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Enjoying New Year's Poetry
It is now 3 o’clock in France, which means 9 o’clock in Vietnam, and only three more hours until we welcome the New Year’s Eve. We have worked a lot over the past year; now, at the end of the year, let us relax, let go of all worries, because preparations for Tet have been completed. There was a university professor who opposed his daughter’s ordination to the extent of threatening to disown her, but when he came to America to join activities with the Sangha in California and listened to the poem “Finding Each Other” – with music in both English and Vietnamese – he was no longer angry and understood that to ordain is not to abandon filial piety, but to manifest it in a much deeper way.
I have been searching for the World-Honored One since childhood, hearing that call as soon as I knew how to breathe, wandering through many perilous paths of life with pain and longing. I have passed through wilderness, the hell of Avici, deserts, and mystical mountains, yet I have always kept in my heart a miraculous faith: the World-Honored One and I are truly one. Yesterday afternoon, autumn leaves filled the path, and the moon appeared before the gate, announcing that you have arrived here, returning to me everything I thought I had lost. From that moment, everything in the garden—the flowers, the pebbles, the leaves—recognized me, manifesting the smile of the One who is neither born nor dies.
Touching the Earth with Bodhisattva Cooling Earth is a Dharma door to return to Mother Earth, helping us to let go of afflictions, to restore our health and peace. The Earth is the Pure Land in the present moment, the common mother of all beings. In the coming time, Plum Village will organize:
- a six-day retreat at the University of Nottingham with about 700 people
- a large Dharma talk in London with several thousand people
- an ordination ceremony for 26 young people from 12 countries, including three new novice brothers: Chân Trời Bảo Tích (India), Chân Trời Bảo Tạng (Indonesia), and Chân Trời Tự Tại (France).
