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Mahāyāna Vipaśyanā Five: Reverence is the Nature of My Love
Thầy interweaves his love story as a young monk with the Diamond Sutra—the sutra for teachings on emptiness of a separate self, beginning with a teaching on anger. Before we are angry, when we are calm and happy, he invites us to create a Peace Treaty (he suggests the contents) with the help of our loved ones. When anger arises, he advises us to take the time—but no more than twenty-four hours—to breathe with our anger in order to calm it. If our anger has not transformed, we have the Peace Treaty available as a instrument for healing.
Thầy continues his story of his love for a nun when he was a young monk, sharing the strong emotions he felt, the desire to be in her presence, and the confusion he experienced by being in love with her. He says that they took refuge in the happiness of, and trust in, each other. They enjoyed long conversations about their shared dreams of an Engaged Buddhism. He says that because his love felt so sacred, he never even had the idea of holding her hand or “putting a kiss on her forehead.”
Ten, twenty years later, looking back he began to understand that she represented “everything that I adore, that I think to be the most important thing in my life.” He realized that it was bodhicitta—the strong desire to realize the Dharma, to bring yourself and other living beings to the other shore, the shore of happiness and freedom—that protected the two of them.
Thầy goes back to the Diamond Sutra, where Subhūti is questioning the Buddha about the career of a bodhisattva. The Buddha explains that it is bodhicitta—making the vow to practice for everyone, not just yourself—that is the key practice of bodhisattvas. Thầy explores the four notions that the Diamond Sutra advises us to transcend:
- The notion of a self
- The notion of a person,
- The notion of a living being
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The notion of a life span
He examines each notion carefully and in detail, saying that understanding these teachings “should be the practice of looking, realizing, living in mindfulness.”
Thầy invites Anne, a lay friend, to lead a mindful movement meditation that is a practice of breathing as interbeing. Thầy promises to distribute a little book of more than one hundred mindfulness gāthās from the Avataṃsaka Sūtra—and refers to his own book, Present Moment, Wonderful Moment that also offers mindfulness gāthās. He proposes that each person in the audience write one gāthā for their practice of mindfulness in daily life and that they share them with each other.
This is the fifth talk in a series of thirteen giving during the Looking Deeply in the Mahāyāna Tradition, twenty-one-day retreat in the year 1992. Thầy offered this talk at the Lower Hamlet, Plum Village, France.
These teachings later appear in the book Cultivating the Mind of Love.
Part of the following collection
Mahāyāna Vipaśyanā Seven: The Three Doors of Liberation