Thầy begins with the picture of lying in a warm, soft bed after a long day, with hours ahead to rest, and yet being unable to rest. He describes how body and mind can be carried off by a mental discourse that runs day and night. Thầy points to how mindfulness can show us that the conditions for rest are already there, and how to smile to the present moment when sleep doesn’t come.

Mindful breathing, walking, and drinking tea are offered not as hard work but as a matter of enjoyment, with freedom as the ground of healing. Thầy says we don’t need to listen to a few hundred more Dharma talks—only to go on practicing, with the Sangha inside us.

Through a cup of tea and the image of a wave that knows she is also water, Thầy explores touching the historical and the ultimate dimensions at the same time, and the eternity in a moment of which the Buddha speaks in the Avataṃsaka Sūtra.

The second part of the talk turns to a koan once shared by Zen and Pure Land practitioners: “Who is the person reciting the name of the Buddha?” Thầy recalls proposing, at a Zen temple in China, that the question’s focus shift to the Buddha, and telling an audience in Seoul something his translator could not translate: “If you think you already know who the Buddha is, you are wrong.” A Chinese story of two philosophers watching fish, and the insight that we are our mothers, our fathers, and our ancestors, open the question at the heart of the koan: Who am I? Thầy invites us to ask of every teaching—a sūtra, a koan, a Dharma talk—what it has to do with our own suffering.

This talk was given during the Fall Retreat in the year 2005. Thầy offered this talk at the New Hamlet, Plum Village.