Thầy teaches that suffering and happiness go together: if we know how to handle a painful feeling, we also know how to generate joy. Looking deeply into a flower, he sees the cloud and the sunshine in it, and shows that happiness and suffering are made of non-happiness and non-suffering elements. Like an organic gardener who turns garbage into compost for flowers, a good practitioner is not in despair when love turns into anger.

Mindfulness and concentration bring insight, and one in-breath can free us from the past and the future. Thầy calls mindfulness and concentration the key to unlock the Kingdom of God, available twenty-four hours a day to those who are truly present, and recalls André Gide’s words, “God is happiness.” Drinking a glass of water mindfully shows that the seed of mindfulness, our buddha nature, is in every one of us. He tells how the Buddha taught the businessmen Anāthapiṇḍika brought to the Jeta Park that it is possible to live happily in the present moment, whether washing the dishes or walking to the parking lot.

When pain, anger, or fear come up, Thầy invites us to hold them tenderly, as a mother picks up her crying baby, rather than turning ourselves into a battlefield. Understanding suffering, beginning with our own, is the basic condition of love, and Thầy shares why Avalokiteśvara is called the Bodhisattva of Deep Listening. He describes the fifth day of a retreat, when people practice loving speech and compassionate listening, and recalls a retreatant in northern Germany who reconciled with his father by telephone. Groups of Palestinians and Israelis at Plum Village, listening to each other, recognize for the first time that the other side has suffered as they have.

Thầy goes through the four elements of true love, with the Buddha’s handful of salt in a bowl of water and in a river. A lotus cannot grow without mud, and the gāthā he learned as a novice for bowing to the Buddha points to the insight of interbeing. In Thầy’s understanding, the Kingdom of God is not a place without suffering but a place where people know how to make good use of it. Handling suffering and creating happiness are both arts, and Thầy closes where he began: every one of us can learn them. Sister Chân Không then sings a song about no fear of death.

This is a public talk given during the North American Tour in the year 2011. Thầy offered this talk at Pasadena Civic Auditorium, Pasadena, California, the United States.