Thầy introduces two new elements of true love — trust and reverence — alongside the Buddha’s traditional four: loving kindness (maitrī), compassion (karuṇā), joy (muditā), and equanimity (upekṣā). He suggests trust and reverence are already there within the four, but to make it more obvious we have to mention their names.

Thầy traces maitrī back to its root, mitra—friend—and points to how the wish to make someone happy can itself cause suffering—a father trying to make his son happy, only to watch him suffer more. For karuṇā, Thầy turns to the image of a doctor: sharing a patient’s suffering is not enough—a doctor has to be able to remove it. Muditā—the capacity to offer joy—comes down to something as small as opening a tap and watching the water flow, mindful of those elsewhere who walk kilometres each morning to fetch their own. And upekṣā—nondiscrimination—Thầy shows through the five fingers of a hand, none smaller or greater than the others.

From there Thầy moves into the Diamond Sutra’s four notions to release: self, human being, mortal being, and life span, through the lens of Interbeing. A flower, Thầy shows, is made only of non-flower elements; there is no separate self to be found in it, only, as he puts it, “I inter-am with you.” On the notion of “human being,” Thầy turns to the Vietnamese poet Nguyễn Công Trứ, who wished to return not as a person but as a pine tree singing on a mountainside, and to Mother Earth herself, giving birth to buddhas and bodhisattvas alike.

Then Thầy recalls his own ordination, and how his teacher told him he could not bow to the Buddha until he had first seen through the boundary between mortal and immortal.

Thầy closes by returning to trust and reverence—a love that includes trusting one’s own buddha nature, and reverence for the whole cosmos each person carries within.

This talk was given on a Day of Mindfulness during the spring retreat in 2012. Thầy offered this talk at the Lower Hamlet, Plum Village, France.