Thầy teaches Touching the Earth as yoga—the practice of connecting, of reunifying. Touching the Earth is sometimes seen as devotion: someone who is lost turns to another for protection and support. In Plum Village, it has become a practice of insight, touching our nature of nonself and interbeing, and that insight can free us from fear, loneliness, and despair.

Thầy describes the practice itself: joining the palms with mind, heart, and body together, then the five limbs touching the earth in an act of surrender, completely open. Seeing that our talents come from our ancestors and that we are made of the whole cosmos, we can let go of the complexes of superiority, inferiority, and even equality. “You are not a lotus flower, you are a chrysanthemum. But you are a wonder.”

From the person sitting opposite us on the subway to the way we pray, Thầy shows how we may touch only our notions rather than reality. He shares the Buddha’s words about something that has no beginning and no end, offers a correction to Paul Tillich’s “ground of being,” and asks why we spend so much time discussing whether God exists. A wave that realizes she is water does not need to turn to the left and to the right to seek for water.

Thầy speaks of two levels of Touching the Earth: devotion, which can bring relief, and the insight that the one who bows and the one who is bowed to are both empty. He reflects on Śāriputra, our eldest brother in the Dharma, and on Mañjuśrī, who need not be a historical person to be very real. He tells newly ordained monastics how to let people pay respect to the Three Jewels through them. He also speaks of the Asian dream of great togetherness, and of the qualities we now bow to as deities—liberty, great understanding, great compassion, love—to be touched as reality, not as concept.

In closing, Thầy responds to a question from a mother, showing how we can touch a loved one in the here and the now.

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