As a monk in Vietnam in 1966, he was invited by the Fellowship of Reconciliation to tour the US and speak out against the war. Before that, he was the founder, with Sister Phuong who is here, of the School of Youth for Social Service in Vietnam and also of Van Hanh Buddhist University in Saigon. He was the head of the Vietnamese Buddhist Peace Delegation to the Paris Peace Talks and was nominated by Martin Luther King for the Nobel Peace Prize. And he asked me not to say any of that. He wants to be described as a lazy monk.

[one sound of the bell.]

Good morning. I have been asked to talk about the practice of peace this morning. I think that the practice of peace should begin with the practitioner and in the practitioner. We used to say peace inside and peace outside. I believe both are the same thing. So when we practice peace, we practice for both inside and outside. Anyway, the notion of inside and outside is more in our mind, in our thought, than in reality.

The basic teaching of the Buddha on meditation is the practice of mindfulness. And anywhere you see the practice of mindfulness, you can be sure that Buddhism is there, even without the word Buddhism. To practice meditation is to live with awareness. To be aware of what is going on inside yourself and around you. The things that go on inside yourself have an influence on the things that are going on around yourself. And the opposite is also true.

The teaching of mindfulness is a very clear, precise, and practical teaching. In a sutra with the title The Sutra on the Awareness of Breathing, Anapanasati Sutta, the Buddha proposed sixteen ways of breathing in order to realize peace. He didn't say peace inside, just peace. I think that we are very lucky to be able to have that text today. There are two versions in Chinese, one version in Pali. And it would be interesting if you have the opportunity to make a comparative study of the three texts.

Conscious breathing is a wonderful means to restore yourself as a human being, a real human being. Because in our daily life we may be very dispersed. Some of us are here, some of us are elsewhere.