Practice is likened to a piece of music, requiring harmony between the six elements of the Sangha (Six Harmonies) and within each person (the five aggregates: form, feeling, perception, mental formations, consciousness). When eating or sitting in meditation with mindfulness, every cell and mental formation in body and mind participates, creating an art of nourishment, transformation, and bringing happiness to oneself and to the larger community. The breath and the steps are like conductors, guiding everything to flow together in one “river”—a state where there is no longer dispersion or forgetfulness, but wholesome habit energy, a way of living with mindfulness.

Observing the sound of the bell (the signal of mindfulness) and keeping to the schedule is not merely a matter of organization, but arises from the self-motivation of each person’s ideal heart. If:

• upon hearing the three sounds of the bell, we stop all speaking and thinking
• we go immediately to the place of appointment
• we do not need reminders from the teacher or elder brothers
  then each member naturally blends into the common symphony, setting an example for lay friends and strengthening the Sangha.

This year, the Sangha has many opportunities to practice and express the collective piece of music:

1. The 21-day retreat based on the Anapanasati Sutra
2. The Summer Opening retreat with young people from 40–50 countries
3. The neuroscience retreat on memory, habit energy, and the store consciousness (alaya-vijnana)
4. The proposal to extend the Rains Retreat by one month, following the experience of the Buddha with 1,000 monastics
   All activities—eating sticky rice cakes, Christmas, New Year, Tet—become the ingredients, nourishing and completing the Sangha’s symphony.

With hearts established in mindfulness, the English rendition of “Chúng con hiện tiền tâm thanh tịnh” was chanted to invoke support from the fourfold Sangha, the Three Jewels, holy beings, and protection from eight misfortunes and three paths of suffering. Two couplets were composed for Bat Nha Monastery to remind practitioners that

• The Pure Land is a place of leisurely wandering, where one no longer seeks anything
• Dwelling peacefully in the present moment, what more is there to pursue?
  expressing that each walking step, each of the twenty-four hours, can already be Pure Land practice, free of seeking and fully present.

Further inscriptions propose that individual effort creates collective refuge:

1. A drop of water becomes a river / At ease, one returns to play in the great ocean
2. Each step creates the Pure Land / Leisurely, we ascend to stroll the high hills
3. A single parasol leaf falls / A thousand daffodils bloom, the earth follows the sky singing the song of no-birth
   these six lines evoke a body of practice that, like a Bose-Einstein condensate or a laser, transforms the many into one unified field of energy capable of cutting through afflictions.

The passing of Sister My Nghiem at age twenty—after just over one year of monastic life—illustrated the power of Sangha care and practice: daily visits, healing chants, meals, gentle massage, and joint meditation helped her meet death with ease and a final smile. Her departure became both a testament to genuine brotherhood and sisterhood, and an inspiration for living each moment fully in the refuge of the Three Jewels.

The three hamlets of Plum Village form a peaceful space, in contrast to a world full of conflict and violence, where practitioners come to seek a bit of peace, to sit and eat in silence, and to feel the brotherhood and sisterhood. Thay observes: the practice of mindfulness and the cultivation of proper conduct in the four postures—walking, standing, sitting, and lying down—generates the energy of peace, deeply imprints it into our brains and cells, and becomes a spiritual gift for our ancestors, our descendants, and for everyone in our daily steps.

Looking back at the first twenty-five years in Plum Village, the New Hamlet, Upper Hamlet, and Lower Hamlet had only muddy paths, no chairs, no central heating, just long benches and wood stoves, meager meals, and a jar of sesame salt or a few pieces of chocolate were precious. Thay washed his own robes, wrote “Old Path White Clouds” in a cold room with his hands warmed by the stove, and each day, two or three hours of writing was an hour of intimate conversation with the Buddha. Although conditions are now much improved, the Four Foundations of Mindfulness and the precepts still require us to live with “three basic insufficiencies”—just enough food and clothing, simplicity, and humility—in order to maintain a simple and modest way of life, to serve life in the spirit of Bodhi, and to continue the work of Thay and the ancestral teachers.

1. The four postures of practice—walking, standing, sitting, lying down—must all be maintained in mindfulness.
2. Mindfulness generates the energy of peace, which is deeply imprinted as a habit energy in our brains and cells.
3. The precepts are the foundation for peace, happiness, and serve as an example for other practitioners.

Sitting meditation as a cell of the Sangha body, not as a separate island
– Sitting upright, with a stable back, is an offering to the entire Sangha; each in-breath brings happiness to all, each out-breath gently shares, smiling is for the Sangha, not for the individual
– Practicing like this helps us break out of the shell of the self, to become non-local, non-temporal, to live with no-self, unborn and undying, right in the present moment

The Sangha body is a social body operating on the Six Harmonies

1. Harmony in dwelling together: living under one roof, sharing conveniences
2. Harmony in sharing benefits: when someone lacks, we fill in; when someone has more, we offer to others
   When the Sangha meets, if there is suffering (quarreling, difficult attitudes, etc.), we need to gather like an immune response to heal: not to punish, but to use mindfulness and compassion to shine light, embrace, support each other, and to transform difficulties into reconciliation

Within the body exists the central nervous system, consisting of the brain and spinal cord, nourished by cerebrospinal fluid within the ventricles, and the peripheral nervous system with 31 pairs of nerves radiating in the following order:

• 8 pairs of cervical (neck)
• 12 pairs of thoracic (back)
• 5 pairs of lumbar (lower back)
• 5 pairs of sacral (sacrum)
• 1 pair of coccygeal (coccyx)

Sensory information from the receptors is transmitted via afferent pathways to the central nervous system, processed through synapses connecting sensory neurons, interneurons, and motor neurons, then responded to via efferent pathways to the effectors (motor organs) along the reflex arc. The speed of transmission can reach one-thousandth of a second, ensuring rapid reflexes and maintaining homeostasis.

In the practice community, similarly, it is necessary to establish a “nervous system”: the central system (the caretaking council, caretaking team, the council of Dharma teachers) and the peripheral system (monastics, practitioners, lay friends), so that any difficulty or suffering arising from an individual “cell” can be reported centripetally in a timely manner, and decisions or support can be transmitted centrifugally without delay. Within each individual, there must also be a spiritual immune system—protecting the six sense organs (eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind)—to guard against negative influences, while practicing Right Attention and contemplation to prevent the arising of Wrong Attention.

Each time we hear the bell or sit in meditation, the practice consists of three main steps to invite all the cells in our body to participate, not just the ears and consciousness:

• listen to the bell as a signal to generate *mindfulness* that permeates the brain cells, heart, kidneys, skin, and so on

• allow *concentration* to spread like a laser beam—that is, photons coming into phase in a common *field*, behaving as a single photon

• from that unified state arises a powerful *energy of concentration*, capable of cutting through attachments, bringing joy, freedom, and non-self

This concept has been demonstrated by quantum science and neuroscience through two examples:

1. a laser operates thanks to stimulated emission of radiation—photons are stimulated to emit in phase, creating a powerful beam of light

2. the formation of a *Bose-Einstein condensate* at a temperature of -273.15°C causes atoms to lose their individuality and behave as a unified mass

3. PET scans show that happiness increases activity in the left frontal lobe, while anger activates the right frontal lobe—meaning we can transform anger into loving-kindness

Practicing sitting meditation, walking meditation, or mindful eating can all help us reach the state of cellular coherence, bringing peace and healing to the body, while also transforming individual habits into the collective energy of the sangha.