Thầy opens with an account from Berlin, where he addressed some four thousand people at the Kirchentag—the first joint national gathering of German Catholics and Protestants. Sitting afterward with a group of bishops, he had made the case that the Church should teach and demonstrate the Kingdom of God in the here and now, so that teachers themselves become living proof that fame, profit, power, and sex don’t need to be chased for happiness. He shares one bishop’s reply—that he still wanted “another Kingdom of God outside of here”—and reflects gently on how hard it is to release a belief we’ve loved for a long time, however clearly we understand it isn’t needed.
Thầy then turns to the Pure Land, distinguishing popular Buddhism from deep Buddhism, and shares the Buddha’s own image for the teaching: a beach you can wade into gradually, at whatever depth you’re ready for.
From there, Thầy traces how the Buddha came to be given three bodies. He describes the Mahāsāṃghika’s protest, roughly a hundred and twenty years after the Buddha’s death, against a teaching grown repetitive and small—“Your Buddha is too small”—and shows how that protest grew into the doctrine of nirmāṇakāya, sambhogakāya, and dharmakāya. He traces its roots back further still, to the dying Venerable Vakkali and his attachment to the Buddha’s physical presence.
Thầy closes by drawing Jesus and the Buddha back into their human, historical forms—the Son of Man rather than the Son of God, Śākyamuni rather than Vairocana—pointing to the teacher in flesh and bone, rather than an idealised figure held at a distance, as where the deepest liberation can be reached. Buddhism, he says, has to stay a living organism, renewed through contact with other traditions and other people, rather than something admired and kept still, like a mummy in a museum.
This talk is from a series given during the Fall Retreat in the year 2004. Thầy offered this talk at the Lower Hamlet, Plum Village, France.
