The First Blossoms Of Awakening

I became a monk in Vietnam. I grew up in Vietnam. I learned and practiced Buddhism in Vietnam. Before coming to the West, I taught several generations of Buddhist students in Vietnam. But I can say that I realized the path in the West. In 1962, at Princeton University, where I was invited to teach, I began to have many deep insights, flowers and fruits of the practice. If you have read my journal, Fragrant Palm Leaves, you will see that, for me, going to Princeton was like going into a monastery. It was far from the pressing demands of the current situation in Vietnam. I had much time to do walking meditation, assisting the maturation of insights that had not yet ripened.

I wrote A Rose for Your Pocket in the summer of 1962 at Princeton. It is a simple little book, but it is, in fact, the fruit of my awakening. In it, the practice of “dwelling happily in the present moment” is first described. We need to live in a way that does not allow the wonderful things in life to slip through our fingers. We need to live deeply, present for each moment. This is what is contained in A Rose for Your Pocket. It can be considered the first blossom of my awakening. Since then, that insight has continued on its path of deepening.

The shortest and most profound Dharma talk I can give is, “I have arrived. I am home.” Only six words, “I have arrived. I am home,” can be considered the Dharma Seal of Plum Village. Any Dharma talk, any teaching that goes against the spirit of “I have arrived, I am home” is not truly a teaching or method of practice of Plum Village. This Dharma Seal was first expressed in A Rose for Your Pocket.

In 1974, while I was working for peace in Paris, I wrote The Miracle of Mindfulness. I wrote it out of love for my monastic and lay students, young social workers working in Vietnam in the dangerous circumstances of wartime. After it was written, I sent it to Vietnam to be published, and it was translated in to English. This book teaches us how to dwell in the present moment and to live mindfully with awareness of what is happening within us and around us. Between writing A Rose for Your Pocket in 1962 and The Miracle of Mindfulness in 1974, there were twelve years, you can recognize the progressive change in my way of looking at things. That was the process of the blooming of the lotus.

In my life of practice, I have had the opportunity to bring Buddhism back to the original teachings of the Buddha. Before this, I had the insight about dwelling happily in the present moment. Once back in the stream of the original teachings, that insight was experienced fully and with more clarity.

The Miracle of Mindfulness was published by Beacon Press, and now, more than two decades later, it continues to sell very well. The Miracle of Mindfulness is a meditation guide to use if you want to share the Plum Village style of practice with people. It has been translated into at least thirty languages.

Mindfulness is the basic meditation practice in Plum Village. Mindfulness means dwelling in the present moment to become aware of the positive and negative elements that are there. We learn to nourish the positive and to transform the negative. Twenty years of Plum Village life has helped me to learn so much and has helped the Sangha of Plum Village to grow up so much.