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Peace is the Way
This talk is preceded by an interfaith welcome from the Washington Hebrew Congregation in Washington, D.C. Thầy gives an overview of Plum Village, recaps his U.S. tour that is wrapping up with this talk, and introduces the topic of this talk and his new book, Creating True Peace—Ending Violence in Yourself, Your Family, Your Community, and the World, “a manual for the practice of peace.”
Thầy names the topic of the talk as Peace is the Way, the second half of his signature statement that begins “There is no way to peace.” He begins by focusing on being peace with and in our own body. The talk builds the throughline point that we must make peace first within ourselves—body, mind, emotions, perceptions—and then with our loved ones and family, and then with our Sangha or local community, and so on, before we can be ready to make true peace with perceived enemies. From personal to international, these widening levels of peace are not separable; they inter-are. Peace, as taught by Thầy, must be lived at all levels in order to be fully true, and it is true when it is sustainable, and it is sustainable when its means are its ends: peace.
The means start within ourselves and build outwards. The method for building our capacity for making peace is practice: mindfulness, meditation, concentration, and insight. This is the primary throughline of the talk: teaching sequential, cumulative methods for building true peace. Thus, Thầy first summarizes breath-based meditation; then how to “produce feelings of joy and happiness” by training in the practices of “letting go,” not getting caught in fixed ideas of happiness; then learning mindfulness in each present moment, our only true “appointment with life” and the wonders of life fully lived; then finding support in the Sangha, family, or congregation; then learning to work with our painful emotions—fear, anger, hatred, discrimination, vengefulness; then becoming aware of how we water these harmful seeds through our consumption of social discourse and media and how we can learn instead to water healing seeds; then developing the insight that sees our discriminative perceptions of ourselves and of our enemies, seeing our shared humanity with all who suffer violence; and finally arriving at the understanding and compassion that prepare us for “mindful communication, loving speech, and deep compassionate listening,” the peaceful means that make the sustainable ends of true peace.
Thầy provides historical examples of how trying to make peace by the means of war has not worked, not in Vietnam and not in the Middle East, where multiple wars have continued since the U.S. military responses to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and following. War has begat nothing but more war. Thầy urges the U.S. to “invest more in the United Nations to allow other countries to play a more important role in the United Nations, to make it into a real body, or organization for peace.”
Finally, a crucial throughline of this talk concerns our children, their exposure to violence in society, in media, and even in our homes and at schools, where parents and teachers struggle mightily to compensate for that exposure with care and learning that can equip them to make true peace in themselves. Living through war after war, shootings, violent media, etc., our society does violence not only to “our young men who die in the front, but we do violence to the children at home.” Realizing and acting on this is “very basic for peace.” “We don’t need billions and billions of dollars in order to do this kind of work” for our children, but, Thầy states, “I think spending eighty, ninety billions of dollars for fighting a war is doing an act of violence to our own children who need school, who need medical care.”
The talk ends with a story told by Sister Chân Không of how, during the Vietnam War, Thầy held fast to the commitment to “peace is the way” even after many of their co-workers were murdered by those who interpreted their peace work as siding with the enemy. The Sister concludes the evening with a song in French, the English translation of which is: The Smile.
This is a public talk given during the North American Tour in the year 2003. Thầy offered this talk at the Washington Hebrew Congregation, Washington D.C., the United States.