Thầy begins with the fifth and sixth exercises on mindful breathing: generating joy and happiness. He teaches that we don’t need to run into the future looking for conditions of happiness — mindfulness brings us home to the present moment, where more than enough conditions for happiness are already available. He shares the story of the farmer who has lost his cows and his crops and wants to kill himself, and the Buddha’s remark to his monks afterward: “You are very lucky. You don’t have any cows to lose.” Releasing what we mistakenly believe we need for happiness — fame, wealth, power — is itself a source of joy. Thầy also points to the UN’s Resolution on Happiness and Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness initiative as signs of a growing science of happiness in the world.
From here Thầy moves into the seventh and eighth exercises, on being with and calming a painful feeling, and uses this as a bridge into the Four Noble Truths. He describes the Second Noble Truth, the making of ill-being, in terms of nutriment: suffering needs to be fed, and if we can identify and cut off what feeds it, it will cease to manifest. This sets up the path to the Fourth Noble Truth, and from there the Noble Eightfold Path, with Right View as its foundation — the view that is free of the notions of being and non-being.
The heart of the talk is Thầy’s teaching on no-birth and no-death. Using a diagram of a line with points B and D, he shows how we mistakenly think of birth as a passage from non-being into being, and death as the reverse. He offers several vivid meditations to undo this: a cloud cannot die, only transform into rain or snow, so when we drink our tea, we are drinking the cloud; a flame struck from a matchbox has come from nowhere and, once extinguished, has gone nowhere; a rose, looked at closely, is made only of non-rose elements — cloud, sunshine, earth, our own consciousness — and so contains the whole cosmos within it. Thầy weaves in Lavoisier’s “nothing is born, nothing dies, everything transforms,” and adds a fourth proposition of his own: nothing has a separate existence of its own. This same insight extends to karma — our thoughts, speech, and action are our continuation, never lost, always maturing (vipāka) until they ripen and we experience them again. He recalls being taught as a sixteen-year-old novice that before bowing to the Buddha, one must first see that the Buddha is made only of non-Buddha elements, and that we ourselves are made of non-self elements — otherwise the bow is only imagination.
Thầy closes with the three concentrations that support this insight: emptiness, signlessness (illustrated by the cloud already present, unseen, in our own breath and the room’s humidity), and aimlessness, taught through the image of a wave who, realizing she is water, is freed from all fear of rising and falling, beginning and ending. He ends by returning to perception itself — subject and object inter-are, arising together, neither able to exist without the other.
This is the second talk in a series of thirteen given during The Science of the Buddha, twenty-one-day retreat in the year 2012. Thầy offered this talk at the Lower Hamlet, Plum Village, France.
