Thầy begins by pointing out that Mother Earth isn’t only around us but within us—and that healing begins simply by knowing this. “There is no healing without relaxation,” and “relaxation means doing nothing, trying nothing”: allowing Mother Earth to breathe for us, just as a mother breathes for her unborn child. This is the practice of non-practice.

Next, Thầy explains the relationship between the historical and ultimate dimensions. The Buddha used the notions of the historical dimension— birth and death, being and nonbeing—as skillful means to lead us slowly toward the ultimate dimension. The Wisdom of Adaptation (anulomatajñāna) is the wisdom that helps us move in this direction, conforming our practice to teachings conducive to the ultimate truth—interbeing, emptiness, no-self. Emptiness, Thầy notes, is an expression equivalent to God: “You cannot say that God is or is not”—notions of being and nonbeing cannot be applied to the ultimate.

The teachings of karma, saṃsāra, reincarnation, and retribution were handed down from teachers before the Buddha and are not the cream of Buddhist teaching. The cream is interbeing, the Four Noble Truths, impermanence, and no-self. Because most practitioners cannot touch the deep teaching of no-self, these earlier teachings persist—a form of Buddhism Thầy calls diluted, “something like homeopathy.”

The twelve nidānas, as Thầy learned as a student, traditionally presented in three times and two layers of cause and effect, belong to the category of conventional truth, aimed at explaining reincarnation rather than leading us to the ultimate dimension. Thầy identifies two weaknesses in this presentation: first, that saṃskāra cannot be understood as action before body and mind have arisen; second, that blaming craving on contact and feeling ignores that the same contact and feeling can equally give rise to compassion and freedom in an enlightened person. Thầy proposes a simpler, more practice-conducive set of five nidānas in their place.

Anything that relies on everything else to express itself is a saṃskāra—a formation—and it is impermanent. Because of delusion, we see each formation as separate. A buddha sees formations in the light of co-arising and interconnection, not as separate, permanent entities.

Through meditation, we can realise the ultimate dimension in which there is no birth and no death. We suffer because we are caught in the notions of being and nonbeing. But with insight, nirvāṇa is not somewhere to go—“You have been nirvāṇized already since the non-beginning.”

This is the eleventh talk of a series given during the Winter Retreat in the year 2012-2013. Thầy offered this talk at the Lower Hamlet, Plum Village, France.