Thầy begins with a line from an old Irish song—“All the praties, they are small over here, and we eat skin and all”—that carries the fear of hunger our ancestors have passed down to us. From there, he invites us to eat, sit, and breathe not only for ourselves but for those who have not had the opportunity: grandparents who lived through hard times, and people today who have no food, or no time to sit.

Thầy shares his memory of the famine in Hanoi in 1944, when, as a young student, he went from house to house asking for a little rice for the hungry. He explores how a meal eaten in mindfulness touches three seeds in us at once—fear, happiness, and compassion—and why true happiness is made of non-happiness elements. Eating for the grandmother and mother within us, we become a bodhisattva: “To be a bodhisattva is what you can do right here, right now, while you eat your piece of bread.”

Thầy points to sitting for our ancestors as the greatest kind of filial piety, and to what the world really needs: not more goods, but more compassion and freedom, generated even while watering the vegetables. He closes with Nelson Mandela’s wish to just sit down and do nothing, and reflects on why those of us lucky enough to have time to sit and walk might practice for those who cannot.

This talk is from a series given during the Ninety-Day Fall Retreat in the year 2004. Thầy offered this talk at the Lower Hamlet, Plum Village, France.