Thầy offers the Buddha’s teaching that there is a very safe island within ourselves, and shows how we can go home to it whenever we feel lost, fragile, or unworthy.

He begins with the practice of Shining Light, which monastics and lay practitioners had just been doing in all three hamlets. A practitioner asks the Sangha to shine light on them, and each person in turn shares what they have seen of that person’s strengths and weaknesses, with love rather than criticism. Thầy describes the letter that follows, and the “Sangha eyes”: the vision of thirty, forty, or fifty people combined, which is always brighter than one person’s. As we listen, we also see ourselves. He hopes that families, workplaces, and even a National Assembly might one day practice in this way.

Turning to the contemplation of the body, Thầy shares a line from a sūtra: contemplating our own body is contemplating the Buddha. He invites us to see the body not as a self but as a community of cells, bacteria, and mitochondria, and to see our ancestors alive in every cell, like the grain of corn that has not died but become the young plant. When we touch our body deeply, we touch the Buddha.

From there Thầy turns to the practice the Buddha recommended to his disciples at eighty years old, taking refuge in the island of self, and to the Plum Village song that goes with it. Line by line, he unpacks it: Buddha is our mindfulness, shining near and far; Dharma is our mindful breathing, guarding body and mind; Sangha is our five skandhas working in harmony. He imagines being on a hijacked plane, where going back to this practice can help us stay calm. Practicing with gāthās like this, he says, creates new neural pathways conducive to healing.

Thầy closes with something he saw that morning while massaging his cold hands: they are his mother’s, his father’s, and his ancestors’ hands. “That is a direct experience and not just something the teacher tells you and you memorize.” The teaching of no-self, he says, should not be a philosophical speculation but a direct, deep experience that brings transformation, healing, and peace.

This talk is from a series given during the Ninety-Day Rains Retreat in the year 2007/2008. Thầy offered this talk at the New Hamlet, Plum Village, France.