Setting Up a Compassionate Line for Loving Communication.

Thầy returns to the need to set up a telephone line to serve as a source of help for young people in emotional crisis. This would be called the “compassionate line,” and he urges each of us to practice so we can be the person at the end of that line who can help someone who’s suffering.

To do this, Thầy teaches, we must become bodhisattvas of deep listening, and that can only happen through practice. Understanding is the foundation of true love, and we can understand by listening deeply—without our prejudices and judgment coloring what we hear. Thầy invites us to listen deeply to the people in our daily life—our parents, our children, our friends, our partner—and to ask them, “Darling, do you think I understand you enough?”

To truly understand another, Thầy shows, we must begin by honestly understanding ourselves. Through a young nun’s letter about seeing our situation from a faraway place, he points to gaining perspective and freeing ourselves from illusions, especially the illusion of what we believe will make us happy. When we have freedom, happiness can come from every direction, at every moment.

Thầy then talks about the four elements of true love and happiness—maitrī, karuṇā, muditā, and upekṣā—with images such as a doctor who doesn’t have to suffer together with the patient. These elements have no limits, and so love can be without frontiers. Through practice, we can enlarge our heart so our love is unlimited and we can accept everything, like the river in the Buddha’s image of a handful of salt. When we have this kind of love, we have a compassionate line to everyone, through which we can bring them happiness and freedom.

The talk ends with Sister Chân Không singing a song first in French and then in English about smiling to everything in life and even in death.

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