The Ground of Mind and Matter

Thầy shares, “If you have been in hell, then you have the capacity to recognize paradise.” Suffering, he says, is the condition for recognizing the Kingdom of God, the Pure Land of the Buddha, in the here and the now. Thầy invites us to practice with our body as well as our mind. In walking meditation, we bring our mind down to the soles of our feet and turn on every cell with the energy of mindfulness, enjoying each step like a piece of chocolate, with no cholesterol.

Sitting is the same. Thầy describes the cells of the body coming into harmony and singing in unison, and calls this state of concentration the foundation of enlightenment. He tells how he once fought sleepiness in sitting meditation, and what he found instead: when our sitting becomes a blessing, we stay awake without any struggle, as we do during a good Dharma talk. Drawing on the Sutra of Mindful Breathing, he shows how stopping and relaxing allow body and mind to heal by themselves, and names the joy of the practice as the daily food of Zen.

The second part of the talk turns to neuroscience. How can the brain, something objective, give rise to consciousness, something subjective? Thầy answers from the Buddhist teaching on perception: perceiver and perceived arise together, and the brain is first of all an object of our perception—just as each of us carries our own Paris. Borrowing a coin, with its head, its tail, and its metal, he points to the ground from which both body and mind manifest.

Thầy then turns to the first of five dimensions of reality, matter, and shows how the Buddhist teachings already blur the line between matter and energy: the images that follow us like a ghost, the precept body received at ordination, the energy of our mental constructions, and the freedom born of concentration. Along the way, he reminds us that analysis in Buddhism is only for the sake of the practice, and draws on David Bohm’s implicate order and the “wavicle” of modern physics.

The talk closes where it began: our body is an aspect of our consciousness, so the practice has to involve the body.

This talk is from a series given during the Ninety-Day Rains Retreat in the year 2004/2005. Thầy offered this talk at the Upper Hamlet, Plum Village, France.