Thầy teaches that happiness, the Kingdom of God, and the Pure Land of the Buddha are found in the present moment, and that this is also where healing begins for those who were hurt as children. He starts from the Gospel story of the farmer who gives up all his land to keep the small field with the treasure, and from the Buddha’s words to a group of businessmen: it is possible to live happily right in the present moment. A retreatant’s suggestion becomes a calligraphy: “You have enough.”

For those who have suffered abuse, Thầy offers practices for healing. The first is to come back to the present moment, with the support of a Sangha, and see that the situation now is safe. The second is the insight of the Heart Sutra that defilement and immaculation are notions of the mind; like the mud and the lotus, they inter-are, and the mud can be transformed. The third is a Great Vow to protect children and young people. A fourth practice, for everyone, is mindful consumption, along with mindful production.

Thầy then turns to how easily the Buddha’s teaching can be misunderstood, recalling the Buddha’s image of the right and the wrong way to catch a snake. With the image of a lotus pond, he explains that the First Noble Truth does not mean there is only mud: the Third Noble Truth confirms that well-being is there too. The path begins with Right View, and enlightenment, he says, is a product of the human being; every one of us has its seed.

Answering a question about the equality complex, Thầy draws on the physicist David Bohm’s implicate order and on his own two hands. The right hand, which has written nearly all his poems, feels no superiority, and when the hammer strikes a finger, it simply takes care of the left hand. He invites students of Buddhism and scientists to work together.

The talk closes with the first twelve exercises of the Sutra on Mindful Breathing, which Thầy says go perfectly with the Noble Eightfold Path. He ends on concentration, which can free us from a mental formation like despair or anger, and names the Three Doors of Liberation.

This is the tenth talk in a series of thirteen given during The Path of the Buddha, the Twenty-One-Day Retreat in the year 2009. Thầy offered this talk at the New Hamlet, Plum Village, France.