The Way Out Is In / In the Footsteps of the Buddha (3/6) | The Heart of the Buddha’s Teachings (Episode #104)

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Dear friends, welcome to this third episode in our special series live from India, in the footsteps of the Buddha.

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I’m Jo Confino, a leadership coach and spiritual mentor.

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And I am Brother Phap Huu, a Zen Buddhist monk student of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in the Plum Village Tradition.

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And today, dear listeners, we are going to be talking about the three foundational initial teachings of the Buddha, which on their own could lead us to a lifetime of practice.

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The way out is in.

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Hello dear listeners, I am Jo Confino.

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And I am Brother Phap Huu.

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And I’m Shantum Seth.

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So, good morning. So before we officially start, I have to say I’m at big disadvantage because Brother Phap Huu has been getting up at probably 5 am, every morning for the last 25 years. And I haven’t. And so I’m feeling sort of like death warmed up. Although, the teaching today is partly about no birth, no death. So I can’t be death warmed up. I can just be tired. And I was also thinking that Shantum and Phap Huu look very, very fresh. And I feel rather sort of downtrodden. So if this, I’m glad this is just audio because if it was video, I would need a whole army of makeup people to, I have huge bags under my eyes. So audio is wonderful. So, brother, how are you today?

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Amazing.

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That feels so rough to say that. So before we get into the teachings of the Buddha, I just want to give everyone a sort of, just a quick flavor of what we’ve been doing, because India is not a place where you just talk about facts and figures. It’s a country that is so alive and full of color and texture and sound, a cacophony of sounds. So we’re just going to talk very briefly about what we’ve done the last couple of days. So we started off going for a second visit to Bodh Gaya, and listeners may remember I questioned Shantum last time is how can I go back because the first time felt so busy that I felt very difficult to connect to the essence of the fact that this is the place and under the tree where the Buddha reached enlightenment. It’s an extraordinary spot to be in and I hadn’t touched it and Shantum gave some very good advice and we went back. And I had this wonderful experience of connecting to this place, this moment, this history, these teachings, this extraordinary sort of turning of the wheel that has changed so many lives in human form and probably beyond. And what was extraordinary about it was it was just… had every sort of Buddhist lineage there. There were the Koreans and the Japanese and the Tibetans and the Vietnamese and others all in their different colored robes, all coming to pay homage to this place. So that was extraordinary. And then there was an afternoon which I unfortunately had to miss, which was, actually, Shantum, can you just tell us about this, briefly about where we went to next?

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So before the Buddha arrived at the tree, and of course there was no temple at the time, it was just a Bodhi tree by the riverbank, he’d been across the river in the village of Uruvela, and he’d just finished his ascetic period. He’d collapsed on the path and under Banyan tree, the young girl Sujata had offered him the rice and milk pudding. And what is nice going there was when we went to the village, we sat under a tree, which was a child of the Bodhi tree that Thay, Thich Nhat Hanh had planted himself in 2008. It’s doing very well. And we sat on that tree and we had kheer, the rice-and-milk pudding made by some young women from the village, about the age of Sujata, a little older, and all 60 of us sat under that tree and enjoyed that. And we walked through the rice fields. Well, in this season it’s the wheat fields, because it’s winter season. And we walked exactly where the path, the little bunds, the little levees between the fields, where the Buddha would have walked. And when the Buddha walked, he told his monks and his lay disciples, please leave enough space for a cow to pass through when each one of you walk, and we did, or tried to do that, of course some people want to take photographs, that is part of the sort of congestion, but otherwise it was just a beautiful trail through the wheat fields, and just looking through and the sun was setting, it was just angelic, really beautiful, and you could realize that the Buddha was walking with us, you know, it is exactly the same scene. The river was still flowing, The fields are green. People walking through the path is the same. And I think that’s why when Thich Nhat Hanh wrote this book, he just called it Old Path. And I looked up and I saw the White Clouds. I said, yeah, this is the Old Path White Clouds, and it’s exactly in the footsteps of Buddha.

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Great, thank you, Shantum. And Phap Huu, can you then just briefly describe where we went next, because we went to the cave where the Buddha meditated, well, when he was still an ascetic, and then Bamboo Grove. So give us a flavor for our readers who may never have come to India or these places.

00:06:17

I think it was, yesterday, so we traveled from Bodh Gaya to Rajgir, and this is… we arrived at the foot of the mountain. And as we arrived, we started to walk together collectively as a community up the mountain to where one of the caves still exists today, and we can come and sit in it, and this is where the Buddha, he sat, as he was determined to deepen his understanding and find a way in and a way through the cycle of birth and death. And each and every one of us had an opportunity to come into the cave and sit in there in silence. And what was special was just our own mind, because what a space can allow you to feel and touch. And everybody probably had their own experience in that cave. And for me, just sitting in that space, not sitting alone, with a community, which was also very special, I was really embodying and feeling the young Siddhartha and the determination that you had to have, because I can also realize I would be so afraid at night of just sitting in here alone. But then this is literally like feeling as you are in the womb of Mother Earth, because this is a mountain, it’s a cave, and you are inside, and you do feel this protection. I felt this protection when I was sitting in there. And what is beautiful is the nature and the view that you get to see from the mountain. I was looking at the rice field, the coconut trees, the paths, and the people that you can see. I was really embodying that the past and the future are very in the here and now. This is it. Like this is what the Buddha saw. These are the fields. These are the sounds of the birds. These are the blue sky, the clouds that we can feel, and it’s not an imaginary practice anymore, this is very present. And we sat also as a community outside of the cave, and we had a session of just recounting the history, and the main important part of that was to give gratitude to the Buddha for going through this extreme practice so that all of us, we don’t have to do that. That’s the important part right there. And it’s to understand that in that moment the Buddha realized that he had to go deeper in his own path because the teachers that he have found and studied under only allowed him to touch spaces of concentration, of deep bliss and deep separation from all of the material world, but the moment you open your eyes and you enter back into everyday life, it’s not an engaging practice and it doesn’t allow you to walk with that liberation, be with that liberation in everyday life. And so the young Gotama Siddhartha realized that I shall now search inside rather than just keep searching for teachers outside. And someone in our community asked me, do you think that the Buddha needed to go through this extreme practice in order to touch liberation? And that question is a very dangerous question, because the reality is yes. But then that yes may mean that each of us have to go to that extreme ascetic practice. And that extreme suffering. I was very careful in my response, and I said, and because of his liberation from that, we have to learn from that. And it doesn’t mean that we have to experience that same journey. And that’s very important because I have met thousands of people through Plum Village and through our retreats. And I always feel that there is this desire for deep suffering. And Thay always say, suffering is all around us, my friends. Hell is in the here and now. Just look in, the suffering is there. We collectively have to have the determination, as the Buddha did, not to deprive ourselves from food, from nutriment, but to understand the sources of our suffering, as well as the sources to the path of liberation.

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Thank you, brother. And Shantum, we then went yesterday to the Bamboo Grove, which is extraordinary because it actually is the first official Buddhist monastery in the world. Can you just give us a little bit of flavor for listeners about why is the Bamboo Grove important? What was important about the fact that the Buddha had a formal home for him and his monastics?

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As Brother Phap Huu was saying, we came down from the cave, it’s now called the Dungeshwari cave because many of the local Hindu people believe that there is a goddess Durga, but amongst the Buddhists we call it Pragya Bodhi, meaning before the awakening. The Tibetans called Mahakal, the great deity of time. We came down and we drove another two hours and came to the city of Rajgir. By this time the Buddha had already, I have to recap a bit because what happens is that the Buddha goes after this, after his awakening to Sarnath, gives his first teaching, comes back to Bodh Gaya and maybe we’ll touch on that later. And then he’s now traveling with a thousand monks from what is Uruvela village up to Rajgir. So when he arrives there, there’s a large congregation. And he’s with a teacher who’s well-known in the area. And Uruvela Kassapa, maybe we’ll come back to that later of what those teachings are. And the king comes to meet him and meet them. And the king is very happy to meet the Buddha. And he says that five of his wishes are now complete, and which is to be king, to be able to receive an awakened person, to be able to be visited by an awakened person, to be able to hear the teachings and then to be able to understand the teachings. He says, please come to my home and I would like to offer you a meal. At the end of the meal, he offers the Buddha this wonderful grove, the Bamboo grove what we call the Venu Van. Venu means bamboo and van is forest. He does this by pouring water over his hands from a golden vase saying, this land is given to you, to the sangha, what the Buddha has said. And the Buddha, of course, had left being a land holder. And he must have been in a little bit of a quandary. Shall I now become, you know, the holder of more land? But I think by this time he was touching the sangha energy of saying, this is being offered to the sangha, and we need a place to stay. And so the rain retreat was coming, so he accepts that with a sort of shake of the head, probably like the figure of eight like we do in India. And it is said that within one day, 60 huts are built, which really were just bamboo sticks put in the earth, put in ground, sort of bent over the top and then taj put on top. And that’s how the Buddha and all his attendants, all his disciples lived. And a lot of very, very important things happened in the Bamboo grove, including meeting Shariputra and Mahamaudgalyayana, who became his two primary disciples, meeting Amrapali, the great courtesan, and then people also from different communities and castes within Rajgir started coming and being attracted to his teachings. So it became important that there was a center, a place they could meet the Buddha. The Buddha wandered all through the year, but in the rain retreat he would pause. So you can imagine the Buddha just walking every few days, not spending more than two nights, three nights in one place. But then if anybody wanted to come and study with him, so I think the Buddha realized that is the tradition in India already. In the monsoon season, in the rainy season, you don’t go for your sort of wanderers, wandering. Because they were shramanas, as I said, they were wanderers. That also is a time which has now become tradition within the Buddha Dharma, where it becomes a time when you can stay with your preceptor, you can have the rain retreat. In Plum Village, we have the winter retreat because it’s more appropriate to the weather there, but you actually have deep practice and then you go out and teach. So you need your own practice space. And I think the Buddha realized all that, that we need a space for practice, for community building, and then we have this strength to, for him too, to be able to have that energy to teach. Because teaching also takes a lot of energy. And so the Bamboo grove is wonderful because you have the Karanda Tank where we know the Buddha would have bathed and the tank is still there, it’s a pond. We heard about the squirrels nesting place. We still have squirrels running around, the chipmunks. And then we have the peacocks dancing place. I didn’t see any peacocks yesterday, but peacocks do come there. So it’s the sort of place where you can imagine the Buddha walking with his community, and also with that realizing that we are so blessed, we are so blessed to have places like this where we can touch the historical Buddha. That we know, oh yeah, he had to have a shower or a bath every day. There it is. It’s not as if he just never bathed or he didn’t eat. He didn’t sleep under a shelter. And I think that sort of realization is very important that we know there was a man who did that. And he was always wandering and working out and so the Bamboo Grove becomes where he spent his second rain retreat, third rain retreat, fourth rain retreat. Later he comes back in the 17th, 20th, so this place becomes a home and Rajgir, just to mention, was the capital of the Magadha Kingdom. The Magadha Kingdom was one of the most powerful kingdoms of the time and King Bimbisara was the king at the time, and the king once he became attracted to the Buddhist teachings and the Buddha knew that. He knew he was from a royal family, he knew if he influenced the king it would have a sort of ripple effect to the whole society. And so I think he probably deliberately chose that. He also had a meeting with King Bimsara earlier when he was still a wanderer. And so he sort of picked up on that and went to visit. So I think that this idea of having a place in the most powerful city, capital city, it’s like the president of a country or the prime minister of a country saying, here, have some land right next to the White House to come and sit and meditate and help you awaken and help others awaken to a type of liberation and a path of awakening for the society.

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I think that having a place next to the White House for people to meditate would be an excellent idea at the moment. Brother Phap Huu, before we get into the teachings, as Shantum was saying, you know, the Buddha introduced the Rains Retreat, three months where everyone, all the monks would come back together to practice. And that is something that is still practiced in Plum Village. It’s normally from towards the end of October to towards the end of January. Can you just, for listeners who haven’t yet been to Plum Village, just how important the Rains Retreat is, you know, the fact is that also you are holding that every year as the Buddha held that space?

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This tradition originates from the Buddha Sangha. And one of Thay’s greatest joys through his life was the Rains Retreat. And the image we always have is birds coming home to their nest and being together. And throughout the years, the bird flies into many different directions and the birds have missions to sow seeds everywhere. Seeds of mindfulness, seeds of love and compassion, as well as to travel and to create otherness elsewhere. And this tradition also comes from the place of compassion, because during the rainy season, when the monastics, they would have to travel to, go village to village to ask for food. That means that they would walk over muddy fields or destroy some of the crops, as well as a lot of the insects would come out. So it’s also a compassionate act to really practice not killing, as well the health and the care of the order. Because during the rainy seasons, if you are poured down, you can get sick. So the Buddha is also a very intelligent teacher and is always reflecting the well-being of the community. And I think this is very important, because the Buddha is not just a teacher, he’s also a spiritual father, a spiritual parent, and his expansiveness of leadership is not just the Dharma, it’s very concrete, the well-being of his disciples, as well as the community. And originally, this practice is only reserved for the monastic. One of Thay’s pride, if we can say his pride or his joy, is that he extend the invitation for all the lay friends to come and practice three months with the monastics. And it’s a strong determination because in the Rains Retreat, we create an invisible boundary that you cannot leave the monastery grounds. At the beginning, everybody gets very excited. They’re like, yes, I get to practice, I can’t wait, I’ve been dreaming of this. After a month and a half, they realize how stuck they feel and their inner world starts to be louder and louder and they look for escapes. You can always leave the monastery. We don’t have like a gatekeeper or anything like that but the intention that we set is the boundary in our minds also. So it’s also a foundation of feeling as well as deep truths to ourself. What are the energies that are pushing us away from the here and now? What are that desires that come up? Because it’s the only time in most of the monastery, the consistency of a practice can be sustained because it’s a vow we make. We stay in the monastery for three whole months. And for Plum Village, we’re a little bit more fortunate because we have three hamlets, three monasteries. So we would travel twice a week in the monastery to be with one another, to hear the Dharma from a teacher, to practice Dharma sharing, to practice walking together, to practice eating together. So there’s more of a connection in a lot of different practices. It’s more solitude practice, but Plum Village, Plum Village tradition, and our teachers’ initiative in building the sangha is also about bringing us together in a more harmonious way so we can deepen our roots in the community. And that means we learn to be together in a more selfless way. And in Plum Village this is the time we all change roommates. So once a year we change roommates and we have this opportunity of room change. It’s a wonderful practice of letting go. You see how much stuff you have accumulated in one year. In principle, a monk and a nun only has three robes and a bow. And now we have five notebooks, a laptop, a smartphone, headphones, and you just see how we accumulate, as well as winter clothes, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s very beautiful because it’s also a moment of seeing who needs what, and we can let go. And it is a very shared garage sale. No transactions. It’s just, you need it, here it is. This is what I would like to let go, so the culture, there’s many layers to it. And one of the most important is that the elders are home. And the elders offer their presence, as well as the elder offer their teachings. It’s the most consistent time where we can deepen our understanding of the Dharma and the precept training. All of us, as practitioners, we always have to come back and re-engage from our foundational practices. So it’s almost like coming back to square one and we have an opening ceremony where we all come together and we just invite each other to remind ourselves why we are monastics. Sometimes the winds of the world sow the seeds of pride, sow the seeds of desire in us, desire of power, desire of fame, the desire of being seen, and so coming back into the home and just concentrating on the practice is also a mirror to oneself, asking the question why am I practicing? As well as some of us, we have extended ourselves so much in the nine months to recharge ourselves, to be reminded of the power of sangha, the power of community.

00:26:29

Thank you, brother. And I’m always impressed because we have a house just outside the boundary. I think it’s a hundred meters outside the boundaries. We have pancakes on offer and lattes and all sorts of goodies. And sometimes during the year, some monastics will come and visit for tea. And I always feel that all these flavors, smells, are wafting over the boundary line. And we have never had a monk who’s sort of sniffs the air and can’t help but cross the boundary and come to our house. So, it’s invisible, but it’s very solid. So let’s get on to the teachings, because as I said, the first three teachings of the Buddha are truly foundational and could exist in and of themselves without anything else. So the Buddha gave many, many teachings, but these first three were very important. So Brother Phap Huu, if you can just start off, and I know we’ve talked about it before, we have previous episodes on this, so we’ll have those in the show notes. But just briefly, just remind us of the Buddha’s first teaching.

00:27:35

After the Buddha has found his path and touched awakening, he was given the title Buddha, the one who is awakened, and the one who was walking the path of awakening and liberation. And so the Buddha from Bodh Gaya, the Bodhi Tree, traveled mindfully towards the Deer Park because he heard this is where his friends are now practicing. And he arrives and he offers the teaching of the Four Noble Truths, which is the understanding of suffering. We all have suffering. This is the shared experience of all of us. So when we speak about equanimity and the word equality in the teachings of the Buddha, this is what it means. We are all equal because we all suffer. None of us from different status, different society, different classes, whatever labels as a humanity we may have for one another, this is a truth that none of us could ignore and could escape. That is suffering. And the second noble truth is that there is a route to suffering. There is the causes and conditions. This is why we suffer. And the causes are birth, death, old age, impermanence, and then the ignorance that comes from that, and we will tap into that in this episode. And then once you see the roots and the causes of our suffering, we start to see the ending of suffering, the cessation of suffering. We see the source of it. That’s insight. That’s, our teacher also said, that’s a moment of liberation. There’s happiness. You see why you suffer. And the fourth noble truth is the path leading towards well-being, the path leading out of suffering. And this fourth noble truth is not just an insight now, it’s action. We now walk that path. We’re determined. We look at our daily lives and we make a vow. Because I suffer, I would like to now live in a different way. And here comes the second teaching in this is the Eight Noble Path, the Eightfold Path, and we begin with right view. The view that we always have to cultivate, and that is the view of non-discrimination, the view of interbeing, and the view of non-views is right view, that needs probably a whole retreat to understand. To support all that, we cultivate the practice of the three karmas. Our aspiration is to have right thinking, right speech, right action, the deeds we enact every day. And then after the three karmas, we have right livelihood. This supports the fourth noble truth, which is the path. We have to really meditate and look at our way of being, what is happiness for us, what does success mean for us? What is our legacy that we are leaving behind? That is our livelihood, our everyday action. And to support our livelihood we have to practice our diligence, right diligence. What are our attentions, what is our right attention we are giving to every day? We only have so much time on this planet. And there’s so much attention we can direct our energy towards. And our teacher used the language of what are the seeds we are watering every day? So the diligence of watering our consciousness and the seeds that becomes the action. And then comes the three trainings that is universal in all Dharma doors and Buddhist schools: right mindfulness, right concentration, and right view. So it comes back to the first noble truth. And right mindfulness is the foundation as in the light to shine to all of the other paths. And this is our bread and butter in the Plum Village tradition. And mindfulness here is not just sitting on a cushion. It is not just walking in silence. It has to be applied with ethics, with flexibility, with understanding culturally, environmentally. Groups of people we are with. Mindfulness is to show us skillful means as well as allowing us to also be a little bit more expansive when needed, to be more disciplined when needed. And so in the Rains Retreat, we come back to discipline. We, our mindfulness inspectors that we have in every hamlet becomes more attentive and more engaged. If a monk or a nun misses a sitting, they would note it down and ask, my dear, were you busy today? And just that question alone touches something in each and every one of us. We may touch shame, we may touch our laziness that we have allowed to push us away from the path of practice. So mindfulness is the foundation of the energy that helps shine the light to the other eight noble path. That is the set of the first teaching that the Buddha offered to his community. And we also have to know that in this moment, when the Buddha was teaching this discourse, this is when the sangha was formally created, his first set of students. And in this set of student, the Buddha himself also told the monks that not only should I be the one ordaining those who have the heart to practice, any of you, if you encounter a person who wants to become a student, you have the right to ordain them. And it was in this moment also in Old Path White Cloud where the ceremony was created. And it very simple back then. You just have to recite, I take refuge in the Buddha, the one who shows me the way in this life. I take refuge in the Dharma, the teachings that allows us to walk the path of liberation, I take refuge in the sangha, the community that lives in harmony and awareness, and you are ordained. And fast forward now, we have a lot of precepts, the trainings of the monastics that is our backbone of the monastic order. But in the original sangha there wasn’t yet any precepts. And only by the monastics mistakes that they would make in their lives that the precepts were added. And I wanna share this because that’s how organic and alive the community was. As the community had their shortcomings, the Buddha would have to set rules. So it is a very direct experience tradition. It’s not from the moment the Buddha was enlightened, these are the laws. Later on, the precepts, the Vinaya, the laws of the order came into place.

00:35:55

Thank you, brother. And for listeners, when Phap Huu talks about the mindfulness inspector, when I first heard that, I thought, it’s like a policeman in uniform patrolling the monastery and arresting people and throwing them in jail, but they are very compassionate. Shantum, can you just give us some context for this teaching? So, you know, now we hear the teaching and it’s like, yeah, that sounds pretty good. That sounds true. But at the time, you know, and this comes up time and time, the Buddha was a revolutionary. So in what sense was this teaching different from anything else that any of these other gurus or wanderers were talking about. What made this a foundational practice that has lasted now 2600 years that has really, that we feel deep truth in, but at that time many had not heard this?

00:36:57

The medical profession had been developing at that time, and we have to look at the Buddha a little bit like a doctor. We have to looked at suffering as that disease, that universal disease. And you might think it’s very obvious that we all suffer, we all get angry, we all are separated from sometimes the ones we love. We have sickness, old age. But it wasn’t a universal idea. Some people said, this life is bliss, such as ananda. So when we start with the primacy of suffering, that in itself is a revolutionary moment. And as somebody who really is imbued with the Buddha’s teachings, I have experienced that and I feel that all human beings experience suffering. And I think that in itself is revolutionary, saying this is where it starts. Because a lot of it is about escaping from the present, escaping from this world. Most teachings are around something which will come hereafter. And the Buddha is saying, come back to now, feel, understand your mind, see that your mind is creating your reality. So the first thing I would say is revolutionary is that the primacy of suffering.

00:38:12

The way out is in.

00:38:16

He hadn’t gone in yet. He just only touched the experience. Then he said, okay, now like a medical doctor would say, is there a cause for that? And that too is quite interesting because that’s when he says, as Brother Phap Huu was saying, is the way you view things. Now, some people might say it’s about desire, clinging, these are words we use, but really it’s the deep misunderstanding that things are permanent. And that is something where he was also revolutionary because the common thinking at that time was there was an entity, like a soul, which had intrinsic existence. When he was in the cave, practicing, and he tried to come in touch with that Atman, the soul, he found there was nothing like that. Everything was impermanent, everything had fluidity, his form or his feelings or his mental formations or his consciousness or his perceptions. So there was nothing which had intrinsic entity. So that in itself, he realized, was the deep cause, the right view, the way of looking at things. So the cause was actually, yeah, the way we understand things, the ways we live our lives. So the first noble truth, as they call it, was duhkha. The second was samudaya, which is the cause. And then he has the third which is called nirodha. And that is the sort of medicine, or saying there is a medicine, not the medicine, but there is the medicine. And that’s the good news of Buddhism. And Thay always emphasized that. He said, you know, people talk about Buddhism being abut suffering. He says, no, it’s the third noble truth. It is about the releasing of suffering and transforming of suffering into joy and happiness. That’s very important. You don’t get stuck in the suffering. That’s why the first noble truth is a noble truth, because you use the suffering as a compost for happiness. And then the medicine is the fourth. And then this combination of practice and ethics. And then that develops into a sort of wisdom which then goes around in a circle again. And I remember a calligraphy, which I have at home, which Thay did in Germany many years ago, and luckily at that time he used to use flip charts. So luckily I took that paper off. And he’s done it as a circle, all the eightfold path, and I liked his spelling of livelihood, L-I-V-E-L-Y H-O-O-D. And so that’s, I would say, the sort of base of where this comes from. And then why other teachers were attracted to him but also had a lot of clashes with him. It wasn’t that everyone said, yeah, this is the right path. And even till today, there are many, many traditions. Not everyone is a Buddhist. And in fact, Thay himself said something like, we are Buddhists, but Buddhists full of non-Buddhist elements. It’s true, I’ve been brought up or born in a Hindu family. I have friends who are from different faiths, from Christian, Muslim faiths. So they all interplay into my life. But what I found is the part the Buddha gave has really helped me touch happiness and alleviate my suffering in many, many ways. So I would say that would be part of the context of the Buddha’s teaching. This doctor, the type of framework that he makes, and then it becomes a universal teaching that exists till now. And that’s why we’re sitting around listening to these teachings.

00:42:01

Can I now say the way out is in?

00:42:05

Yes.

00:42:08

It’s all about skillful means. Timing is everything.

00:42:44

Thank you, Shantum. So, Brother Phap Huu, let’s go to the second teaching, so we’ve got this sort of now foundational understanding of the Four Noble Truths. Where did the Buddha take us to from there?

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In his deep looking, as Shantum has talked about, about the liberation from the concept of the soul. And I just want to emphasize that it’s not just 2600 years ago, it’s still very 2026. Just this summer retreat in 2025, somebody came in our summer retreat and had an amazing experience. And before she left, she came to me and she said, brother, do you believe Thay’s soul is here? And I didn’t dare say yes or no. My answer would be no, if I was to be very frankly and directly, because that contradicts our Dharma. And it’s about skillful means, because for many, there is something that we yet are not ready to accept our emptiness, which is the truth. And this is that teaching that we cannot be by ourself, we can only co-exist. This is because that is. This arises because of all of these conditions that are there, and we will cease to exist when the conditions are not there anymore. So we are not a creation. We are a manifestation, and this is that core understanding of liberation, the freedom that touches us from the cycle of birth and death. And this is just an insight. And for all of us to feel it, we have to practice and we have touch the truth of impermanence, as well as when we talk about impermanent, we only think about things that are dying, things that disappearing. But in impermanance, that’s where birth is also possible. That’s where insight is possible. That’s how we can change. If I was this frail and vulnerable yesterday, thanks to the practice and thanks to the nature of impermanence, I can be solid and stable tomorrow. So when we talk about impermanence, I invite all of us to also open a space in our consciousness to see, thanks to impermanence, all the potentials of freedom, of liberation, of joy and happiness as possible. I’m sure many of us when we think of impermanence, we think our death. We think about letting go, we think about the disappearing of things, and we go very negative. And the truth of impermanence, it is the foundation of manifestation also. So in this insight and in this teaching, Siddhartha touched the reality that life and death are just a game of hide and seek. It is just labels. We… But where did we, where were we before we were born? Thay always asks us this question also. And if you reflect on it, you already existed. Half of it in your mother, half of it in your father, and then all the conditions that supported them. So we are just this lineage, this invisible little seed that was already in the manifestation of the whole cosmos. And when all the conditions come together, we have the opportunity to manifest. And understanding this, we also see the miracle of life. And we see that we are made of so many non-us elements. And this is the freedom that we can be free. This insight here is also the key to acceptance, the key to being at home in our own self. So in the journey of life, when we get older, we don’t dwell in how we were yesterday. Oh, I wish I was like that. Oh, I was so healthy back then. But when the conditions are not there anymore, we get ill. And the understanding that this is a part of the journey, this is a part of life and this can be a teaching moment. And how do we accept our illness? How do we except our cancer, our declining of health? And this is also the co-arising of all the conditions to be. So when we have these acceptance, we are free. It doesn’t mean we don’t get sick anymore, but we are from the striving and the fighting of reality. And this is where that liberation comes into action. And I can share this because I had the greatest privilege of journeying with Thay after his stroke. I witnessed him in pain. I witness him trying to find his voice again, because he couldn’t speak after the stroke. I witnessed him looking at his paralyzed hand with agony, with pain. His right hand was the hand that he wrote all the calligraphies and all of the poems and all the books that we have read. And I’ve witnessed him accept it. There was a day when we were exercising through different physiotherapy to see if he can gain any muscle movements. He looked at it and he shook his head. And then he had a smile. And I was watching him just meditating on his hand. And that smile was the smile in my interpretation, of acceptance. And after he smiled, he took his right hand and he placed it on his left cheek where he can feel. And so tenderly, he uses his left hand and he just massages his hand. And it was such a profound moment for all of us, his attendance, to just witness that, that there is no more superpower that we imagine in spiritual practices. But the superpower is acceptance, and being with all the conditions in the present moment. You cannot escape the present moments. You can escape it by being in our suffering and our wishful thinking. But once you arrive in the very here and now, and you embrace these realities, you are free. Thay accepted his condition, he knew that my way of teaching now is not through speech. My way of teach is just being, it’s just presence. And he would come every day to sit in meditation with us, we would push him in the wheelchair. And I was going through a very difficult time also in that moment. I was having my own struggle. A teacher’s suffering had an impact on me. I saw in him, which I didn’t have at that moment, was his bodhicitta. Bodhicitta is the energy of awakening, of the beginner’s mind. And I saw that even at 89 years old, Thay was so eager to be with the sangha. After coming back from our journey in the hospitals, the first thing Thay wanted to do was sit with the sangha. And I remember pushing him into the meditation hall, and the monastic and the community, we sit in meditation, we sit facing the walls, and I was pushing him down the middle aisle, and I also motioned for him to sit facing the wall, as all of us, we are practicing. But Thay motioned me to turn his wheelchair so that he can look at the community. And in that moment, there was this joy that I can feel from him as this community was sitting in silence. And Thay was just watching the sangha sit. And he had the smile. These are my continuation. I’m free. If I’m here, beautiful, great, but I have no more fear because this is my legacy. And I was like so like in my own thinking of what should I do with my life now? Thay is not well. Am I ready, are we ready to be without Thay? And I was in this cycle of fear and doubt. And just seeing his smile just gave me so much strength. I was like, we’re in this together. The river of the sangha is here. We’re not perfect and we’re never gonna be perfect. We all have our difficulties but we’re sitting together collectively. How beautiful is that? I borrow Thay’s joy and I borrow his smile and I did feel the smile come up in my face. I was like, if someone who just came out of the gate of death is smiling now, all of us who are alive and well, let us offer that smile. And so, this direct experience I had with Thay allowed me to touch deeper the co-arising of realities. And this is, in a nutshell, interbeing and wisdom. And I love it when Thay says it. He goes, what is the Buddha-Dharma? This is because that is. This is not because that it not, period. Stop looking. Stop searching. If you ever ask Thay a question, Thay, what happens when I die? Thay was like, I haven’t died yet, I don’t know. But what I can tell you is what happens when we are very much alive. Let’s come back to that present moment, to that insight. And this teaching, as we have heard what Shantum just spoke about, in all culture, there is this belief to look for a pill, a drink, a fountain of eternal youth, of eternal life. In also our culture in Southeast Asia, many people would go on journeys to look for this miracle pill, this miracle plant, this miracle fountain, so that we can live forever. And this, the Buddha touched the reality of truth, and that truth liberates us. And that truth is that other shore over there. And I think that most of us, we’re so lucky, actually, to hear this teaching. And there’s many rafts that guides us to this understanding. The podcast is one of the rafts. The many traditions are the raft. The many retreats are the raft. But our ignorance is deeper. Sometimes we don’t want to believe in that. We’re not ready to touch that truth because it is also ancestral. It is our culture that have also given us this belief that there is much more than the present moment. In the Buddhist teachings, in the many different schools, we have the Pure Land tradition in the Vietnamese lineage of Buddhism. And that tradition manifested from adaptation and skillful means. So because so many people believe that in the afterlife there is another realm that we will go to, so the monastic were very skillful to blend into the culture. You don’t want to go actually, you guys, know what? That’s all rubbish. Let me give you the truth. Then suddenly, the wall is built. What are you talking about? We won’t follow you. So the monastics were very skillful. There is a Pure Land, there is a Buddha land. And for us to enter into that space, we have to review and reconduct our way of being, be kinder, invoke the names of the Buddha, to water the seed of compassion in you. The more compassionate you are in this life, for sure those doors will be open for you. Unfortunately, that has also become the idea of that’s the afterlife. But that was the door to the present moment, actually. And so Thay, as a tradition, people also ask us, Thay do we have Pure Land Buddhism in the Plum Village tradition? Thay said, absolutely, but it’s not in the afterlife, it is in the very here and now. And Thay also helps our Christian friends. He said, dear friends, the Kingdom of Heaven that you have been searching for and that you are longing for, it’s here. Look at the flowers, listen to the sound of the birds, look at your loved ones. They belong in the Kingdom of Heaven. It is not after you die, it is in the very here and now. And hell? It’s not after your die. Look at all the suffering. That is present, the suffering in our hearts, the suffering around us, that hell is in the here and now also. So these teachings, why they are like thunderstorm is because it cuts through the illusions that we cling into the soul after life and so on and so forth. And it is very strong, it’s striking. Thay says, Zen is like a stick sometimes. It hits you, and it should awake you. And many of us, we need to be hit every day, but that hitting is not physical. That hitting is to come back and to meditate and to touch the reality of life.