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Overseas Vietnamese 2
When anger arises, the practitioner immediately takes hold of their breath and mindful steps to generate the energy of mindfulness, embracing their anger as a mother would hold her crying child. That tenderness helps the suffering to ease right away, and then, with mindfulness and alertness, one recognizes the roots of the suffering, cuts off its source, and develops insight. The process of practice includes three stages:
- Mindfulness – generating the energy of mindfulness in every moment (eating, drinking, breathing, walking…),
- Concentration – stability to shine light on the truth,
- Insight – seeing that wrong perceptions give rise to suffering, transforming illusions, and liberating oneself from suffering.
The Middle Way teaching on being–nonbeing, birth–death is illustrated by the image of a cloud becoming rain, showing that there is no birth from nothing and no death into nothingness, but only the manifestation of the power of interdependent arising. All notions such as “being” or “nonbeing,” “birth” or “death” are merely illusory ideas. Through listening with a compassionate heart (compassionate listening) and loving speech, family and social relationships are healed. The forty-year journey of teaching in the West has been a dialogue between traditions, with 250 monastics and lay practitioners living together in a monastery without private possessions, as a symbol of brotherhood, without seeking power, sensual pleasure, or fame. That harmony is strengthened by the practices of mindfulness, concentration, insight, and the three karmas (body, speech, and mind) – the marks that lead us into samsāra or to liberation.