Thầy asks two questions: Do we want survival, or do we want happiness? And can the two go together? Building on the previous week’s talk on biological evolution, he looks at how the drive to survive and the drive for sensual pleasure push us to fight and to kill, bringing suffering to the one who perishes and to the one who wins. The Buddha does not speak about survival, Thầy points out; his message is about how to transform our suffering.

Thầy names anger, fear, confusion, and craving as poisons, and looks at how they are destroying us and the world around us. This is why we need spiritual evolution, and another meaning for the word survival. He tells of a young man in Canada whom he challenged at a tea meditation: “What is the use of having one hundred years to live if you are not capable of drinking your tea with peace?”

Thầy explores how the practice can purify not only the mind but also the body and the brain, creating new patterns of behavior, as when the sound of the bell in Plum Village stops our thinking by itself. What we gain from the practice can be transmitted to our children and students—not genetically, but in the way they walk, sit, and smile. He reflects on what a Dharma talk is for: not nice words, but watering the seeds of understanding and compassion already in us, and offering tools such as walking meditation and listening to the bell.

The last part of the talk turns to ways of dealing with anger: going back to our breathing, visualizing the outcome of anger, and calling up the image of someone who can smile in a difficult situation. Thầy shares how news from a refugee camp in Thailand once made him so angry he could not eat, and how meditating on a young sea pirate changed that anger into compassion. He speaks of a spiritual immune system, of three sentences we can keep in our wallet, and of a nun who kept her practice alive in a small prison cell. The talk closes with a letter Thầy wrote to a young nun in her final days, and how she received it.

This talk is from a series given during the Ninety-Day Rains Retreat in the year 2004/2005. Thầy offered this talk at the New Hamlet, Plum Village, France.