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Cuội’s Moon Banyan and the Four Foundations of Mindful Healing
A logger named Cuội chops down four tiger cubs, then watches their mother miraculously revive them with leaves from a small tree. He digs up that “medicine tree,” plants it at home and becomes a healer—only to marry the mayor’s daughter, mistreat her, and cling jealously to his tree. In anger she urinates on it, the tree uproots itself into the sky, carrying Cuội all the way to the moon, where his untruthfulness and greed keep him in lonely exile. Vietnamese children see his silhouette beneath a banyan on the full moon and say that fallen leaves from that tree can still heal those lucky enough to catch them.
Thay then turns to the Buddha’s path of mindfulness, concentration, and insight—mindfully breathing, walking, eating, and bowing—to transform suffering and touch Nirvana. He outlines the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, each with four breathing exercises to
- Embrace the body
- Tread the realm of feelings
- Recognize and work with mental formations (all 51, positive and negative)
- Contemplate perceptions and the objects of mind
Through recognizing impermanence, non-self, and inter-being, we discover that everything is a formation in constant transformation and that true freedom comes from seeing into “no birth and no death.” Every in-breath, step, and action then becomes an invitation to generate the energy of mindfulness-concentration-insight in daily life.
