Thầy opens by sharing the Sutra on the Better Way to Catch a Snake, preserved in both the Theravāda and Sarvāstivāda traditions—and notes that comparing the two versions is itself a practice in openness.

The sūtra offers two central images. The first: the Dharma is like a raft to cross the river of suffering—but clinging to it once we reach the other shore only leads to weariness. “Even the Dharma has to be abandoned, not to say the non-Dharma.” The second: if we do not bring our whole being into studying and listening, the teaching can harm rather than heal—like grasping a snake by the body rather than using a forked stick to hold it safely at the head. Thầy illustrates how dangerous misunderstanding can be through the monk Yamaka, who taught nihilism, and the monks who, misreading the Buddha’s teaching, took their own lives.

The monk Ariṭṭha claimed that sensual pleasures are not an obstacle to practice. Thầy treats him sympathetically—suggesting he may have confused mindful enjoyment of simple pleasures with sensual craving—and notes that the Sangha failed to truly dialogue with him, which led the Buddha to teach this sūtra.

The chim trĩ bird story from the Sūtra of One Hundred Examples illustrates the danger of mistaking the word for the thing. The Ratnakūṭa Sūtra shows that even emptiness, if clung to as a view, becomes a trap with no way out. Impermanence, nonself, emptiness, nirvāṇa—all are rafts, not destinations.

Thầy explores three subtle traps through which we cling to a self: “mine,” “me,” and the most subtle—“inter-containing” (tương tại). The ascetic Vacchagotta received only silence when he asked whether a self exists—because both yes and no would have confirmed a wrong view. Two personal anecdotes from Thầy’s own life illustrate the same teaching with characteristic lightness.

The Aniruddha encounter asks the four possible propositions about the Buddha after death—and finds none fitting. Reality is bất khả đắc—ungraspable by concepts.

Thầy closes by framing Mahāyāna as an attempt to correct accumulated misunderstandings, inviting us to read the Pali Canon and the Āgamas with Mahāyāna eyes—approaching the Dharma as artists rather than ideologists.

This is the fourth 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.