© Thich Nhat Hanh 

[Bell x 3]

Today is July 1st, in the year 2007, and we are in the Assembly of Stars Meditation Hall in the Lower Hamlet.

The first time that Thay visited India was in 1968.  Thay had been in Tokyo when he learned that Vietnam peace negotiations had started in Paris.  So he left Tokyo to go to Paris, with the intention of setting up a Buddhist delegation to be present at the peace talks.  On the way, he stopped off in India, hoping to have an opportunity to visit the place where the Buddha had become enlightened.  The Buddha did not travel by car, plane or train - he just walked! He walked to many cities.  We know that he once walked to Delhi, and that he visited 15 or more countries simply by walking.  If you know that, you look down and see his footsteps everywhere, footsteps that print his solidity, freedom, peace, joy and happiness all over the place.  It’s very nice to have 15 minutes on the plane to look down and visualise the Buddha walking around down there and sharing his enlightenment, his peace and his joy with the Earth, and with the human beings that shared that part of the Earth. 

We can be moved to tears if we sit on the plane and look down and see the presence of the Buddha in the here and the now.  Thay promised that he would practise walking meditation and take the steps of the Buddha to other parts of the world.  We can practise walking meditation in Europe, America, in Australia, in Africa, and in that way we can continue the Buddha, bringing peace and joy, solidity and freedom to many parts of the world. 

Thay’s dream has come true; he has been able to share the practice of walking meditation all over the world with a great many people.  Many of Thay’s friends, monastic and lay, have practised walking meditation all over the five continents.  So now the Buddha is everywhere, and not just in the Ganges delta. 

Visiting India at that time, Thay had the opportunity to climb the Gridrakuta mountain.  The Buddha liked to stay there.  It is in the vicinity of Rajagriha, the capital of the country where King Bimbisara reigned.  A group of monastic and lay friends climbed the Gridrakuta mountain with Thay, including a monk by the name of Maha Ghosananda, who later became the patriarch of Cambodia. We climbed the Gridrakuta mountain slowly and mindfully.  When we arrived at the top of the mountain, close to the place where the Buddha used to sit, we all sat down, and we were able to watch the beautiful sunset that the Buddha used to watch.  We all sat down, practised mindful breathing, and contemplated the beauty of the sunset. We used the eyes of the Buddha to admire and enjoy the beautiful sunset.  Later on, Thay wrote a poem about that, saying that the monk of 2,600 years ago was still sitting there, enjoying looking at the beautiful sunset. 

King Bimbisara built a stone path from the foot of the mountain to the top, so that the Buddha could climb up and down more easily, and that stone path is still there.  If you go there, you can enjoy using the stone path to climb the mountain, and you might visualise the Buddha stepping on the very same stones. 

Thay met Maha Ghosananda on several occasions in India and America, and one day he told Thay that because he was a monk and could not marry, it meant that every beautiful woman in the world was his beloved one.  He said that if he were to marry one of them, he would lose all the other beautiful women!  I did not say anything, but it’s very interesting that a monk made such a remark.  If you are in love with one beautiful lady, you want to marry her, and if you cannot marry her, you suffer.  You say that if you cannot marry that woman, you will never marry, because she is the only one that you want.  Maybe you are lucky enough to marry that woman, but the question remains as to whether you will love her throughout your life, or just for one or two years. 

To marry someone is to embark on a very adventurous trip, and you must be very wise and patient to keep your love alive, so that it will last for a long time. 

In the case of the majority, that does not happen.  The first year of marriage may begin to reveal how difficult it is.  You have to learn a lot in order to adapt yourself to the situation.  When you marry someone, you have a very beautiful image of that person, and you marry that image rather than the person himself or herself.  Then when you spend 24 hours a day with him or her, you begin to discover the reality of that person, which does not correspond truly with the image you have of him or of her.  Sometimes you are disappointed. 

[Bell]

In the beginning you are very passionate, but that passion for the other person may last only a short time – maybe six months or a year, or two years.  After that, if you are not skilful and don’t practise, and if you are not wise, then you and your partner may end up suffering.  You may see someone else who is not your partner, and you may think they are better.  You sit on the top of one mountain and look over at another one, and you say that it’s more wonderful to sit on the top of the other mountain. 

The fact is that in both Asian and European countries, there are many people who lead a double life, people who have a wife but who also have a mistress. Every day the press reports this sort of thing about celebrities in political and business circles.  There are people who lead a double life or even a triple life, who cause a lot of suffering to many people around them, especially to their children.

According to the institution of marriage, you should be faithful to your wife or your husband for your whole life.  You should not think otherwise.  I remember what Maha Ghosananda said.  You had better not marry, because in that way you can love everyone.  If you marry one person, you are committed to that one only, and you lose all your freedom. 

In the Buddhist tradition, there is the practice of the Five Mindfulness Trainings, and the third one is to be faithful to the one you have married, and to be happy with him or with her all your life.  That is a strong practice.  If you don’t practise strongly enough, you cannot keep your happiness, you cannot maintain that loyalty.  If we look around us, we see that loyalty, that faithfulness is not there.  In many European countries, the percentage of couples that divorce can exceed 50%.  There are young people who are afraid of formal marriage because they think that they will lose their freedom, so they practise living together.  Many children who grow up in this environment don’t feel they have a true family.  They are not firmly grounded in the family, and so they continue the practice of their parents, and that determines the direction taken by society in this century. 

 In fact when we look around, we can see many beautiful people, both men and women.  They are beautiful not only in their physical aspects, but in their spiritual and moral aspects too.  We should be able to love them, because they are so beautiful; we have the freedom to love them.  It’s wonderful to see them around and to appreciate their beauty.  Sometimes we compare ourselves with someone else, asking ourselves whether we are more or less beautiful than that person physically and morally.  It is important to be a beautiful person both physically and morally at the same time, because a person without spiritual and moral beauty is very difficult to live with.  They suffer themselves and they make us suffer too. We prefer the kind of beauty that won’t make us suffer.  We need to ask ourselves whether we have enough beauty to be happy, to share with other people, to offer to other people.  Those of us who have confidence in our own beauty don’t need to use make-up. The practice can make you beautiful, both physically and mentally, and morally.  If you feel that your beauty is growing every day with the practice, you will have confidence in your path, you will become a happy person and you will be able to help other people to be happy too. 

There are people among us who feel that they are not worthy of themselves and of the trust of other people.  They cannot accept themselves because they are not capable of seeing the beauty in themselves.  They think of themselves as ugly, both physically and mentally, and those people suffer very much. 

There is a tendency to believe that the basic nature of the human being is goodness, but that being in touch with evil around us makes us lose a little bit of our goodness every day, so that we become cruel and unkind.  The opposite tendency believes that human beings are basically evil, but thanks to civilisation and the laws established by society, they can slowly learn to be good.

According to Buddhist insight, when man is born, he is neither good, nor evil, because he has within him the seeds of both goodness and evil.  This is because birth is not a beginning, it is a continuation.  Everyone has the transmission of their parents and ancestors within themselves, and that is why there are good, bad and neutral things in their genes.  So it’s not true to say that when a human being is born, his basic nature is good or bad, it is both good and bad. 

The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said that we cannot define man in the beginning.  Man can define himself by his actions.  So Jean Paul Sartre believed that in the beginning, man is neither good nor bad, but through living, through his actions and experiences, man defines himself as good or bad. 

According to Buddhist insight, when man is born, the seed of goodness, the seed of cruelty, and every other kind of seed are already in him, because he is only a continuation, not a beginning. But according to Jean Paul Sartre, when a child is born, that is the beginning.  But we know that it is not a beginning.  It is only a continuation.  The child is a continuation of his parents, so the goodness or the evil of his parents are already in his body, his mind, and his consciousness. 

A poet said that Man is cruel, but Man is kind.  According to Buddhism, goodness and evil can co-exist. They both exist in your store consciousness.  You can either be very good or very bad.  When man is cruel, he can be 100 times more cruel than a tiger.  But when man is gentle, he can be very gentle; he can be a Buddha.  It is through his actions and his way of life that the goodness or the evil in him can be revealed.  The beauty of the body depends  very much on the beauty of the heart; the beauty of the heart also depends on the wellbeing of the body. 

[Bell]

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a small book with the title L’existentialisme est un humanisme. In Plum Village, we practise according to the teaching of Lin Chi, Master Lam Te, who was a very strong advocate of humanism.  In fact, the records of Lin Chi show that he was a very strong humanist.  His teaching has a very strong element of humanism, he always referred to the human level.  He reminds us that in Buddhist teaching, Buddhahood is inherent in every one of us.  The ground of his teaching is that the Buddha and the human being are not two separate entities.  According to this teaching, in order to be a Buddha, you should first be a human being, and while you are a Buddha, you continue to be a human being.  If you remove the human being in you, you are no longer a Buddha.  If you want to become a Buddha, you should not destroy the human being in you, because if the human being in you is no longer there, the Buddha cannot be. 

When ill-being is there, wellbeing must be there somewhere as well.  It’s like the left and the right.  If the right is there, the left must be there somewhere.  If you are on the left wing politically, you don’t wish for the right to disappear, because if the right disappears, you will disappear also. 

If Mr Le Penn represents the right wing, and you represent the left wing, you have to wish Mr Le Penn a long life, so that you can be there too. 

There are people who are fanatical in their belief.  The Buddha spoke about suffering, so they believe everything should be suffering.  That is not logical at all. If suffering is there, the opposite of suffering should also be there somewhere, because the right cannot exist without the left.  Suffering is at the extreme end of one spectrum. The First Noble Truth is about suffering, and that is why Thay likes to describe the Third Noble Truth as wellbeing.  It’s like when we speak about pairs of opposites, we mention coming and going, being and non-being, birth and death, sameness and otherness, eternalism and annihilation. 

Some people believe that the soul is eternal and that when you die, the soul continues to exist forever.  Others believe that when you die, everything is finished.  If you believe that ill-being is there, you have to accept that the opposite of ill-being must be there somewhere.  When you believe that the right is there, then you must believe that the left is there somewhere as well.  If you believe that being is there, you have to believe in the existence of non-being.  You cannot escape the logic of this. 

The teaching of the Buddha is the teaching of the middle path, transcending pairs of opposites.  If you recognise one thing, you have to recognise the existence of its opposite. The third Noble Truth has been described as the cessation of ill-being, which means the presence of wellbeing!  Just as the absence of darkness means the presence of light, so the absence of ill-being means the presence of wellbeing, and that is why it is helpful to describe the Third Noble Truth as the opposite of the First NobleTruth.  The Truth of Ill-being should go together with the Truth of Wellbeing.  The Second Noble Truth is the path leading to Ill-being. The way you live your life can bring a lot of suffering to you.  The way you consume and the way you conduct your relationships leads you to make so many mistakes that you bring ill-being to yourself, and the Second Truth is about the roots of that ill-being. 

The Fourth Noble Truth, the last one, is the path leading to well-being, which means leading to the cessation of ill-being. 

So there are two sets of causes and effects.  If you apply the Four Noble Truths in the field of medicine, you see that there is a sickness (First Noble Truth), the sickness is there because you have lived in such a way that has brought sickness to you (Second Noble Truth), the Doctor has said that the sickness can be healed (so he has confirmed the Third Noble Truth).  The Fourth Noble Truth is the route to healing - if you take this path, if you live your life in this way and take this medicine, and you don’t eat and do the things that you used to do, then you will be cured.  The path leading to wellbeing is called a Noble Path.  And the path leading to suffering should be called an Ignoble Path! 

For young people in the west, it is more helpful to present the Four Noble Truths in positive terms.  The cessation of suffering should be replaced by the presence of happiness. 

[Track 2]

If you go to the Aurangabad area in India, you will discover many monasteries that were not built.  They just carved them out of the rock face.  By taking a lot of rock away, they created Buddha Halls, dormitories for the monks and so on.  In this way, they had everything they needed; they did not have to build.  Enlightenment is also like that.  You don’t bring in enlightenment from the outside, you just remove confusion, ignorance and forgetfulness, and suddenly enlightenment reveals itself.  It is like telling a person to come and learn mathematics.  Instead of saying, “Young man, come here and I will impart the knowledge of mathematics to you,” Indian people in the old days used to put it like this, “Come here, young man, and I will take the ignorance of mathematics out of you”.   That’s the way they used to speak. – in the same way that nirvana is the extinction of suffering, of ignorance, of wrong perceptions.  They used to use the negative to express it.

When we tell a young person that we want to remove the ignorance of mathematics in them, it means that we believe in their capacity of understanding mathematics, and that we will help them remove their ignorance about mathematics little by little.  We trust in their capacity of understanding mathematics.  Enlightenment is like that.  You have the capacity to be enlightened. I don’t offer you that; I only help you to remove the non-enlightened elements in you.  We should get used to that kind of language. 

When you say zero is nothing, it seems very negative, but it may not be negative at all.  If you used to owe someone a million dollars, but now the amount you owe them has arrived at zero, that means a lot!!!  Suppose you don’t have any illnesses, that’s zero, but means a lot!  We should understand the language of the Four Noble Truths, so that we can present them in a different way.  The meaning will be exactly the same, but we can present them in a way that will help people to understand better. 

If we are not intelligent, we say that since the Buddha spoke about suffering, I have to try my best to demonstrate that everything is suffering. But that is not logical, because if there is suffering, it means that something else should be there too - namely happiness. 

So the First Noble Truth tells us that the Third Noble Truth is there. 

When someone thinks of themselves as not worthy, they are wrong.  When someone thinks of themselves as not beautiful, they are wrong.  Beauty and goodness are always in us.  You run after a Buddha or a teacher, because you believe you are nothing, you are not worth anything at all, but if you know that the Buddha is a part of you, if you know that the teacher is in you, you will have confidence, and you will practise in such a way as to help the Buddha and the teacher in you to reveal themselves more clearly day by day, and you will take refuge in the Buddha and the teacher in you.  You will take refuge in the beauty and the goodness in you.  There is beauty in you; there is goodness in you.  It is very important to believe in the beauty and the goodness in yourself.  That is the basic teaching of the Buddha.  The Lotus Sutra said that everyone is a potential Buddha. 

In Buddhism we speak of taking refuge in the Buddha, taking refuge in the Dharma, and taking refuge in the Sangha.  In the beginning, we think that the Buddha is an entity that exists outside of us.  Taking refuge in the Buddha, we imagine that the Buddha is someone out there, but that is not a deep practice.  The sixth patriarch said that you have to take refuge in the Buddha in yourself, so he advised us to recite “Taking refuge in the Buddha in myself”. 

When the Buddha was about to pass away, he said, “Dear Friends, you have to go back to yourselves and take refuge in the island in yourselves.  The Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha are always there.”  The Buddha knew that there were people who would cry a lot when they learned that their teacher had passed away.  He knew this in advance, and so he said that his body was not really the Buddha; the Buddha was the teaching that he had transmitted to them, and he explained that they had the essence of the Buddha in themselves, which is called Buddha nature.  Buddha nature is the capacity to be beautiful, to be good, to be true.  When we go to a Buddhist temple, they teach us the practice of taking refuge in the Three Jewels.  This is the beginning of the practice, and we think that this is an easy kind of practice.  We want to learn deeper teachings, but the practice of taking refuge is very deep, and you can practise it all your life. 

If you still have the feeling that you are not worth anything, even if you have practised Buddhism for 10 years, you have not succeeded.  You have not taken refuge in the Buddha, you do not have confidence in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha in yourself.  So if you have the feeling of being unworthy, you have not really practised the Three Refuges, because you have the capacity of being mindful, compassionate, and beautiful, and if you don’t believe that, you cannot advance.  It is a type of faith, but this type of faith is not based on what other people say, but on your own experience.  I believe in the goodness within myself.  I believe in the beauty within myself.  I believe in the truth that I contain. 

We need to trust the Buddha in ourselves when we find ourselves in a difficult situation.  We don’t have to struggle; we allow the Buddha in ourselves to do it for us.  Let us imagine that you are struggling with a problem on your computer, and you are about to give up, but then your elder brother, who is very good with computers, comes into the room.  You say,  “I give up!  Please come and help me.”  He asks you to move over whilst he takes over for a while.  That gives you confidence, and in no time at all, your elder brother solves the problem.  The elder brother is the Buddha in you.  Every time you struggle, and you are about to give up, you say, “Dear Buddha, I give up.  Please take over.”  And the Buddha always comes and takes over.  He doesn’t have to make any effort at all. 

One day Thay was walking in Seoul.  There was a Sangha walking behind Thay and a thousand people were supposed to join the walking meditation.  The police had arranged it so that we could walk, but there were so many people with cameras coming to take a picture that there was no path left to walk on.  Thay said, “Dear Buddha, I give up, please walk for me.”  The Buddha came and just walked, and people made a path for him to walk, and Thay just enjoyed walking.

Every time Thay asks the Buddha in him to come and help, the Buddha always comes to help, and how easily, how naturally, how beautifully he does so.  This is his practice. There are five parts to this practice, each with their own gatha or little poem.  The first gatha is,  “Let the Buddha breathe, let the Buddha walk, I don’t have to breathe, I don’t have to walk.” 

When you practise sitting meditation and you feel sleepy, you can say, “let the Buddha breathe, let the Buddha sit.  I don’t have to breathe, I don’t have to sit.”  When you have enjoyed this for a few minutes, you switch to the second gatha, “The Buddha is breathing, the Buddha is walking, I enjoy that breathing, I enjoy that walking.”  You don’t have anything to do apart from enjoying walking and breathing. It’s very nice.  It always works for Thay.  It works very well. 

Then you can go deeper.  The third gatha is, “Buddha is the walking itself, Buddha is the breathing itself.  I am the walking, I am the breathing.”  This is a very deep practice.  Before that, we believed that there was someone who was walking, someone who was breathing, but looking deeply, we see that it is the walking and the breathing that count, not the “I” or the “he”.  Looking deeply we see that the expression, “I think, therefore I am,” does not have a lot of meaning because in fact there is only the thinking.  You don’t need someone to do the thinking.  The thinking just happens.  It’s like the cloud floating and the rain falling.  When the rain falls, it is very funny to say that the rain is falling, because if it’s not falling, it’s not rain.  You don’t need a “rainer” performing the raining.  It is like when the wind blows.  If the wind does not blow, it’s not the wind.  So the wind is the blowing, the rain is the falling, the one who thinks is the thinking itself.  That is a very deep teaching of the Buddha – no-self.  You don’t need a thinker to think.  A thought manifests, and in the thinking, the subject and the object always go together.  There is no subject separate from the object.  So when you walk like that, you see the walking is taking place, and you don’t see the need for a walker.  It’s not essential, it’s not necessary, it’s absolutely possible to walk without a walker.  You are one with the walking, you are one with the breathing, so you enjoy it much more.  There is no self to suffer with. 

This brings us to the fourth gatha, “There is only the breathing, there is only the walking, there is no-one breathing, there is no-one walking.”  You can feel it, you can touch the truth of no-self by walking like that. 

The last gatha is,  “Peace is the breathing, peace is the walking, happiness is the breathing, happiness is the walking”.  “Peace is the breathing, happiness is the walking”.  While walking like that , you touch the reality of no-self.  You are the Buddha, the Buddha is you.  The Buddha is the walk, the Buddha is the breath, the breath becomes peace, the walk becomes happiness, and during the whole time of practice, if you take refuge in the Buddha, the Buddha becomes you.  It’s wonderful. 

When I was a novice I believed it was very difficult to become a Buddha.  I thought it would take many lifetimes to become a Buddha, but if you practise like this, you learn to become a Buddha, and the Buddha learns to become you, and it’s very easy.

At the beginning, you are a part-time Buddha.  Slowly you become a full time Buddha.  Sometimes you fall back and become a part time Buddha again, but with steady practice you become a full time Buddha again.  Buddhahood is there, within our reach, and you can become a Buddha whenever you like to.  It’s very nice, because the Buddha is always there, because you are a human being, and taking refuge in our Buddha nature is a good thing to do. 

The Buddha becomes available in the here and the now at any time and any place.  If the Buddha is there, the Buddha land is also there, so you can enjoy being a Buddha, you can enjoy walking in the Pure Land of the Buddha – the Buddha land. 

As a novice we learn how to invite the big bell.  Thay was very impressed with the gatha he learned for this (in Chinese) when he was a novice.  Very briefly, the gatha says, “I want to become a Buddha in order to help living beings. When I hear the sound of the bell, my anger, my fear and my pain become light.  My understanding grows and my enlightenment begins to be born.”  This happens just by listening to the bell, because the bell puts you in touch with the Buddha nature in you.  So it’s nice to have a bell around.  Every time you hear the bell, you touch the Buddha nature in yourself, you take refuge, you feel more solid, and you suffer less right away.  So it’s good to have a bell, even a mini bell.  It helps you to get out of hell.  Hell is not somewhere remote.  Hell may be right here.  In my daily life, I find myself in hell from time to time.  When I listen to the bell, suddenly you I can get out of hell very easily, because the sound of the bell puts me in touch with the Buddha nature in myself. 

The practice of a novice is to listen to the bell in order to feel light, to get out of hell, with the intention of becoming a Buddha and helping many people.  If you have lost touch with that kind of vow, get back in touch with it while listening to the bell, and nourish your intention of becoming a Buddha. 

Becoming a Buddha is not so difficult, because Buddha means someone who is enlightened, who is capable of loving and forgiving. You know that you are like that at times.  So enjoy being a Buddha more often than usual by listening to the bell and by learning and practising the Dharma. You are closer to the Buddha than you may have thought.  You are the Buddha, the Buddha is in you.  When you sit, allow the Buddha in you to sit.  When you walk, allow the Buddha in you to walk.  It’s very easy for the Buddha to become you and for you to become the Buddha.  That is a conviction, a type of faith, and this faith is based on evidence. We know that every one of us has the capacity to get out of hell, to be light, to love, to be joyful, so let us not chase after a Buddha outside of us, let us go back to our Buddhahood and enjoy being a Buddha. 

Thay has enjoyed practising this for a long time, and so he wanted to share it with you.  Enjoy your practice, enjoy your Buddhahood, enjoy becoming a Buddha at any time.

Tell yourself, “If I cannot become a Buddha, who will?!”

 [Bell x3]