Signlessness and the Eight Bodies of the Practitioner

Thầy begins this talk by asking members of the audience how they generate joy and happiness and to share those methods with each other and with him. He also asks how they handle painful feelings. He then speaks about signlessness, which is a way of seeing the world as it truly is—not in the forms we usually perceive—using the example of a cloud in the Dharma hall.

Thầy next speaks about the first of our eight bodies—the physical body—and how we need our body to be inhabited by our mind for us to be truly alive. The next body is the Dharma body, which is our spiritual practice. The Buddha had a physical body and a Dharma body.

Thầy recounts the story of Vikkali, and the importance of recognizing the Dharma body and not being attached to the physical body. We also have another body, the Sangha body. The Buddha recognized the necessity of building a Sangha. Thầy tells the story of his meeting with Dr. Martin Luther King and how they agreed that Sangha, the beloved community, is essential to bring peace to the world. Sangha is what nourishes us and supports our practice.

The Sangha is a continuation of the Buddha, and each of us has buddha-nature. We also have a body that’s outside our physical body. Thầy relates a story in the Lotus Sutra about people hearing a voice coming from a stūpa. The Lotus Sutra teaches that anyone who has a human body can become a buddha. The people ask the Buddha to open the door of the stūpa so they can see the eternal Buddha. He does this by summoning all his bodies, which reside in the cosmos. The people witness tens of thousands of the Buddha’s transformation bodies. We, too, have many bodies. Our nature is non-local, and that means we can experience our continuation body now. Through our practice, we can assure that we have a beautiful continuation body.

Our human body contains the entire cosmos. When we touch the phenomenal world deeply, we touch the true nature of the cosmos, which is absolute freedom.

This is the second talk in a series of twelve given during the What Happens When We Die, twenty-one-day retreat in the year 2014. Thầy offered this talk at the Upper Hamlet, Plum Village, France.