Let us listen to the sound of the bell before we continue.

[Sound of the bell]

Dear sangha, the practice of restoring communication in the family is something we must study carefully and practice diligently.

How can the members of a family speak to each other, communicate with each other? In English, we call this communication. As long as communication is still possible, the situation in the family is not yet hopeless. That is why we must be determined to protect communication.

When one person no longer looks at another, when they cannot speak to each other anymore, that is a dangerous situation. We do not have the right to let that situation continue. We must find a way to get out of it right away. We need to learn methods to break through, to open a way out. And if we do not have enough strength, we must ask for help from a teacher, from spiritual friends, from those who have experience, those who can come and support us, help us to break through and find a way out.

Here are some concrete suggestions that you can put into practice. We choose a time when the atmosphere in the house is joyful, when there is no anger, no tension. We organize a family meeting, a family council, and together we establish a constitution, a charter for our family.

If necessary, we can meet several times, but we must come to collective decisions, just as a country must follow its constitution. It is the same in our family; we need to have a set of family rules. These rules are created from our own wisdom, our experiences, our suffering, but guided by the standards of the Buddha’s teachings. We use the standards of the dharma to create these guidelines for our family.

There are many times when we do not agree with each other. Your opinion may be very different from your sibling’s. A husband’s view may be very different from his wife’s, and each person wants to hold on tightly to their own opinion. So how do we resolve this?

First of all, we have the dharma. The dharma gives us principles for how to act. How to act so that there is harmony, understanding, and love. That is why our opinions must be illuminated by the light of the dharma, to see whether our views are in accord with the true teachings or not. If they are not in accord with the dharma, we should not cling to them. Because if we stubbornly hold on to our opinions, even after we see that they do not follow the Buddha’s teachings, then we are not truly children, not truly disciples of the World Honored One, not truly students of Thầy.

This morning, the children learned a very