Beyond Non-Duality: The Path to Right View

Thầy begins this talk by relating a love story from the Imperial City of Hue about a couple married for nearly seventy years. After the death of the wife, the man loses all pleasure in life, believing his beloved is no longer accessible to him. Thầy then talks about how our feelings for someone we fell in love with can change over the years—so much so that they may seem like another person. He points out that this is both the same and not the same person we fell in love with.

Thầy relates another story of a couple married for ten years who had come to feel only suffering in their relationship. One day, the woman finds a LU biscuit box of love letters written by her husband. She reads them and feels again the love that she felt for him when they first met.

We all have seeds of love in our store consciousness, but sometimes they haven’t been watered for years. Whenever we water those seeds, our love is rekindled, and we can express it in loving speech. On the fifth day of mindfulness retreats, the miracle of reconciliation always happens, and this often takes place through loving speech.

We must be human to achieve buddhahood. There is a buddha in each of us, and in every buddha is a human being. In addition to our physical body, we have our cosmic-nature body. We also have a cosmic body, which is our dharma-realm body. The realm of dharma is the world of phenomena.

On first looking at phenomena, it appears to us that things exist outside of each other. This is called the explicate order: The son is not the father. But if we look deeply, we see the implicate order: The son is the father, and the father is in the son. All things inter-are. When we transcend perceived duality, we obtain right view.

This is the third talk in a series of twelve given during the What Happens When We Die, twenty-one-day retreat in the year 2014. Thầy offered this talk at the New Hamlet, Plum Village, France.