage in sexual activity that harms others or don't, whether you lie or don't, and whether you engage in intoxication or don't. It makes a big difference whether you're greedy or not, whether you have hatred or not. It makes a big difference if you're generous or not, if you're grateful or complaining. It makes a big difference whether you take the time to see people with respect and reverence, or the opposite. These are all actions and behaviors. By choosing the side of the equation that is healthy, we create our own refuge. We create an inner life that we're happy to be in, that we're proud of, that brings us a sense of joy and delight. More importantly for meditators, it brings us the possibility of relaxation and ease. We look within and we don't find conflict or regrets, but instead we think, *Oh, it's good in there. It's nice to be in there.* Who's your best friend? Your own heart, what you find inside. But to discover that, it's through our actions. Some people feel like they have a lot of doubt and lack of confidence. How do you find confidence? How do you find faith? Some people think it's by reading a lot of books until they find the perfect teaching, or finding some meditative state of mind that will correct everything. But the way to build confidence is step by step in the actions you do. It might be that after practicing honestly in small increments, you eventually feel, *Oh, I think I have confidence. I've learned the skill to communicate honestly in a way that's effective, helpful, and safe.* We learn to be generous in small steps until we feel, *I know how to be generous, when to be generous.* It's through actions that we develop ourselves and cultivate confidence and faith. You want to have enough faith in Buddhism that you begin acting and behaving differently. Then the faith becomes less about Buddhism and more about yourself knowing how to behave and act beautifully. When the Buddha talked about action, the word is kamma. Sometimes in English translations, they'll talk about "good" and "bad" kamma. The word for "good" in Pali literally translates to "beautiful."[^4] There's bad behavior, and then there's beautiful behavior. That creates a very different feeling; it doesn't have the moralistic flavor of good karma. What if we say we're living our beauty? That is an ethical life, but it doesn't have the heaviness of calling it an ethical life. It has a sense of freedom, delight, and joy in what we do. This teaching is so central to Buddhism, yet it's not always conveyed to people learning meditation. There's a particular syndrome among some individuals here in the modern West where any emphasis on *doing* ties them in knots. They feel like they can't do it right, they have to strain, push, try too hard, and prove themselves. They feel exhausted just hearing about action. They think, *Oh no, I have to do more? I just need meditation as a break.* To get that break, some people love Buddhist teachings that say, "Don't do, just be." It can be very profound to hear the instruction "just be and don't do" as an antidote to all the proving that goes on in this culture. But as good as that teaching is, it doesn't represent the fullness of what the Buddha had to teach. The Buddha taught about action and how to do it wisely. One of the ways to do it wisely is to pay attention and learn from the feedback loop when our behavior adds stress, and when our behavior is refreshing and brings ease. We start recognizing the extra attitudes we pile on top that make it heavy and difficult, and we learn other attitudes so that acting in the world can be light, easy, and fresh. How do we live and behave in the world so that there's an ease, it's beautiful, and we enjoy it? So that when we finish doing something, we're not exhausted by it, but revived by it? It's possible to do that much more than most people realize. It means using mindfulness to track carefully the extra tension, stress, and straining that goes into what we do. The solution is not to avoid acting; the solution is to act without all the extra stuff. When I was at that Zen monastery, there were stories about the founder, a Japanese monk named Shunryu Suzuki Roshi[^5]. He was pretty short, maybe five feet tall, and in his late sixties. He liked having tall, strong American male students help him with his rock garden, where they had big boulders. The stories from those people who worked with him were that when Suzuki Roshi was going to move a big boulder, he seemed to use no more effort than was needed. His body seemed to stay relaxed, and he knew how to move the boulder without any extra strain. I wasn't there, so I don't know what they actually saw, but that principle stuck with me. Yes, you can even move boulders without adding extra strain on top of it. So beings are owners of their actions, heirs of their actions, bound to their actions, originate from their actions, and have actions as their refuge. Your actions can be your refuge. It's your choice whether you make them a refuge or make them something that keeps you bound up and caught in a certain kind of prison. Those are my thoughts this morning. ## Q&A **Speaker 1:** It seems to me very hopeful, because I get a new chance all the time. **Gil Fronsdal:** Yes, it's hopeful. You get a new chance all the time. Yes, you do carry with you the effects of the past, but you always can see, *Okay, now I get to start over.* So you don't have to be weighed down by it. **Speaker 2:** I do try to do the best I can most all the time, but since I can't guarantee that I will not offend you, I ask the people around me that if I offend them in any way, please tell me. Because then I can look at it and maybe correct my mistake. But if I don't know about it, I can't. **Gil Fronsdal:** I think that's really wise. We have a lot of unconscious behavior, a lot of foolish behavior, and all kinds of things we do. How do we take that into account? You don't want to be in a straitjacket. What you just explained is a really important way of having a community to support us and find our way. Make agreements or arrangements with people, or choose friends who can offer you feedback and places where you're safe to make mistakes, be told about it, and find your way forward. This is really, really useful. It's difficult because people don't want to offend you. **Jeannie:** I just had the thought that what you were talking about—living with a teenager, you start anew every day. Because the teenager's mood changes from day to day, sometimes moment to moment, and you're seeing a new person each day. Having to learn to flex and change with that, and decide you're going to do things differently, is probably very good Buddhist practice. **Gil Fronsdal:** Fantastic, because maybe you'll then learn to do it for yourself, because you've probably changed more than you realized. **Speaker 4:** Thank you, Gil, for explaining actions as a refuge. It was confusing to me when I first saw that statement, but now it's very clear that good actions can certainly become a refuge for going forward. And beautiful actions too. I'm inspired by this idea of calling it "beautiful actions" rather than "good actions." I don't quite know what to do with it to be honest, but it inspires me quite a bit. **Abhishek:** Can you please explain what's the difference between a good action and a beautiful action?[^6] **Gil Fronsdal:** The word "good" probably needs defining. We use the word "good" so easily, as if everyone understands what we mean. I would like to use the word "good" to mean that it's useful and beneficial for some purpose, rather than focusing on the morality of it. A good action is an ethical action that is healthy and beneficial. Whereas "beautiful" for me means that it's pleasant. It's almost like looking at art—it's so nice to see. Someone says something beautiful to another person; it's not just useful, but there's a kind of grace, pleasure, delight, and inspiration. It's kind of like, *Wow, that was well done. That was a nice thing.* For example, if I just said something like, "Well, thanks for that question, that was a good question," that's one thing. But if I say, "Wow, that was a really great question. That was important. It makes me reflect on it now and gives me something to think about even more." There's a difference. So maybe the first was not so beautiful, but the second approach has beauty. Am I in the ballpark for you? **Abhishek:** Yes, so what I get is that *how* we do things relates more to beauty, rather than *what* we do. **Gil Fronsdal:** Ah, the beauty has to do with the *how*. Yeah, I like that. Very nice. ## Conclusion Thank you all very much for coming. When we met before the pandemic, we would periodically ask people to turn next to each other and say hello. I feel a little hesitant to do it now with masks and being closely together, but if you go outside in the gravel or under the tree, maybe some of you would like to say hello to each other and chat a little bit. Jeannie used to do that before the pandemic, so she's offering anyone who's new or relatively new to come say hello and hear a little bit about what goes on here. Go see Jeannie out in the hall just outside. Thank you all. --- [^1]: **Tassajara Zen Mountain Center:** Original transcript said "sahara monastery", corrected to Tassajara Zen Mountain Center based on context. [^2]: **Kamma:** A Pali word (Karma in Sanskrit) referring to the principle of cause and effect where intent and actions of an individual influence their future. [^3]: **Five Daily Recollections:** This teaching on actions as a refuge comes from the Upajjhatthana Sutta (AN 5.57), which outlines five subjects for daily contemplation. [^4]: **Kalyāṇa:** A Pali word often translated as "beautiful," "good," or "lovely," frequently used to describe wholesome or skillful actions. [^5]: **Shunryu Suzuki Roshi:** A highly influential Japanese Zen monk and teacher who helped popularize Zen Buddhism in the United States, and founded the San Francisco Zen Center and Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. (Original transcript said "shinri suzuki" and "suzuki russia", corrected based on context). [^6]: **Good Action:** Original transcript said "dread action and a beautiful election", corrected to "good action and a beautiful action" based on context.