Thầy teaches that Buddhism is practical, not theory: the Buddha taught suffering and the transformation of suffering, and a true practitioner learns first how to handle a painful feeling and how to generate joy. Thầy tells of the handful of leaves the Buddha held up to his monks, and of the man struck by an arrow with poison who wants to know who shot it.

Thầy then offers an insight that heals rather than speculates: interbeing. A sheet of paper cannot be by itself alone, and its left side cannot be without its right. Happiness, too, cannot be without suffering, just as lotus flowers cannot grow on marble. This gives Thầy his own definition: “The Kingdom of God is a place where people know how to make good use of suffering in order to create understanding, compassion, and love.”

Thầy explores how love is made of understanding, with the story of a young man who chose the one friend who understood him. Understanding our own suffering brings relief right away and opens the way to understanding others. Looking at the Four Noble Truths through the example of depression, Thầy shares the Buddha’s teaching that nothing can survive without food. Instead of running away through consumption, we can come home with the energy of mindfulness and hold our suffering like a mother holding her baby, supported by the Sangha like a drop of water in a river.

Thầy points to salvation by insight rather than by changing our partner or our surroundings: the father is in the son, and a person who makes us suffer needs help, not punishment.

With the fifth to the eighth exercises of mindful breathing, Thầy shows how to generate joy from the conditions of happiness we already have. He shares how the School of Youth for Social Service rebuilt a bombed village again and again so that people would not fall into despair, and what he told students who asked whether the war would ever end. He also offers the practice of selective watering, the Buddha’s image of the second arrow, and breathing deeply with the abdomen to calm a strong emotion, which he says should be taught in families and schools.

Thầy closes by reminding us that Buddhism is first of all a practice: as we transform and heal, we can help others to transform and heal.

This talk is from a series given during the Fall Retreat in the year 2012. Thầy offered this talk at the Lower Hamlet, Plum Village, France.