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Travelogue: Gil Fronsdal and the Insight Meditation Center

Episode 9 • 1st December 2025 • The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford • The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford

[bell dings]

LEAH CHASE: In a meditative context, mindfulness is often referred to as an ability to concentrate without forgetfulness or distraction. It may require complete and utter silence to maintain this concentration, which is why Buddhist monasteries often opt for secluded areas like forests or mountains. But in the Bay Area, a region whose population has nearly doubled over the past 50 years, distraction is inevitable. How, in this sprawling urban landscape of multimillion dollar tech companies and global research universities is one expected to concentrate, to be “mindful”?

Enter: the Insight Meditation Center. It’s a rather unassuming two-story building on the corner of a quiet residential street in Redwood City. Once a church belonging to the First Christian Assembly, it is now a non-denominational meditation center for those interested in the study and practice of Buddhist ideals without distraction. But walk a couple blocks, and you’ll find yourself amid the scores of distractions that make up Redwood City’s downtown district. Movie theaters, museums, restaurants, banks, mid-rise apartments, corporate offices: a perpetual stream of traffic flows through this concentrated hub of urban leisure. The Caltrain, ferrying thousands of passengers every week, stops at a station just half a mile from the Center.

This episode is the first in our new Travelogue series. I’m your host, Leah Chase, and I’ll be taking you on a slightly different journey, stepping outside of the library and into the many Buddhist organizations and communities in the California Bay Area. The relentless, all-consuming work culture of Silicon Valley and Stanford University may seem at odds with the relatively serene Insight Meditation Center, and yet, the synthesis of these institutions yields a surprising result: it is precisely because of this combination of urbanity, intellectualism, and desire for spiritual liberation that the Insight Meditation Center exists.

The Center has gone through many iterations across the past few decades, from a small sitting group in nineteen eighty-six to a non-profit organization replete with silent meditation retreats, free online classes, and affinity and support groups, all supported by a broader culture of community care and generosity. This is thanks to Gil Fronsdal, the founder of the Insight Meditation Center and our guest today. Ordained as a Sōtō Zen priest and a Theravāda monk, Gil is also an alumnus of the Stanford Religious Studies PhD program, and it was his grand vision that planted the seeds for the Center as it stands today.

[music]

GIL FRONSDAL: When I went to college in nineteen seventy-two, there was still a draft for going to Vietnam, fighting in Vietnam.

[gunfire, planes flying]

And so there was a big potential—all of us freshmen males could get drafted. We were waiting for our draw—you know, to know what our lottery number would be. And so there was a lot of intense conversations in the dorms late at night about war and peace. And I was always the person on the extreme pacifist, extreme nonviolent, civil disobedience kind of camp. But I knew that I was— I was afraid to die. And I had this idea that I had to address my suffering in some way. And so when I was a sophomore, I started practicing, meditating twice a day, and—and that—then that just became the flow that I entered into and never left.

Well, after two years in college, I dropped out, which was kind of a normal thing to do back then. And I went hitchhiking around and traveling around the country. And I ended up in—visiting a farm. It was called The Farm. It was America's largest hippie commune.

LEAH CHASE: The Farm was founded by Stephen Gaskin in the early nineteen seventys after he and approximately 60 caravans set out from San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury on a four-month cross-country tour. By the time Gil encountered them, they had settled in Louis County, Tennessee with nearly 700 residents. The community espoused a kind of spiritual practice rooted in the concept of right livelihood, following principles of nonviolence, veganism, and organic farming.

GIL FRONSDAL: Suddenly the spiritual—what was spiritual became interesting for me. And I was so impressed by people could be so honest. They had—they were wise about how they worked through things. They had all—there was conflict. They would spend sometimes hours talking about it until they found a way through. They—some of them, you could see the people had been doing it for a long time, had gotten really skilled at it. And all they had to do was kind of wink at each other, and they all understood what was happening. And they’d all calm down.

LEAH CHASE: This was in part because The Farm had a seminal text around which its philosophies were constructed: “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” by Shunryū Suzuki, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center.

GIL FRONSDAL: That book was such an amazing experience to read because I couldn't stop reading it. But I had the feeling that I couldn’t—that I knew everything that he said in the book. I just didn't know I knew it. I was like, “Oh, yes, this makes sense. This is right.” And so the first chance I had, I went to the San Francisco Zen Center to check it out. And I thought—I was there for two weeks—“This is what I want to do. This is the right thing for me.”

And so by the end of those two years of sitting there, it became really important for me what was happening for me in meditation. And it wasn't that I wanted to meditate more. I wanted a way to find the integrity that I felt in meditation. I wanted to find how to do it in daily life.

[one voice chanting]

LEAH CHASE: Gil joined the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, an American monastery off the coast of Big Sur. It was founded by Shunryū Suzuki in nineteen sixty-seven as one of three Sōtō Zen practice communities that comprise the San Francisco Zen Center.

[group chanting]

The other two being the City Center in San Francisco and the Green Gulch Farm in Marin County. Secluded in the remote wilderness amongst mountain valleys and natural hot springs, Tassajara was an ideal haven for aspiring monks training in the Sōtō Zen tradition.

GIL FRONSDAL: So I went there in January, middle of the winter. I think I was really happy to go. At first I was a bit intimidated by it, and I thought they were really strict. So then the first time I overslept one morning, I thought—I thought they were going to kick me out. I thought I really had broken the major rule. And to my surprise, no one ever said anything to me.

But I loved the lifestyle. For me, I felt that monastic life was the perfect lifestyle. I was totally into it. I felt absorbed. I loved all the meditation. I loved the work, I loved the community. I didn't need a lot of community, but in the monastery you have just enough. It's like a village. And so I felt well held by a community, and I had teachings, and I got to do wonderful hikes in the wilderness on my days off. So I was really happy there. Other people there have all kinds of challenges, but I was kind of tailor-made for that kind of life.

And then after a year in the monastery, I decided that the way I want to address the suffering of the world is through Buddhism.

LEAH CHASE: Gil was eventually ordained as a Sōtō Zen priest through the San Francisco Zen Center in nineteen eighty-two. Around the same time, he was invited to study and practice Zen Buddhism at a monastery in Japan. But first he had to get a visa in Bangkok.

GIL FRONSDAL: So I had a ticket to Bangkok to get the visa and coincidentally had the address of a meditation monastery outside of Bangkok that did vipassanā. I didn't know what that was for anything. And I wasn't interested in Theravāda, but I was interested in seeing what they did there. So I showed up and said, “I'm waiting for my visa. Can I stay here until the visa comes and do a retreat?” And the Abbot gave me a little hut kind of on the edge of the monastery, and I was supposed to meditate all day long, and then each day come and see him. And it took me ten weeks to realize that the visa wasn't coming.

And so my first introduction to vipassanā meditation was a ten-week silent retreat. And I needed that. That got my attention because I got more concentrated, more still inside than I ever had in Zen. Because the longest you sit in Zen is one week at a time. And I touched something inside that was so important for me that I felt like there was nothing else that mattered anymore in the world but to touch that place again.

LEAH CHASE: It was around this time in the early 80s, while studying with the Burmese teacher in Nepal, that Gil met American students Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg. These two, along with Jack Kornfield, were inspired by their Theravāda teachers in Asia to start a meditation retreat center in the U.S. In nineteen seventy-six, they purchased a Catholic novitiate in Massachusetts as a venue for their study and practice. This was the Insight Meditation Society. Today, the IMS is credited as one of the first institutions to popularize vipassanā meditation in the West.

After receiving ordination as a Theravāda monk in nineteen eighty-five, Gil returned to the United States. From there he moved around a bit, spending time at the San Francisco Zen Center, the Insight Meditation Society, even returning to Tassajara to serve as a senior monk.

GIL FRONSDAL: And when I finished that, I had done ten years of intensive monastic life. And I'd finished something— something had finished with me. And it didn't feel like it was appropriate to go back into a monastery again. But I had no career. I had nothing to do.

So I went to the University of Hawaiʻi and got a masters, and it was like a kid in a candy store. I hadn't actually—hadn't done much studying in all those ten years. And there I got kind of introduced to the texts, to the basic ideas of the tradition. It was really fun.

LEAH CHASE: This newfound interest in academic study led him to apply to the Religious Studies PhD program at Stanford. He was accepted, and in the fall of nineteen ninety, he officially enrolled.

GIL FRONSDAL: Yeah, I was using partly that time at Stanford to try to understand better what had happened to me, especially in the monasteries. To understand what we were doing there, how it worked, the role of the rituals, the role of the teachings, the way that people got transformed, how faith worked, how blind faith worked, how the teachings worked and the relationship between what's being taught, and the difference between the rhetoric— what's being taught—and what people actually do. These were all kind of very interesting topics that helped me understand what had happened in those ten years. So Stanford was kind of— helped me with a lot of self-reflection.

LEAH CHASE: There was one thing in particular that Gil learned from his time at Stanford that would form the basis for his dissertation: the difference between rhetoric and practice.

GIL FRONSDAL: In Burma, the rhetoric was, “We just do mindfulness. We don't do concentration.” But the whole monastic environment was set up to help people build their concentration. And it turns out that concentration is very important for people doing insight. But they don't say that in their rhetoric. So I also saw that there is a tendency to overemphasize the rhetoric, overemphasize the spoken or written teaching as like, “That's where it's at.” But actually a lot of what's really happening is not in the teachings but is in the practice environment, the lived life, the relationship between people and what people actually do.

LEAH CHASE: This shift from a regimented monastic order to an individualized heuristic approach to meditation practice is one of the defining characteristics of the American vipassanā movement. Before nineteen seventy, vipassanā meditation was rarely taught in the United States. Instead, interested students traveled to Asia to study under Buddhist teachers like Mahasi Sayadaw and S. N. Goenka, and upon their return to the States, established their own institutions focused on meditation and silent retreats. Removed from its Southeast Asian religious, cultural, and social contexts, vipassanā meditation adopted a uniquely Western structure organized around values of freedom and individualism, something more spiritual than religious.

With the founding of the Insight Meditation Society in nineteen seventy-six and its West Coast sister location, Spirit Rock, in nineteen eighty-one, vipassanā meditation’s popularity rose to new heights. There was no longer such a big push to uproot oneself and travel to Asia to receive a spiritual education. Now, the next generation of vipassanā teachers were being trained right here in America. Gil was one such teacher, training under Jack Kornfield at Spirit Rock.

GIL FRONSDAL: When I started at Stanford in nineteen ninety, there was a small sitting group in Palo Alto that maybe 12, 15 people came on Monday nights to meditate together and listen on cassette tapes some Dharma talk that they had. And because I was in the teacher training with Jack Kornfield, I was asked to come and be the teacher for the group and to give the talks live.

And so I remember the first thing I thought, “Well, let's have a half-day retreat.” And so we did it at, in the fourth floor of the—back then, the Aerodynamics building at Stanford—in a conference room there. We got it for free from someone. And then, “Let's do a day-long. Let's do a class on Buddhist, like on the precepts. Let's do a class on loving-kindness.” It just kind of—this is how these people can expand and grow. So at some point, I realized there was a little bit of surprise, after many years that, in my role as a kind of a leader, a teacher of a group, part of my job was to have vision. And so I became kind of a visionary. And then as it grew, the visions got bigger and bigger.

LEAH CHASE: Over the course of the next six years, Gil helped expand the group in Palo Alto, with attendance growing from 12 to 15 people in nineteen ninety to 40 people in nineteen ninety-three. Eventually, they held their first residential retreat in nineteen ninety-four at the Jikoji Zen Center in the Santa Cruz Mountains. A host of new programs were implemented, including mindfulness meditation classes, loving-kindness and sutta study, and youth programs.

Then in nineteen ninety-seven, two very important things happened. First, the group, officially named the Insight Meditation Center and colloquially known as the IMC, was incorporated as a nonprofit organization. This would lay the groundwork for the purchase of a meditation center in Redwood City, the building we know as the IMC today.

The second was Gil's dissertation defense. Titled, “The Dawn of the Bodhisattva Path: Studies in a Religious Ideal of Ancient Indian Buddhists With Particular Emphasis on the Earliest Extant ‘Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra,’” it examined the scholarly emphasison the philosophical side of the “Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra” versus what it revealed about the historical community that composed it.

He writes, “The bifurcation of Buddhism into faith versus philosophy has resulted in the scholarly neglect, not only of the devotional dimension of the early bodhisattva movement, but also of the affective tone of the bodhisattva’s way of life. It is unlikely that Indian Buddhists bifurcated the devotional and philosophical dimensions of their religion in the same way that many modern scholars have done. In order to understand the movement as a whole, we must include in our study its devotional elements, its relationship to Buddhas of the past, present and future, its relationships with texts and stories, the role of merit, the religious differentiations among its participants, the immediate and final religious goals for the bodhisattva practitioner, and the various normative religious practices within the movement.”

This call to investigate the relationship between the devotional and the philosophical mirrored the spiritual and scholarly pursuits in Gil's own life.

GIL FRONSDAL: So I had these two tracks parallel in Palo Alto. And so that represents kind of how these two streams of my life, they both have been important for me. I felt that they—they're in conversation with each other. They're an important part of each other. And I didn't want to have people only do practice because then it— it's too easy to become lopsided. And I didn't want to only do study because that's also lopsided. But I saw the possibility of having both together And so there was I had this vision of, of an integrated, holistic, Buddhist world culture that we were creating—we were trying to create, so we can meet people and support them in all aspects of their life.

LEAH CHASE: In addition to the IMC’s incorporation as a nonprofit and Gil's dissertation defense, there was one more important event that would significantly impact Gil's practice and teachings.

GIL FRONSDAL: So in nineteen ninety-eight, I also had—my wife and I had our first child. And that was a big sea change for me in my understanding because, as I said earlier, monastic life was relatively easy for me. Parenting was not. And so I began to—I had to look at my attachments, my sufferings in a whole new way in these challenges of parenting and family life.

Before I had kids, I thought the answer to everything was just let go. And after I had kids, I thought, “That's naive.” You have to meet the situation. There's complex—complexity, psychological, family dynamics. There's so much going on there. And so, as I started being a parent in the years—the early years of being a parent, I had no time to prepare talks. I just was tired a lot. It was challenging. And I thought that my talks were getting worse and worse. People liked them more and more because they were more relatable. They were—they—I was talking about what was going on with family life and kids and and people felt, “Now, now Gil's talking about my life too.”

LEAH CHASE: In two thousand two, the IMC bought a church in Redwood City which had once belonged to the First Christian Assembly. You can still see traces of its Christian aesthetics in the Center's architecture. The tall windows in the meditation hall, for instance, used to be fitted with vibrant stained glass. The rapid growth of institutions like the IMC clearly demonstrates a mounting interest in eastern spirituality in the West. But the question still remains: what exactly is it that brings people here?

GIL FRONSDAL: Well kind of what brings everyone to Buddhism, I think, I mean the simple—simplistically it’s because they're suffering. That's the—somewhere, somewhere in there, that's the reason people come to it. Why people come here might be because it's kind of Buddhism lite here. So we don't hold— it's not a heavy duty Buddhism. It’s not like a lot of devotion or dedication to faith, or you have to believe something. There's not like you have to have a particular relationship with a teacher, and I’m not wearing robes. I’m not asking people to chant. So it's very accessible and very open. And I'm very cognizant we're in an urban area where people's lives are busy and challenged in all kinds of ways.

Well, one of—and one of the big aspects that’s changed from Theravāda Buddhism is we’re kind of a religious tradition now, a religious spiritual group or something that's lay-centered. And for Theravāda Buddhism, that's relatively rare.

LEAH CHASE: Theravāda Buddhism has been imported to the United States in a variety of different forms, and not all of them are necessarily lay. According to Gil, there were over one thousand one hundred and fifty Theravāda temples servicing migrant communities of Thai, Lao, Cambodian, Burmese, and Sri Lankan practitioners as of nineteen ninety-eight. Unlike Western vipassanā centers like the IMC, these Theravāda temples have monks and nuns who provide teachings and rituals for the laity in their native language. On the other hand, vipassanā teachers like Gil are lay teachers, who invite practitioners to engage in meditation on their own terms, acting only as guides. For Western practitioners, vipassanā meditation is central; for Theravāda temples, it is but one of many practices.

Additionally, Theravāda, as it has manifested in Western lay communities, has taken on a distinctly secular expression, engaging with the vipassanā meditation as a therapeutic practice rather than a religious one. The Theravāda doctrinal framework, with its tenets on rebirth and monastic renunciation, is therefore de-emphasized in favor of four basic principles: mindfulness, loving-kindness, ethics, and generosity. This secularization affords practitioners of the IMC with greater flexibility, allowing them to approach Buddhist practice and philosophy without renouncing any preexisting political, religious, cultural, or material affiliations.

GIL FRONSDAL: Westerners in California and in the United States are—we're living in a psycholo— psychologized culture. So that's the domain. That's the way people talk, the way they understand each other. So one of the strengths of the insight movement as it developed was how much psychological understanding that they could incorporate into them. It's also the weakness. And so it tends to reinforce some of the unfortunate side of the psychological self that has developed in the West, and in some ways, in some ways, at times even accentuated, the very hyper-individualism that people can have because of the individual focus.

I think it's useful to distinguish between secular mindfulness and Theravāda mindfulness because secular mindfulness has a lot of benefit, but there, in some ways, it's almost being used to reinforce some dysfunctional Western values or reinforce a dysfunctional Western kind of idea of self.

LEAH CHASE: Regardless of the pros and cons, the popularity of vipassanā in Western society, for all its preoccupations with wellness and self-improvement, is undeniable. Psychotherapists espouse the many benefits of mindfulness for treating clinical depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues. Self-help authors write guidebooks on mindfulness in the workplace, mindful parenting, stress management, addiction, relationships, money, and the many trappings of our modern reality. Software developers create apps that offer guided meditation, and AI therapists conduct personalized sessions from your phone, laptop, or even your car. In pursuit of living in the moment, people have turned to this secularized practice as a refuge from suffering in their daily lives.

GIL FRONSDAL: So there's pluses and minuses in all kinds of ways of practicing, but our plus and minus is, is to give people a lot of space and ability to tailor-make their practice. How much they practice, how they, you know, how they practice, how they sit. People, they—not today, but sometimes people will lay down here because that's the only way they can meditate.

LEAH CHASE: In twenty ten, Gil published “A Monastery Within: Tales from the Buddhist Path,” a collection of vignettes inspired by his monastic life that reflect and instruct on spiritual living. “After ten years, I discovered that the essence of monastic life is not found at the monastery itself, but rather in the qualities of kindness, clarity, and wisdom cultivated through that life. When a person has adequately developed these qualities so that they become guides to further spiritual growth, then we say that he or she has created ‘a monastery within.’”

GIL FRONSDAL: What I like to teach here is we're supposed to all become our own teacher. So when I—when I teach, I have that in mind. I'm trying to help people become their own teacher. So they're not requiring a teacher. They're not requiring the group in order to find where that practice is. They carry it with them.

I think that my general wish is for this place to offer something for everybody. And so you—that's impossible to do, but the idea is to try to make people who want to come and practice, to find a way to accommodate and hold everyone. So it's very satisfying that we have people who are brand new and new who come—never been meditating. And we have people here who are Buddhist monks, you know, who have been serious— practicing for decades. And they all find a way here.

But it also requires having a lot of different programs. So we have programs for experienced students. We have meditation retreats for really experienced students. We have things for new people. And so to have the full range and variety, and that’s our, kind of our wonderful good fortune is we've been able to build up this big curriculum and opportunities for people that a lot of people can find what they need here. And as they grow and change over the years, they just switch from one part of IMC to another.

LEAH CHASE: The IMC is the first of three institutions that Gil has founded. The others, the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies and the Insight Retreat Center, were established in nineteen ninety-six and two thousand twelve, respectively. Together, these independent yet mutually supportive institutions constitute what Gil calls a “balanced Buddhist culture.”

This culture and the institutions supporting it reflect the foundational Buddhist principle of the Three Treasures. Based in Santa Cruz, the Insight Retreat Center represents the Buddha, emphasizing simplicity, renunciation, and realization through silent meditation retreats ranging from one day to one month. The Sati Center for Buddhist Studies represents the Dharma. Much like a seminary or graduate program, it offers a variety of curricula for study and reflection on the Dharma, from online courses to one year chaplaincy programs. The Insight Meditation Center represents the Saṅgha for its commitment to community, service, and practice in daily life.

GIL FRONSDAL: We do—all kinds of people come here. There was this old, sweet, probably homeless woman who came, would sit here on the floor to meditate with us. But she would have con—quiet conversations with her friend that was sitting on top of her shoulder out loud. And I made it clear that we just hold this person. That's okay. Our practice can include that as part of our mindfulness, not tell her to go or tell her to shut up. She's come to a safe place. So we opened—we're just going to include her too.

Sometimes we have—I tell people who have newborn babies, “You can bring your baby here.” If there's babies crying a little bit, that just opens people's hearts. If it's sobbing and the floor is shaking, maybe take it outside. And then some people here will complain, “There's this baby making baby sounds there, and cooing or crying, and this is terrible.” Our practice is to be open and practice with what's here, not—and be inclusive—not to have to have pristine conditions for it.

For many years, we met at the Friends Meeting House in Palo Alto. I loved it there. When you're in it, it doesn't draw any attention to itself. It has no photographs or paintings. It has no statues or crosses. It's very plain and simple. It's not ugly, but it doesn't draw attention to itself.

LEAH CHASE: In Buddhist temples, the main halls are generally adorned with prominent religious iconography: altars with various offerings, candles, and incense burners. But the IMC is different.

GIL FRONSDAL: So it makes sense in the—in that religiosity to have the Buddha, you know, such a big Buddha. Probably the comparable thing for us is freedom. And so what do you use to represent freedom? Maybe nothing. But nothing is a difficult teacher.

[music]

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9. Travelogue: Gil Fronsdal and the Insight Meditation Center