Thầy details the importance of being present, focusing on mindfulness and concentration through practices like inviting the bell, listening to the bell, mindful breathing, and walking meditation. The bell serves as a reminder to pause, breathe, and return to the present moment, inviting ancestors and cultivating mindfulness, concentration, and peace. Mindfulness, concentration, and insight are foundational energies for being alive in the present moment. Through mindful breathing, walking meditation, and recognizing habitual energies, practitioners embrace the present moment deeply, experiencing life’s wonders and cultivating compassion and love. The Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path guide practitioners in addressing suffering and developing virtues like forgiveness, compassion, tolerance, brotherhood, and sisterhood.

This is the second talk of a series of thirteen giving during The Path of the Buddha, twenty-one-day retreat in the year 2009. Thầy offered this talk at the New Hamlet, Plum Village, France.

Interbeing of Suffering and Happiness – Ill-being (dukkha) and well-being (sukha) are two organic realities that cannot be separated: only when we experience suffering do we truly appreciate happiness; deep meditation helps us to recognize the roots of our suffering, so that we can transform it and open the door to well-being.

Afflictions and enlightenment also inter-are, like flowers and garbage: instead of running away, we should learn to take care of our afflictions in order to nourish awakening. In the Sangha, brotherhood and sisterhood are precious jewels, nourishing and sustaining our collective happiness – to lose the Sangha is to lose this brotherhood and sisterhood, like “throwing away the baby with the bathwater.”

Two practical proposals were made to UNESCO:

1. “A Global No Car Day” – to encourage at least 10,000 people to make the aspiration not to use their cars one day a week, in order to protect the environment and promote peace.
2. To establish a center for nonviolence training for teachers at all levels, using methods of walking meditation, recognizing and transforming anger, to sow the seeds of a culture of peace right in our schools.

With guided meditation Thay teaches that when we let the Buddha within us breathe, sit, and walk, we release the idea of a separate self who performs these actions. In that deep letting go, we see that breathing is just breathing, sitting is just sitting—there is no breather, no sitter. Like wind being the blowing and rain being the falling, action and actor are one. In this direct experience of no-self, peace and happiness reveal themselves naturally, and we touch the true nature of emptiness and interbeing.

Thay shares about deep listening and loving speech and illustrates with stories of people attending retreats and transforming their communication. We hear examples of Israeli and Palestinians coming together. In a discussion about the Five Mindfulness Trainings, particularly the Fifth, Thay introduces and shares about The Sutra on the Son’s Flesh, and the Four Kinds of Nutriments. He continues on to discuss three kinds of concentrations called the Three Doors of Liberation: emptiness, signlessness, and aimlessness. Thay ends with the story of the lay person, Anāthapiṇḍika, from The Sutra on The Teachings to be Given to the Dying.

This is the final talk in a series of five given during the Body and Mind are One retreat, in the year 2011. Thay offered this talk at the YMCA of the Rockies in Estes Park, Colorado, United States.

Thay begins with a guided meditation on touching our freshness, solidity, stillness and freedom. He then speaks to the children about maintaining joy and happiness while playing, emphasizing that playing with anger leads to loss. He teaches that the highest way of playing is to ensure neither the winner nor the loser suffers. He also introduces the third mantra about love, “Darling, I know you suffer and I am here for you,” and discusses the wisdom of non-discrimination and the three complexes: superiority, inferiority and equality.

Thay shares the fourth mantra, “Darling, I suffer and I want you to know. I’m doing the best I can. Please help,” and explains how pride and anger can prevent us from seeking help. He advises practitioners to take care of their anger with mindful breathing to understand the wrong perceptions behind it.

Thay elaborates on the eleventh and twelfth exercises of mindful breathing—concentrating and liberating the mind. He discusses the three doors of liberation: emptiness (śūnyatā), signlessness (animitta), and aimlessness (apranihita), as well as four other objects of concentration: impermanence, non-craving, cessation, and letting go. These practices help free us from notions of being and non-being, birth and death, coming and going, sameness and otherness, and the four notions of self, man/human, living beings, and lifespan, allowing us to touch reality, nirvana, and realize our true nature of no-birth and no-death.

This is the fourth talk in a series of five given during The Body and Mind Are One retreat in the year 2011. Thay offered this talk at the YMCA of the Rockies in Estes Park, Colorado, the United States.

Today’s talk begins with the need to recognize and prioritize our deepest needs by learning to preserve three vital energies—thinking, speaking, and sexual energy. Drawing on Taoist and Buddhist traditions (and the example of Mahatma Gandhi’s fasting), we see that economizing these energies—through non-thinking, mindful speech, and transforming sexual desire with compassion and understanding—frees us to devote ourselves to spiritual realization. Our daily habits (meals, reading, TV, conversations) either drain or nourish these energies, and an intelligent, communal program of practice is essential to protect them from society’s distractions.

Next, the insight of non-self must move from theory to living experience: knowledge of no-self is merely a map, whereas true understanding arises when we practice mindfulness and concentration (“kung fu”) in each moment—looking deeply into a flower, a cloud, a child—to touch the reality of non-self. This practice ripples through generations: seeing our father in ourselves and ourselves in our child nourishes patience, gentleness, and freedom from anger.

Devotion and meditation are not opposed but can merge. Whether lighting a candle, bowing, praying, or chanting, mindfulness and single-pointed concentration transform acts of devotion into one-hundred-percent meditation. Doubt—held as a question mark—keeps us open, preventing dogmatism by inviting continuous exploration rather than collapse into disillusionment. Finally, “letting go” is not renouncing love but releasing fear, anger, and wrong views so that our practice can mature. True freedom lies beyond before/after, being/non-being, and only through sustained, concentrated practice can we touch the ultimate dimension.

People’s Peace Conferences: A Real Roadmap for Peace in the World

Thay offered this teaching on the second day of a retreat for Israeli and Palestinian attendees. His purpose is to lay the foundation for a “peace process” based not upon governmental or political debates–which have failed–but rather upon mutual human needs and shared aspirations. Thay very mindfully builds that foundation for the first hour and twelve minutes of the talk before making his proposal. He starts with an instruction about how to receive this Dharma talk, which is to allow it to fall like rain upon the internal seeds of peace within us.

The talk then focuses upon how to cultivate the seeds of understanding, love, and compassion within ourselves, emphasizing that we only can make peace in the world if peace is within us. It develops in stages then from internal capacity to capacity to give to our loved ones and then outward through Sangha building. These are preparatory for developing the capacity to give deep listening and loving kindness to wider circles of people, ultimately to “enemies.” We must develop the foundation of non-violent responses to our own worry, fear, and anger in order to be able to communicate constructively with perceived adversaries. Thay urges us both to learn to “be ourselves”—our true selves—through individual Dharma practice and, also, to make good use of Sangha when available and “borrow the energy of Sangha” to sustain us when alone. Thay then provides a sketch of Buddhist psychology to emphasize that our happiness depends upon what seeds in our “store consciousness” we water—and allow our children to ingest—and that we are responsible for healthy consumption that does not perpetuate hate and violence.

In order to effect a peace process that has a better chance of succeeding, “We should know the art of selective watering so that we have enough calm, enough peace, enough hope, enough joy in us, so that we can help the other person to cultivate the same and to go home to ourselves and take care of our own garden.” This is the foundation that Thay lays for his proposal for a “real roadmap for peace.” In the remainder of the talk, he reemphasizes some steps in that process, such as: start first with your own inner garden, practice peace with your family loved ones, pacify your own anger, practice deep listening, recognize the other’s suffering, admit your role in it, and, remember, “You are not discussing peace; you are practicing peace.”

This is the second talk in a series of five given during the Israeli-Palestinian retreat in the year 2003. Thầy offered this talk in the Lower hamlet, Plum Village, France.