In this session of questions and answers the following questions were asked:

By the children:

• Why do people get so angry sometimes when they don’t even mean to get angry?
• Why do people have to suffer?
• What do you have to do to have a calm mind?

By the teens and young adults:

• If you had a chance to live your life again, would you choose the same path or a new life?
• How can I practice non-attachment to my sister who is living in Blue Cliff Monastery?
• What made you decide to become a monk?
• What is the hardest thing to practice?
• How can you detach from your strongest attachment in life?
• Is it possible to do something fast mindfully, like a sport?

By the adults:

• What could have prevented the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and what changes can help prevent such suffering in the future?
• After losing my nineteen-year-old daughter to leukemia, is it possible to truly be happy again?
• What would you advise the president regarding military intervention in Syria, and how can we deal with our despair?
• How can we engage young men in post-conflict zones to turn away from violence and embrace peace?
• How do we practice joyfully with physical limitations and pain as we grow older?
• How can we use the energy of mindfulness to forgive ourselves for trusting someone who hurt us?
• How do we practice transforming inherited seeds of depression and mental illness?

This session of Questions and Answers was organised during the Art of Suffering retreat in the year 2013. Thầy offered this talk at Blue Cliff Monastery, Pine Bush, New York, in the United States.

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.

Śūnyatā (emptiness), alakṣaṇa (signlessness), and apranihita (aimlessness) are the three doors of liberation (the three gates of liberation). Among them, aimlessness (apranihita) means that there is nothing you need to do, no goal to attain, no object to pursue—you are already what you want to become.

To practice aimlessness is to stop all the running, to cease all seeking, to come home and dwell peacefully in the present moment in order to touch the nirvana that is already available within us. A wave is made of water; it does not need to go in search of water. A flower is simply present in order to be present. When we see this clearly, restlessness dissolves, giving rise to sudden enlightenment (đốn ngộ) and non-attainment (vô đắc), and happiness and peace are available right away.

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.

Thầy shares about the early phases of the original Sangha’s formation, specifically he recounted the event in which Śāriputra met Aśvajit. Śāriputra was very impressed by the monk, and asked him who was his teacher and whether he could receive a teaching from the Buddha right away. In response, Aśvajit mentioned the following four-line verse to him, and thanks to it Śāriputra glimpsed the Way:
“Everything manifests when conditions come together. Everything ceases to manifest when conditions are no longer together. And the great teacher Śākyamuni has already made this declaration.”

Śāriputra was also deeply impressed by how Aśvajit was walking: his way of walking was a living Dharma talk. This is a practice we can all train in: by investing all our body and mind in each step, we “print” peace on the Earth and are able to reconcile with ourselves, our ancestors, and all species - practicing the insight of the Avataṃsaka sutra as we walk. Then Śāriputra and his close friend, Maudgalyāyana, decided to leave the community they were practicing with in order to join the Buddha’s Sangha.

Building a Sangha requires patient, sensitive care—training in mindful breathing, walking, eating—so that each member may flourish and heal the world. Thầy highlights the fact that we cannot build a Sangha just by using our telephone, our fax, our email; we have to build our Sangha by the practice of breathing, of walking, and so on.

Thầy then examines the Buddha’s twelve links (Pratītyasamutpāda):

1. delusion (avidyā)
2. negative karma formations (saṃskāra)
3. consciousness (vijñāna)
4. name-and-form (nāmarūpa)
5. six sense bases (ṣaḍāyatana)
6. contact (sparśa)
7. feeling (vedanā)
8. craving (tṛṣṇā)
9. grasping (upādāna)
10. becoming (bhava)
11. birth (jāti)
12. aging-and-death (jarāmaraṇa)

Rather than seeing past, present, and future causes and effects, he invites us to study any single moment—thought, word, or deed—as a specimen in which all twelve links, both positive (wisdom, wholesome formations) and negative, are alive. Every action—mental, verbal, physical—carries immediate and long-term fruits; by recognizing “where we are going” here and now, we will understand our continuation.

This was the seventh talk in a series of thirteen given during The Hands of the Buddha, twenty-one-day retreat in the year 2002. Thay offered this talk at the Lower Hamlet, Plum Village, France.

The I is composed of non-I elements: our thoughts, feelings and the whole cosmos — like a flower made of sunshine, clouds and minerals. With the insight of non-self or interbeing, calling I or you is safe, for we see the roots of our sadness and learn to transform suffering. Likewise, impermanence is not merely a notion but a living meditation: by touching a cup of tea, an emotion or a flower in mindfulness, we experience change in the present moment and free ourselves from suffering.

Nirvana is the practice of letting go of all notions — even those of impermanence and non-self — so that we are not caught in ideas that become prisons. The Four Noble Truths unfold this path in two cause-and-effect pairs:

1. suffering and its roots (ignorance, clinging to notions)
2. the end of suffering (happiness, peace) and the way to the end (the Eightfold Path)
   Deep looking, or meditation, uproots ignorance and allows freedom and joy to arise.

Every being holds a Buddha nature — the capacity for understanding and loving — and taking refuge manifests as practice:
• in the Buddha (touching our own awakening)
• in the Dharma (mindful living as the true teaching)
• in the Sangha (a community that supports harmony, healing and growth)

Mindfulness turns ordinary acts — drinking tea, walking in an airport, cooking a meal — into meditation. The Five Precepts are the fruit of this mindfulness:

1. protect life
2. practice generosity (no stealing)
3. respect personal integrity
4. speak truthfully and compassionately
5. refrain from toxins in body and mind

Building Sangha as a family, revisiting tradition, and practicing in daily life help these seeds of peace and joy to flourish.