Thầy explores what the Buddha calls the greatest wellness in the Discourse on Happiness, a sūtra very popular in Theravāda countries. The Buddha begins with the environment: we all carry seeds of peace, joy, and understanding, but they need good company and a good environment to be watered. Thầy notes that modern science points the same way, and invites us to put our energy into Sangha building rather than running after fame, power, and wealth.

To have a path, Thầy says, is to have a practice of our own—breathing, walking, taking care of painful feelings—that we bring with us wherever we go, unlike a phone we might forget at home. Our belief in it rests on experience, like knowing how to make tofu. He also touches on the sūtra’s lines about learning and growing like a tree, a livelihood that brings happiness to others, and the Five Mindfulness Trainings as the practice of true happiness and true love.

Setting the sūtra aside, Thầy shares a dream he had after addressing members of the Parliament in Northern Ireland, in which he ate an unfamiliar fruit with the happiness of a child, and tells of the two palm trees at the Hermitage that came from an earlier dream. He invites us to peel a tangerine with freedom, because “every moment that is given to us to live is a gem, is a wonder.”

Remembering a monk in Japan who said he would most regret the beauty of nature, Thầy offers the practice of signlessness. With a cloud in his cup of tea and a drawing of air rising over a mountain, he shows that what we cannot see still exists. Touching our forehead, we touch our father and our mother. A cloud cannot die, and neither can we. Thầy closes with the phrase that has replaced his “Present moment, wonderful moment”: this moment is full of wonders.

This talk was given on a Day of Mindfulness during the Spring Retreat in the year 2012. Thầy offered this talk at the Lower Hamlet, Plum Village, France.