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God Can Be a Person
Relinquish Dual Grasping and Find Holiness Beyond Dualism
Thầy bows to the sacred anniversary of Christian faith while at the same time lighting a path to experience God and Jesus in a Buddhist way that transcends limiting dualisms such as birth and death and being and nonbeing. Thầy invites attendees to a candle-lit, walking meditation procession after the talk. He charges us all with generating the collective energy of peace and compassion in the world.
Thầy points to the practice “I have arrived, I am home,” and the question of what is our “true home” recurs throughout the talk. Thầy’s answer that home is available in every present moment, every step, “and that true home is available now and here, not just after you die.” The context of Christmas invites large, difficult questions, from which Thầy does not shy.
He proceeds by showing how traditional dichotomies can limit our understanding. He starts with the finding of modern physics that matter and energy are ultimately indistinguishable one from the other to show that it is not supportable to dismiss “matter”—the body, planet Earth—as simply inert and dead: “We realize that we have a body, a precious body given us by the Bodhisattva Earth. . . . And it is easy enough to see that when you die you go back to Mother Earth,” as part of which none of life’s energy or matter can be created or destroyed. Far from being merely a resource or an environment, “the Earth is us,” and “we are her children, and she is in every one of us.”
Thầy then examines two “kinds of theology,” the vertical dimension (God above human above all else) and the horizontal dimension (historical,temporal). He asks “Is God a force behind—outside—of the cosmos?” He answers with one of his favored metaphors: the individual wave is caught up in the horizontal dimension, and water is the vertical dimension of which all waves are part, yet “the wave may be able to find that she is made of water.” Thầy concludes, “when you get in touch with the vertical dimension—your true nature—you get at the same time in touch with the horizontal dimension,” and, conversely, “if we know how to touch the historical dimension deeply, we will touch the ultimate dimension, and we will touch our true nature of no birth and no death; no being and nonbeing, exactly like the wave.”
And this conclusion prepares the way for the ultimate Christmas question: is Jesus the “son of man” or the “son of God”? Thầy’s answer is both-and the son of God and the son of man, the ultimate and the historical. But, then, in every moment absolutely everybody and everything is potentially both. We all belong to the historical dimension of birth and death, being and non-being, but we also all belong to the ultimate dimension. And so does God: “Yes, God can be a person, God can be a cloud, God can be a rose.” And, as Thầy illustrates with another favored metaphor, the cloud is never born and never dies but always exists in its various forms, because nothing exists eternally and nothingness cannot exist either. “So,” Thầy teaches, “let us try to transcend our notions of body and mind, matter and spirit, consciousness and the material world—that is a big obstacle for us,” the obstacle of “dual grasping.”
Thầy offers in closing that “if vertically we can touch our ultimate dimension, then we will make peace with everything in the horizontal dimension,” and “there will be no war, no conflict, and peace will be possible.” That would be a very blessed Christmas indeed.
This talk was offered on Christmas Eve during the Christmas and New Year Retreat in the year 2011. Thầy offered this talk at the Lower Hamlet, Plum Village, France.
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