Thầy teaches that the Five Mindfulness Trainings are a path of love, and that practicing the precepts is the same as practicing mindfulness. In a summary in English of eight Dharma talks given in Vietnamese, he explores what Buddhism can offer toward a global ethic.

Thầy shows how mindfulness carries concentration and insight within itself. To know that you are drinking tea while you drink it is already enlightenment, so enlightenment is our daily business, not something far away.

Turning to the Buddha’s first Dharma talk, Thầy explains why Right View is the foundation of Buddhist ethics. Wrong thinking can destroy the world: fear, discrimination, anger, despair, and greed all come from wrong views. Emptiness, impermanence, and nonself are not philosophies but instruments of concentration. Thầy shows how remembering impermanence can dissolve our anger toward someone we love, and how a son can see that he is the continuation of his father. Understanding, he says, is the other word for love.

Right Thinking alone begins to heal us and the world, and with Right View come Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Livelihood. Right View, Thầy says, is that you contain the environment and the environment contains you.

Thầy describes how the Buddha’s disciples have renewed his teaching on ethics over the centuries, and how the Sangha is rewriting the Five and Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings to respond to global warming, terrorism, war, and discrimination. He names two aspects of Right View. Of nonattachment to views, he says, “You cannot kill in the name of God. You cannot kill in the name of truth.” Of nondualistic thinking, he offers the bamboo trunks that share one block of roots, asks whether a rose is in our mind or outside it, and tells of Winnie the Pooh following his own footprints.

Distinguishing normative ethics from metaethics, Thầy uses the mud and the lotus to show that right and wrong, good and evil, inter-are in the realm of relative truth, while nirvāṇa is the extinction of all notions. The real right view is the removal of all views. He closes by asking us to help the Buddha make the Dharma relevant to our time: forty-five years of teaching was not enough, and we are his continuation.

This talk is from a series given during the Ninety-Day Rains Retreat in the year 2008/2009. Thầy offered this talk at the Lower Hamlet, Plum Village, France.