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Orientation
Happiness is now or never—enlightenment is the transformation of suffering into joy. Two years ago Blue Cliff held its first retreat under a tent; this Great Togetherness hall now shelters our practice. Last August Thây returned mid-retreat despite a serious lung infection (pseudomonas), foregoing a required fourteen-day hospital stay and four IV injections daily. Nine hundred eighty people attended the Colorado YMCA retreat in his absence, and the Sangha’s success led them to make it an annual gathering—proof that “Thây has transmitted himself to his Sangha, and the Sangha will continue Thây for a long time.”
Our Sangha is “true” because every member practices mindful breathing, walking, sitting, and eating, generating a living Dharma—mindfulness + concentration + insight—that carries the true Buddha within. During a ninety-day Winter Retreat in Plum Village, three hundred monastics and lay practitioners studied the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, and crafted a new version of the Five Mindfulness Trainings.
- The Five Mindfulness Trainings represent the Buddhist vision for a global spirituality and ethic.
- They express the Four Noble Truths and Noble Eightfold Path, the path of right understanding and true love, leading to healing, transformation, and happiness.
- Practicing them cultivates the insight of interbeing (right view), which can remove all discrimination, intolerance, anger, fear, and despair.
- Living according to them is already the path of a bodhisattva, inviting dialogue across traditions and translation into non-Buddhist language for a shared human ethic.
Every bell invites “deep listening”: 100 % of body and mind return to the in-breath, out-breath, and touch our true home in the here and now. Each mindful step—“I have arrived. I am home.”—brings solidity, freedom, peace, and joy. Whether brushing teeth, drinking water, or eating a morsel of carrot, full awareness of the miracle of life is enlightenment in action. Walking, sitting, cooking, speaking or observing Noble Silence together generates the collective energy of mindfulness that heals and transforms, building the Sangha and continuing the Buddha.
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Public Talk at Pasadena