Thầy speaks of the beauty of Mother Earth as a bell of mindfulness. Every flower is her smile, every fruit her gift. Yet many of us cannot hear her, pulled away by the past, the future, and a radio of thinking that never stops. Silence, Thầy says, is the basic condition for hearing her call and responding that we are here and free.

Through mindful breathing, the noises within fall away and there is the emptiness of sound, very powerful, very eloquent. Thầy recalls a lunch on the grass in the Upper Hamlet during the French retreat just ended. When the bell was invited, everyone stopped thinking together, and a collective noble silence arose: a thundering silence against which the wind and the birds could be heard very clearly.

Silence, Thầy says, is also a kind of sound. He describes the frozen Niagara Falls, and a creek in Thailand where he imagined the trees hearing silence for the first time if the water stopped: the sound of no sound.

Turning to Avalokiteśvara, the one who listens deeply to the sounds of the world, Thầy explores the five kinds of sound named in the Lotus Sutra: the sound of wonders, the sound of the one who observes the world, the Brahma sound, the sound of the rising tide, and the sound that transcends all worldly sounds. Along the way he touches on oṃ, the Gospel and the big bang, the Buddhist logic showing that sound is impermanent, and the qualities of the Buddha’s voice in the Ratnakūṭa Sūtra, first of all that it is easy to understand.

With the noise stilled, the deepest call of our heart can be heard. Beyond our daily concerns for material and affective comfort lies an ultimate concern: who are we, and what do we want to do with our life? Looking deeply, we see that we are a continuation of our ancestors, children of the Earth and the sun, made of the stars. Thầy then offers the four nutriments, with volition as our deepest desire, and the Fifth Mindfulness Training as the practice of mindful consumption.

He concludes with a poem by a Vietnamese poet: “Spring has come. All the flowers are trying to open. How about your heart? Why don’t you let your heart open like the flowers, and be happy right here and right now?”

This talk was offered during the Spring Retreat in the year 2014. Thầy offered this talk at the New Hamlet, Plum Village, France.