This talk opens with The Great Bell Chant sung in Vietnamese and translated into English by a monastic. Then Jack Kornfield introduces Thich Nhat Hanh and talks about his own realization regarding the practice of bowing. He then reads a poem he wrote about the spirit of innocence.

Thay begins this teaching by pointing out that meditation is a way to investigate our self—our true home—which we may have left a long time ago. To become familiar with our self, we use the light of mindfulness, and that allows us to embrace anything we find. The energy of mindfulness helps us to heal, to calm down, to nourish, to see deeply, and to transform. When we generate the energy of mindfulness, we send beams of light from our spirit that stimulate mindfulness in others.

In Buddhist meditation, when we look deeply at one thing, we begin to see the presence of other things: A flower contains the entire cosmos. This is the nature of interbeing.

Through our practice, we’re able to walk in the Kingdom of God, the Pure Land, with every step. Nirvana—the Kingdom of God—is within us. In the Avatamsaka realm, there’s boundless space and time in which we always abide in the present moment. Love is defined as being truly present and recognizing the presence of the other person.

When we realize that our true nature is freedom—Nirvana—we no longer have fear. We release our notions of being and not being, birth and death. The primary teaching of the Avatamsaka Sutra is interbeing—the one contains the all.

Thay then relates the story of Manjushri’s young disciple, Sudhana, and his quest to find Mahamaya, the mother of the Buddha. He finds her on a thousand-petaled lotus, and she tells him she’s the mother of all buddhas in the past, present, and future. In a similar way, each of us is pregnant with a buddha.

He then tells the story of Sudhana’s meeting with Maitreya, their journey into Vairochana Tower, and how their discoveries relate to the nuclear physicist David Bohm’s ideas of explicate order and implicate order.

The doorway to living happily in the here and the now is mindfulness. Meditation means to stop and look deeply, which can be accomplished by a simple practice of breathing in and breathing out while acknowledging a flower, a cup of tea, our body. In this way, mindfulness opens the door to healing. The practice of mindfulness is easy when we do it within a Sangha.