Episode #122: A Conversation with Gil Fronsdal
Gil Fronsdal’s single visit to Myanmar came over three decades ago, but the impact of the trip on his spiritual life stays with him still.
Gil’s initial meditation experience came in the form of Zen. This eventually took him to Japan, but because of the outsized focus on rituals and decreased emphasis on sitting, he soon became disillusioned. From there, he traveled on Thailand, where he took a Mahasi course. Immediately impressed, he felt inspired to practice more in this tradition. He worked in both Thailand and Nepal with a teacher that Sayadaw U Pandita had appointed to teach outside Burma, and was pleased with both the teacher and the arc of his own practice. However, he felt compelled to go to the source of the teaching and seek further guidance under Sayadaw U Pandita himself.
It was 1985, though, and Burma was still not very welcoming to foreigners; it took nearly nine months for the visa to come through. When Gil did finally arrive in the country, he devoted himself to intensive meditation at the large Mahasi center in Yangon. “I felt like a large junior college campus,” he recalls. “At times there were 5,000 people meditating there! I think the atmosphere of meditation, of practice, of devotion of the Dharma, that I felt oozing out of that particular corner of Burmese society that I was in, touched me in some deep, emotional way.”
However, studying under U Pandita was no easy feat for Gil. “When he took people seriously, I think there's sometimes some certain kind of Burmese paternal attitude of care of people in your charge, where you are really strict with them,” he notes. “And a lot of the Westerners I knew at that time burned up under his tutelage! Some people had really serious psychological problems, challenges that they had to recover from after practicing with him. But because I had the Zen background, I didn't buy into the striving that he was teaching. But I did buy into the care and the attention to detail, the practice he was teaching. And so this attention to detail was fantastic.”
Gil was spending seventeen hours a day immersed in this detail, with little time left for anything beyond sitting. “I had such long periods of extended rapture and bliss that I've ever had in my life.” Eventually, U Pandita went off to teach a course in Australia, leaving Sayadaw U Lakkhana, who had a much gentler style, in charge. This is exactly what Gil needed. “I had so much momentum going that I dropped into a whole new, deeper level of practice. And then I just cruised along and went deeper and deeper.” When U Pandita returned, he sensed a sea change in his student, and was careful to advise him only where needed.
U Pandita regularly talked of attainment. In the context of Gil’s balanced and deeper practice space, this emphasis now resonated with him in a new, more concrete way, helping him realize how, in the “micro-moments” of his life, he was not quite as accepting as he had believed himself to be. In his own words, “Without having some sense of what the potential is in this practice, people don't orient themselves to that potential. And so, it actually helps to have some sense of a goal of how people can deepen and how much further this can go then.” This was to eventually impact his teaching career, as Gil became increasingly conscious of not only presenting meditation as an aid to leading a balanced life, but also reminding about this potential of full liberation, and what could be achieved “in this very life,” to borrow a phrase made famous by Sayadaw U Pandita.
Eventually Gil chose to ordain as a full bhikkhu, and spent half of his eight months at the Mahasi center in monastic robes. However, he found this experience not so impactful. Essentially, he felt that “being a monk was not as ideal as being a lay person in the monastery,” because monastic duties cut into his intensive meditation time too much for his liking.
Years later, Gil was privileged to meet another renowned Mahasi teacher, Sayadaw U Silananda, who had been instructed to teach in the Bay Area. “The remarkable thing about meeting him was that I'd never met him before, but he treated me like we were old friends! I'd never had this experience of a total stranger treating me like we're good friends.” Their on-going relationship was characterized by this informality, even when discussing weighty topics like Buddhist theory and meditation practice. This further indicated to Gil just how diverse the various Mahasi teachers were in disseminating the Dhamma.
Overall, that brief stay in the Golden Land continues to be a special memory for Gil. “Of the eight months I was there in the Mahasi center, I really felt like I was a guest of the country, and the whole culture. The whole country was hosting me and caring for me.”
Following the talk, Gil requested that Insight Myanmar address his group, The Sati Center for Buddhist Studies. This talk will take place September 17 at 9.30 am, Pacific time. If you would like to join the discussion, you can register here.