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Walking the Twelve Links: Mindful Steps as Living Sangha
This title has been reviewed for accuracy.
Thầy shares about the early phases of the original Sangha’s formation, specifically he recounted the event in which Śāriputra met Aśvajit. Śāriputra was very impressed by the monk, and asked him who was his teacher and whether he could receive a teaching from the Buddha right away. In response, Aśvajit mentioned the following four-line verse to him, and thanks to it Śāriputra glimpsed the Way:
“Everything manifests when conditions come together. Everything ceases to manifest when conditions are no longer together. And the great teacher Śākyamuni has already made this declaration.”
Śāriputra was also deeply impressed by how Aśvajit was walking: his way of walking was a living Dharma talk. This is a practice we can all train in: by investing all our body and mind in each step, we “print” peace on the Earth and are able to reconcile with ourselves, our ancestors, and all species - practicing the insight of the Avataṃsaka sutra as we walk. Then Śāriputra and his close friend, Maudgalyāyana, decided to leave the community they were practicing with in order to join the Buddha’s Sangha.
Building a Sangha requires patient, sensitive care—training in mindful breathing, walking, eating—so that each member may flourish and heal the world. Thầy highlights the fact that we cannot build a Sangha just by using our telephone, our fax, our email; we have to build our Sangha by the practice of breathing, of walking, and so on.
Thầy then examines the Buddha’s twelve links (Pratītyasamutpāda):
- delusion (avidyā)
- negative karma formations (saṃskāra)
- consciousness (vijñāna)
- name-and-form (nāmarūpa)
- six sense bases (ṣaḍāyatana)
- contact (sparśa)
- feeling (vedanā)
- craving (tṛṣṇā)
- grasping (upādāna)
- becoming (bhava)
- birth (jāti)
- aging-and-death (jarāmaraṇa)
Rather than seeing past, present, and future causes and effects, he invites us to study any single moment—thought, word, or deed—as a specimen in which all twelve links, both positive (wisdom, wholesome formations) and negative, are alive. Every action—mental, verbal, physical—carries immediate and long-term fruits; by recognizing “where we are going” here and now, we will understand our continuation.
This was the seventh talk in a series of thirteen given during The Hands of the Buddha, twenty-one-day retreat in the year 2002. Thay offered this talk at the Lower Hamlet, Plum Village, France.