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Dharma Talk
I brought corn seeds to Italy and each child planted one in a pot. When the seed sprouts into a young plant, they are to speak to it: “Do you remember the time you were a seed of corn?” In our bodies every cell carries our father, our mother, and all our ancestors—blood and spiritual (Jesus Christ, the Buddha, and Thầy) are fully present in every cell. This morning the children received the two promises:
- I vow to cultivate understanding in order to live peacefully with people, animals, plants, and minerals.
- I vow to develop my compassion in order to love and live happily with people, animals, plants, and minerals.
Looking deeply into the present moment reveals “continuation”: each thought, speech, and action (the triple karma) carries our signature and never disappears. Right thinking—non-discrimination, compassion, understanding—brings well-being to ourselves and the world; wrong thinking—hate, anger, fear, despair—brings suffering. Two wrong views to avoid are nihilism (belief in total cessation at death) and eternalism (belief in an unchanging soul). Buddhist psychology describes eight consciousnesses:
1–5. the five senses
- mind (thinking, perception)
- manas (clinging, pleasure-seeking and avoiding, ignoring suffering’s goodness, ignoring moderation)
- store (the ground containing seeds of mindfulness, concentration, and insight)
Right View transcends notions of birth/death, coming/going, sameness/otherness, being/non-being. Meditating on a flame, a cloud, or a lotus shows that nothing “comes from nothing” nor “dies into nothing,” and that each phenomenon “inter-is” with its conditions. Cultivating mindfulness (smṛti), concentration (samādhi), and insight (prajñā) reveals our true nature—nirvana, the extinction of all views—and forms the Buddhist vision for a global spirituality and ethic.
