Mahāyāna Vipaśyanā Sixteen: The Cosmos as a Flower
The Avataṃsaka Sūtra is the Buddhist foundational text on ecology whose teaching is that everything is linked to everything else. Thầy says that the Avataṃsaka Sūtra “…can be the ground for us to practice and to act in order to save our planet from destruction.”
Thầy then teaches from the Lotus Sutra which is written like a play, teaching not with abstract ideas, but with images and poetry born from insight. The aim of the first Mahāyāna sūtras is to correct the rigid, mistaken notions of impermanence, non-self, and nirvana. The two main teachings of the Lotus Sutra are, first, that everyone possesses buddha-nature and can become a fully enlightened buddha; and second, that the Buddha cannot be limited in time and space. Because people were historical practitioners of Buddhism in three different yānas (vehicles), the Lotus Sutra reconciles all Buddhist traditions into one (Ekayāna): no matter to what tradition you belong—Vajrayāna, Theravāda, or Zen—you are an authentic disciple of the Buddha.
Thầy, like the Lotus Sutra, uses both vivid images and beautiful language to teach about the ultimate dimension (substance) and the historical dimension (form), comparing them to the relationship between water and waves. While traditional teachings historically focus on two doors, Thầy brilliantly illuminates a third dimension to this framework: the action dimension (function), representing the coming of buddhas and bodhisattvas from the ultimate dimension back into the historical stream in order to actively help others.
Thầy offers a short teaching on three of these bodhisattvas of action: Medicine King, who practices the samādhi of using various kinds of bodies to do the work of healing; Wonderful Sound Bodhisattva, who uses different kinds of language, including music, to put an end to suffering; and Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of the energy of love, of being present, and of listening deeply through five-fold vipaśyanā contemplation.
Thầy ends his Dharma talk with an invitation to attend the upcoming Lamp Transmission Ceremony for nine new Dharma teachers and a collective call to formalize harmony by signing the Plum Village relationship Peace Treaty in the presence of the Sangha.
An extra delight in this Dharma talk is Sister Chân Không singing Hội Thủy Tiên (The Daffodil Festival)—a song celebrating the countless Bodhisattvas emerging from the earth—into which she weaves a profound insight by the 13th-century Vietnamese Zen Master Tuệ Trung Thượng Sĩ on the interbeing of the speaker and the listener.
This is the twelfth talk in a series of thirteen giving during the Looking Deeply in the Mahāyāna Tradition, twenty-one-day retreat in the year 1992. Thầy offered this talk at the Upper Hamlet, Plum Village, France.
These teachings later appear in the book Cultivating the Mind of Love.
