The Way Out Is In / The Eight Realizations of Great Beings – Part One (Episode #82)

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Hello, dear friends, welcome to this latest episode of the podcast series The Way Out Is In.

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I am Jo Confino, working at the intersection of personal transformation and systems evolution.

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And I’m 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’re going to do what Phap Huu described as getting nerdy, so we are going to be looking at a sutra that is core to Buddhist philosophy and it’s called the Eight Realizations of Great Beings. And Thich Nhat Hanh says this is pretty important and he says if we actually study this and put it into practice we will put an end to countless misunderstandings, difficulties, and progress towards enlightenment, leaving behind the world of birth and death, dwelling forever in peace. So no small promise here, so let’s get going.

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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’m Brother Phap Huu.

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And today, this is a very special day because who do we have in the house?

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Ta daaa.

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Sister True Dedication! And we’re always trying to get Sister True Dedication to jump into our net and join us. And it’s difficult to get her and the last time she was on I said to her, sister, what would encourage you to come back again? And she had a very simple answer. She said coffee. And as a result of this going out there have been a number of lay practitioners who come to Plum Village and in their suitcases rather than putting clothes in they’ve been bringing bales of coffee for Sister True Dedication. Sister, is this true or not true?

00:02:19

It is true. And I received some amazing offerings of coffee both in Vietnam and Asia when we were there in January, and then here, in Plum Village. And each time it comes with a big smile and a hug from a wonderful listener. So thank you very much.

00:02:37

So I know you’re not attached to anything, sister, but if we were to encourage you to come back again, would your answers be the same?

00:02:46

That I would love more coffee?

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So all our thousand listeners, I think sister may end up being a coffee merchant.

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I am a bit of a dealer in the monastery, it’s true. Sometimes the sisters, you know, are moderating the amount of coffee available, but then I whisper to people, you know, just come, just come, and find me, I can make you some.

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We all know where to go when we’re sort of hung over and we need something to bring us into life. So today, as I mentioned, we’re going to be talking about the sutra on the Eight Realizations of Great Beings. And this was translated by Thich Nhat Hanh. And I’m just going to start off by reading the end bit because I think this just gives a sense of what might be on offer. And then we’re going to sort of ask Sister True Dedication just to give us a sort of context for where all this came from. And then we will, as usual, dive in and get into trouble. So let me just read what Thay said. And Thay means teacher in Vietnamese and is how Thich Nhat Hanh is referred to. These eight realizations of the discoveries of great beings, buddhas and bodhisattvas who have practiced diligently the way of understanding and love they have sailed the dharmakaya boat to the shore of nirvana and have then returned to the ordinary world free of the five sensual desires, their minds and hearts directed towards the noble way. Using these eight realizations they help all beings recognize the suffering in the world. If disciples of the Buddha recite and meditate on these eight realizations they will put an end to countless misunderstandings and difficulties and progress towards enlightenment, leaving behind the world of birth and death, dwelling forever in peace. So Brother Phap Huu, that’s quite some offer there.

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Truly is.

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So, sister, Phap Huu has a few words today.

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Today, today I’m here to listen and learn.

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Yeah, both of us. When we thought we’re doing this as a topic we thought Sister True Dedication, we’ve got to get her in. So sister, we’re relying on you today to make us look good. So I hope you’re on top form, I hope you had a lot of coffee today. So sister, to start off with let’s just look at what is the context? I mean because it’s the sutra of eight realizations of great beings. Where did this appear from? Was it written by, was it talked about by the Buddha directly or is it the result of many teachings?

00:05:39

Very excellent question. So well I think so important when we’re kind of studying things we want to have a sense of where this emerged from. So this particular text emerged in the PalI Canon, so the oldest canon. And then was translated into Chinese in about the year 140, 160 in the common era. So this is a text that is I mean almost 2 000 years old when we’re working from these Chinese translations. And this text is interesting because it is one of the first texts to be translated as Buddhism was making its way east. So the text itself is kind of telling a story like the movement of many texts does, it’s telling the story of the emergence of Buddhism along the Silk Road. And we can speak here of the Silk Road across land that went sort of northwest out of India through central Asia and then north through the north land route into China so along the north Silk Road. But also many of these texts were moving along the maritime Silk Road, so going through the boats, across the seas and up and round to Vietnam, to China, through the oceans. So this particular text it’s extraordinary because of the person who was in sort of early China, in the year, whether it’s somewhere around the year 140, translating this into Chinese from the Pali, that monk was not a Chinese monk, that monk was a monk from what is sort of called the Parthian kingdom which is modern day Iran and Iraq. The monk that was translating this was born about 30 miles outside of what’s today Baghdad and had himself traveled along the Silk Road to be part of this effort of bringing the wisdom, the insights, the practices and teachings of Buddhism into China. And what’s the sort of incredible kingdoms and sort of merchant networks all involved in this great transmission of Buddhism along the Silk Road and as I was preparing for this this morning, it was just extraordinary to discover that at the sort of turn of the common era, so like the year 00, in Kabul, there was like 40 temples and monasteries, Buddhist temples and monasteries. So we’ve got a sense that they’re in Central Asia, where all the ‘stans’ are, you know, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and of course Afghanistan and Pakistan, there was a flourishing of Buddhism there in central Asia. And that is what is traveling along the Silk Road to arrive in China. Like sometimes you might think of Buddhism as a Chinese spiritual tradition, but it had its journey out of India and along both the land and maritime silk roads to kind of reach it, and this was one of the very first sutras to be translated into Chinese. And so from that we know it’s a super important sutra.

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Wow, brother, someone’s done their homework.

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Yes, we have selected the right companion for this podcast. I’m having a huge smile because like this is amazing just listening to the history of it.

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Yeah, thank you, thank you, sister. We’re very appreciative actually.

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And can I say one more thing about the sutra, just to say like there’s always a context to why a particular teaching is given, and this sutra emerged from, well, legend has it, tradition has it, a question put to the Buddha, which is we know the monastics they need to live in harmony with one another, follow the six harmonies, practice non-discrimination and absolute generosity. But what about householders? What about normal people? How should they practice? And that is the framing before this sutra then begins and then this sutra is the response to that question. How do we, as normal people in the world, face suffering, oppression, discrimination, and sort of all the worldliness of the world, everything that’s kind of going wrong and is struggling and difficult? And this, this sutra, is the response to that, drawing on the monastic tradition, drawing on the idea of awakened beings or bodhisattvas, how can we draw from that and learn to see how we can respond to the struggles and trials of the reality of life in the world.

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Great. And that is very much in the tradition of Plum Village, which is actually we’re not trying to help people to go and live in a monastery up in the mountains but we’re saying actually how can people live their life in this generation in a way that can help people deal with their suffering and find greater joy. So actually we should be looking through this sutra rather with that in mind, what what does it mean for everyday life. So anything else Phap Huu? Is anything you want to just chime in with before we sort of dive in?

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No.

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Great, you see, Phap Huu’s being the most zen-like I’ve ever known him. So this is wonderful. Let’s see if he says a bit more later…

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We’ve got a guest today, Jo.

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Oh that’s true. Sorry. Okay, so I’m going to start by reading out the first realization which is the awareness that the world is impermanent. So I’m going to read it and interestingly the first line is Political regimes are subject to fall. Things composed of the four elements are empty, containing within them the seeds of suffering. Human beings are composed of five aggregates and are without a separate self. They are always in the process of change, constantly being born and constantly dying. They are empty of self and without a separate existence. The mind is the source of all confusion and the body the forest of all unwholesome actions. Meditating on this you can be released from the round of birth and death. So Brother Phap Huu, to come to you first, do we, should we… because you said let’s get a bit nerdy, so how do we approach this and how do we help? Some of our listeners may not have heard of some of these terms, so what’s the best way to approach this one do you think?

00:12:37

Well I think first of all we can help break down, as we discuss together, each realization and I think what would be important whenever we read the sutra or we listen to the sutra we always have to ask and how can we put it into our daily life? So I think a sutra is not to just be studied one time but we recite it again and again, because as we progress into the practice, with the practice, our understanding of the Dharma also develops and grows. For example, we heard the word impermanent, impermanence. That is a truth that is one of the doors of liberation in Buddhism, so here we can explain and expand and look into how do we understand impermanence? Do we go through in the day understanding that life is impermanence? And when we look at impermanence there’s so many teachings towards impermanence, there’s the five remembrances, which we have also reflected a lot then shared a lot in other episodes. But for me whenever I hear the word impermanence, instead of going towards fear, it is to invite us to see how precious life is and to not take for granted. As well as to see that everything that is manifesting today and it can bring immense pain and suffering that we also have to know that everything has the thread, has the foundation of impermanence. So here, political regimes are subject to fall, everything that is present, whether it offers happiness, joy, or it offers suffering, we know that it is of the nature of impermanence. And how do we take care of let’s say a happy feeling that is also subject to fall, that is subject to cease, and we are taught that it is organic. We have to know how to take care of it, we have to know how to feed it, we have to know how to be with it. And if it ceased to exist and we suffer, but then we have the insight that suffering is also impermanent. So as we are going through the teachings of the eight realizations, we always want to reflect and see, try not, for me at least, I try not to grasp everything at once because a sutra that we are reciting has so much wisdom in it. And I also want to check in with myself now what is becoming alive for me in this moment when I listen to the words of the Buddha.

00:15:43

Beautiful, thank you. Sister, just coming back to that first line, because I think for a lot of people that would be quite meaningful at the moment because I think a lot of people are concerned about sort of certain political regimes rising certain, that we’re getting a sort of breakdown in cohesion in society, and there’s some people who are very worried about the state of the world and are sort of feeling despair or panic or or worry. So to say, start off by saying political regimes are subject to fall that’s interesting, isn’t it? And I remember when the sort of all the suffering and pain and war broke out in the Middle East on October the seventh last year, I went to see Sister Jina, who is one of the sort of more elderly members of the community, and I asked, I said, I’m in deep pain about this, and she said even this will pass. In other words, at the moment, this is causing immense suffering in the world, but this too shall pass. So do you want to just start off with that because I think that’s particularly relevant today?

00:16:54

Yeah. Thank you, Jo and Brother Phap Huu. I think it’s so important for me and so powerful in this sutra… So two thousand years ago someone said this, right? And it’s so important to be able to identify what are the characteristics of human life and civilization. And those political regimes will come and they will go and there are those regimes that bring justice and prosperity and other regimes that can bring greater discrimination and polarization and injustice and harm. There are wars, there are civil wars, there’s so much that is sort of part of the tapestry of life and I find this such a powerful kind of first bold statement of the sutra which is saying, as a practitioner, we position ourselves like with the broad scope of human history and we see this on a much much bigger scale. So it’s sort of opening up our mind to not get caught in the signs and symbols. They are real, and as we go on to see the suffering is real. But we use the contemplation of impermanence to help us emerge from the panic, to help us dig deep into that pain and suffering and despair and fear that may be grounded in real rational observation. There are people whose lives can be endangered by certain political regimes, whose livelihood can be endangered. And in this case we sit there, and, for us, we read this in the meditation hall, we’re all sitting there cross-legged in a… It’s a contemplation. We know this to be the case. And so right away, as we hear this line, can we apply it to the political regimes in the world today to give ourselves some space? To not feel this is the end of the world? For many of us we can have that feeling this is the end of the world and I need to do something. But maybe the something we need to do is a little bit unexpected in the light of the practice. It’s not just to rage against the machine and go directly onto the streets, I mean direct action has its role, but maybe there are other ways that we can position ourselves in relation to impermanence and injustice. And this is such a powerful opening to this sutra. And as Brother Phap Huu was sharing, so this is one of the Three Dharma Seals and actually what we have in this first realization, we have all three of them. So the first is the truth of impermanence. The second is the truth of no self, so humans we are made of a kind of composite, we’re composite, we’re made of form, feelings, mental formations, perceptions, consciousness, they are all rivers, we are ever changing. So impermanence across time leads naturally to an understanding that our self is also impermanent. And then the Third Dharma Seal is that the peace is possible. And that is this final line that we come to here, where we say that when we can meditate on the sort of impermanence of our context, the political regimes, we meditate on our no self nature. It is possible to touch nirvana and to be released from the round of birth and death. And so we have in this first realization, the historical dimension and the ultimate dimension in the final line. So that’s what’s sort of going on here, we’re really, we’re taking impermanence as the door for us to touch our true nature.

00:20:31

Brother, help us with…. And I, you know, I think I struggle with this still after many years, and I’m sure many people, this idea of no self and to be freed from birth and death, and of course we’ve said this in other, we’ve brought this into other podcasts, but I think it’s something we keep on having to come back to, especially lay practitioners who maybe don’t dwell for great periods of time in these teachings. Can you just bring us back to the basics. When it says no self…

00:21:26

It means you don’t exist, Jo.

00:21:29

In your dreams, brother.

00:21:32

Yeah, I think this is a deep insight in Buddhism. And in the podcast or in the Plum Village language you may have heard of the insight of interbeing, and that is to help us touch the nature of no self. So what it means is as a human being we all have a self in the historical dimension. I am Brother Phap Huu, Sister True Dedication is here, Jo, you are here, and many other friends are also here. But when we contemplate and we meditate and we shine the insight, we shine the light of mindfulness towards ourselves, we actually start to identify that we cannot be here alone, we have to interbe with all the conditions for us to manifest, for us to be breathing this air, for us to have words to speak, for us to have energy to have action. So looking deeply inside of us we can be in touch with our parents, our ancestors, the spiritual ancestors thanks to the wisdoms that have been handed down from generations to generations, to be in touch with the sun, the earth etc etc. So the no self element is to help us know that we are not a separate self. So this ideal that we are men or humans are separate this is an ignorant view in Buddhism and because of this ignorant view we have allowed our greed and our desires to overtake us and therefore a lot of suffering arises. So this particular self in Buddhism is at at the root of the round of birth and death. So whenever, for me, whenever I hear and we hear this in sutra, it means samsara, it means the repeating of suffering, the repeating of the chasing, the greed and the desire. So when we talk about non-self in Buddhism it is to understand that we cannot exist by ourselves. That is non-self in a nutshell.

00:23:56

Thank you, brother. And sister, things composed of the four elements are empty containing within them the seeds of suffering. What does that mean?

00:24:08

So this is unpacking this idea of impermanence. Here, the four elements, traditionally, in Buddhism, are earth, air, water, and fire. I think if with a more scientific perspective we could think things are composed of elements also works here. And this is so important to see that those things we might hold on to as important are also impermanent. So basically in this realization we’re touching both the good news and also the challenge, the good news of impermanence and the challenge of impermanence. So those things that are causing great injustice, hardship, suffering, fear, and despair, they are impermanent. So that can give us some relief when we really look into that in the broad scale of things and our… and a broad scale of time. But also things we cherish are impermanent. The house that we saved up to build, to renovate, to take care of, where will that house be in two thousand years time? In twenty thousand years time? We can pour our whole heart into a project. Where will that project be in ten thousand years? And this is an important contemplation because it’s one of the sort of unlocking keys in Buddhism. Everything is a formation, it’s made of other parts, but we grasp onto and we hold on to these things and we sacrifice our life and our happiness, our present moment, and our relationships chasing after those things, investing in those things, and we lose, we lose the wonders of the present moment. And so here we are seeing that also political regimes are subject to fall. Thank heavens! But unfortunately so also is your house, your city, everything that you are sort of investing in, your career, all of these things, they’re all composed of different elements, they’re not something to kind of grasp onto. And furthermore your own body is also made of elements is also impermanent. The body of your loved ones is also impermanent. And so this is a real… Like this first realization is you have to sit with this, you have to hold it at the front of your heart and mind and contemplate it to sort of burn through like holding a lens to something to really emphasize those, to concentrate those rays of light to burn through this tendency to always attach to and grasp and tell ourselves stories. So, for example, if we take the contemplation about political regimes. Right? So for many of us, despair may arise recently or fear may arise if there’s been an election in our country or in our region that has gone in a direction of more injustice or discrimination or polarization or greed. So that despair we should not identify with that despair, like we shouldn’t identify with our fear. What can I do? The external problem if it doesn’t change, then we feel we’re trapped in our despair. But what this realization is telling us, your despair is also a river, your despair doesn’t belong to you. You are not defined by your despair. Your despair is just one of the five aggregates, one of the five elements of your being. You also have your body. You also have other ways, other seeds in you. You have compassion in you. You have love in you. You have generosity in you, which we come to later in other realizations. You have all of this goodness in you. And helps us not get locked or identified in certain formations, whether they’re external to us or internal to us. So this realization is kind allowing us to ride the waves of suffering in the world and ride the waves of impermanence in ourselves and to see the good news of that that we have a chance to see in our community, in our network of friends and family, in those people with whom we are in solidarity. How can we still practice generosity and service? How can we still act to protect life? How can we act to protect families and relationships? How can we act to protect people’s core freedoms over their body or whatever else it is? So there are actions that are still available to us thanks to impermanence, but also thanks to us being much more than our fear and despair. We can also activate the other seeds that are there.

00:28:37

Thank you, sister. And it’s interesting because some of the people I’m coaching at the moment, they’re talking about well I can’t change the global situation at the moment but I’m going to turn and look at what I can do within my local area, within my region, within my town, within the village I’m living in. But actually we can always take actions, we can always make a difference, but sometimes it’s about understanding where we should place that energy rather than despair. Because if you look at the global situation it can be quite easy to be despairing, but if you look at your local community and what you can do, that can be very empowering.

00:29:16

Absolutely. And then no self then totally becomes the good news because of the truth of interbeing means that when we act we can benefit those around us. They are also made of us, we are made of them, our contribution is real and we can influence, we can activate things in our consciousness, that then activate them in the consciousness of the networks that we’re connected to.

00:29:39

Thank you, sister. Brother, you started off by saying this is regularly practiced within Plum Village, and practiced over the entire lifetime of a monastic. And I just want to bring in now this question of the accumulation of wisdom, because each of these realizations by themselves is like oh, you know, we’re asking people to let go of the idea of the self, we’re asking people to go beyond life and death, we’re asking people to see the impermanence of life. Is it necessarily going to be the case? And I suspect, yes, well it definitely is for me, that this is takes time, that that someone who is practicing or wants to sort of develop their wisdom should not expect like oh, right, okay, got it. Because it’s very easy to get lost in an intellectual understanding and I sometimes do this, I think I intellectually understand something but I’m not sure if I’ve integrated into my life.

00:30:42

I think each and every one of us will have a we call it a ripening, a different ripening of understanding with the practice and the sutras, the teachings from the Buddha and our teacher. But, you know, for me, recently, I don’t only meditate on the impermanence of things that are not going well because that’s an, of course, practice in like what Sister True Dedication shared, but I’m also practicing it to something that, for example, Plum Village is also of the nature of impermanence. And we’re sitting in his hut right now and we had this beautiful view of the forest just in front of me and I remember one time sitting, drinking tea with Thay, and he said, Phap Huu, this view here, do you think in a hundred years it will still be like this or will it all be supermarkets and a new city that is developed? And will Plum Village still be here? And listening to our discussion and I just realized that especially now, like a lot of us we are in this phase of strengthening our community and learning to step up and be the legacy that our teacher have given to us. And present moment I’m very happy, and I don’t want to be attached to that happiness also. And I’m also really practicing interbeing of action right now, because I know these actions that I am contributing by my body, my speech, my thinking, has an impact and will be an ingredient for the future. For me like recently, like every time I come into meetings with my brothers and sisters and I see that how what we are doing is not just for us alone, it’s for many generations down the line. And I still… what gets me up and what gets me to continue to be like motivated is that what we are doing is developing and it’s nurturing this continued spiritual tradition that we have received. So for me it doesn’t just exist intellectually, but it really becomes really alive and that our actions really have impact, you know, because we represent not only ourselves but we represent the three jewels, the three jewels in Buddhism that is the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha which represents each and every one of us that practice. We carry the awakened nature which is the Buddha, we are speaking words that can contribute to understanding love that is Dharma, and Sangha is community and individual makes a community. So each and every one of us we are of this interbeing thread of this community and for me I continuously am reminded of like why mindful actions are so important, because they do contribute to the beauty that is also a part of this world. And so for me when I hear all political regimes are subject to fall. Also all, everything that is beautiful, like what we’ve heard has a nature of impermanence. But we can also keep nurturing and seeing that we are constantly being born and constantly dying. Here, that is actually beauty, because in Plum Village in 50 years should be very different than now. Right? Like I think one of our responsibility is to continue to evolve the tradition. So right now, like we’re all wearing Vietnamese robes and I remember one time like our teacher said one day I expect our robes to change, because it’s a part of the cycle of birth and death. Birth and death here there’s an opportunity when something ceases to exist, something new has an opportunity to exist. So in this contemplation it really is like a deep meditation and recently, you know, this has been very close to me because it means Sister True Dedication, we’re in a lot of meetings together looking at the growing, developing, sustaining, and joy and suffering of a sangha. And honestly, sometimes it’s long and hard, like attention and thinking and holding the space together, but I know that what we are doing is not for us alone and it has interbeing in it. You know, so for me that’s very practical how I am applying this first realization into practice right away. And the five aggregates of our perceptions, our consciousness, all of these are continuing to change and they are not of a separate self.

00:36:54

Sister, the next bit. The mind is the source of all confusion and the body, the forest of all unwholesome actions. Help us. What is that? How is it useful to know this?

00:37:13

So I think what this line is saying, mind is a source of confusion, the body the source of kind of unwholesomeness is an interesting declaration on the nature of homo sapiens. We’re saying here that our mind organ, our mind consciousness, is not a kind of abstractly reliable thing. It is not something that is experiencing the world in a super clear way. It is something that needs to be trained. It’s something that needs to be cultivated. In Buddhism we always have this line, the mind is a field to be cultivated. There are seeds and we have to take care of the ones that come up as weeds and the ones that will come up as good things, that can nourish us. So the mind here, the source of confusion to not trust the mind too much, to know that the mind left uncultivated will lead to wildness, will lead to all sorts of things we’ll come to in the later parts of the sutra, the greed, the desire, the craving, the exploitation, that lead to harm, to injustice, and to suffering. So this is saying ah, be careful, your mind it’s the source of confusion. Ah, be careful, your body it is the source of unwholesomeness. So it’s not exactly that our mind and body are two separate things, disclaimer here, but when we come to the sort of bodily aspect of our consciousness if you like, of course our body has craving. We want food, we want comfort, we want sensual pleasures, our body is wired for that. Right? And our body needs to learn a certain moderation, our body needs guidance, you know, to take care of our body with exercise, to take care of our body with healthy foods, to not always follow our impulses. And we’ve also explored that in previous episodes of the podcast. Impulses can come, but we have a chance to be free from them, we have a chance to be the master of them. We can master our body, we can take care of it. We can master our mind, we can take care of it. And so this line is just saying it’s just a little line of warning here, you know, folks, that no self nature you found that you might think oh no self is bliss, I’m just made of everything, that means I’m one with everything that means everything’s fine. It’s like, hang on a minute, you are the guardian of this mind, you better take care of it. And you are the guardian of this body, you better be careful how you handle all those impulses, because left unhandled they lead to all of this impulsive short-sighted behavior which is the root of suffering and injustice in the world. So both our body and mind there’s something for us to take care of.

00:39:59

Great. And sister, before we move on to the next one, just in relationship to what you just said, how, for someone who may be starting out on this practice, for someone or even a more seasoned practitioner, I mean this is a lifetime of study, I mean there are people, and we’ve discussed this before, Phap Huu, that some people come to Plum Village expecting or hoping in their one week here to sort of get all this, understand it, and leave sort of, not necessarily enlightened, but definitely happier and with a sense they’ve got the tools in their toolbox to go and sort of change their lives for the better. But this is slow heavy going sometimes, sister. And this can take years, so I’m just wondering, just from your own personal experience, because as Phap Huu said, everyone will have their own experience. How has this process been through your life?

00:40:50

Oh, good question.

00:40:52

That’s a good question.

00:40:54

Well I think I believed my mind too much before. I benefited from a good education and had great teachers and I thought oh, yeah, my mind. And I just believed it all the time. And I believed my opinions, I believed my feelings, I believed my despair, I believed my frustration, my anger, my sense of kind of righteous injustice, I believed it all all the time and it sent me into an absolute pit in the end. And then I was afraid of my mind, because I thought I can’t possibly confront these hidden depths of it. So I think for me something that unlocked when I began to encounter this practice was simply this question are you sure? Like I had some space around my thoughts and what I would tell myself. And I realized that my thoughts are not something I need to believe, they’ve just emerged through mental processes. It doesn’t mean they’re right, it doesn’t mean they’re going to help me, it doesn’t mean they’re going to take me in a good direction. So I think having some space just to say are you sure? The mind is an organ, it’s an uncultivated organ until we get really familiar with it and learn how to take care of it with a lot of compassion and understanding. So that’s on the mind part. And I think the body part also, of course, we’re driven by impulsives, impulses, and I think I come from quite an impulsive family in certain ways, I think I probably have a natural tendency to addictive behaviors. I think I have a tendency to want to fight to get what I think I need or want. You know, and that is coming from my human nature and my relation to my kind of inner impulses. If I get this I’ll feel okay. If I get this I’ll feel safe, all of these things. So what I’ve come to understand is to really subtle… It’s been a really subtle journey for me and I can’t remember if we’ve spoken about it before yet, but for me it was always in relation to food. So I’m somebody who had dysfunctional food behaviors for a good 10 years or so. And that kind of disordered eating is coming from my inability to handle the impulses that were coming from my body that ultimately I was repressing and ignoring and not listening to and mixing up with my feelings and so on. So for me the journey of understanding my body came through how can I feel I have an appetite, how can I handle just craving for sugar or craving for crunchiness? I love chips.

00:43:24

She’s not saying…

00:43:25

I’m not saying, no, please, do not give me more chips… No crisps…

00:43:28

We have to do a disclaimer every time…

00:43:30

But it’s just, you know, and I think, okay, yeah, maybe, you know, coffee is one of these cravings that I do indulge or whatever, but for many of us it starts in these really basic things like around our food habits. Because our food habits then lead to how we feel about our body, they lead to how we’re handling our energy through the arc of the day. How we are giving ourselves the nutriments that we need to feel well in our skin. So for me these were two sort of initial doors with the body and with the mind, and for each one of us it will be different. And then from there we then can start to, you know, I mean, of course, fascinating thing about monastic life because we’re celibate. Right? So then what are those inner impulses for physical affection? You know, then as in my years of being a novice, then it was like, how can I become aware of that? I just want a hug from someone. You know, who will I have a hug from? But also, will the hug make me feel better? You know, so then… And this, for all of us who are dealing with loneliness or other things, these are real impulses, they’re coming from the body, and we can think that they’re noble. We can think I’m a human that needs a hug and when we have self-pity, I’m a lonely person in need of a hug. Right? And then it’s like, oh, well I’m a homo sapiens, we’re a mammal, we need human touch. So then it’s like we bring wisdom to our body that has an impulse and we say, okay. And, you know, I mean literally it’s only since being a nun, Jo, that I’ve actually been someone who like who strokes my chest, who hugs myself, who puts my hand on my brow. But also, of course, in the sisterhood there’s a certain intimacy, and, of course, there are lots of sisters I can ask for a hug. And whenever my mom is here, one hug in the morning, one hug in the evening, I’m like, mom, I need this. I gotta store up. So we’ve got to be able to see these things and to meet them with insight and love so that we transform them, because sometimes that need coming from the body, a need for physical affection, it can take us down all sorts of pathways that are ultimately into either self-pity or unwholesome craving or like neediness around people and we project it on others to supply those things. So as you can see the path is kind of infinite. But these eight realizations they are distilling just some really core foundational principles. And here, in this first one, we’re realizing, are you sure about the mind? Are you sure about the body? Whatever is arising there, approach with caution, approach with vigilance, approach with insight, and love and then let’s see where we go from there. In these lines, in the Chinese, it’s so powerful, because each line is just four characters. Boom boom boom boom. So they’re real declarations of wisdom and here we have these lines. The mind is the source of all confusion. The body, the forest of all kind of unwholesome action. And here it’s not to say oh, all bodies are impure. Bodies are bodies. You know, but it’s just to say what arising from our body can take us in the path of goodness, in the path of service of all beings, in the path of stability, balance, insight, compassion. All these good things, how can we take care of our body to lead us there?

00:46:49

Sister, thank you for that sharing. I’m going to take a breath. Right. Well, that is the foundation. And now let’s go to the second realization which I will read. So the second realization is the awareness that more desire brings more suffering. So let’s read it. All hardships in daily life arise from greed and desire. Those with little desire and ambition are able to relax their body and mind free from entanglement. So, Brother Phap Huu, let’s start here because I know that when I grew up I was trained to succeed and to do more and to be more successful and to earn more money and to have more things. And it was very much on the basis that actually my happiness lay in more and more and more. And, of course, we see, you know, that one of the problems with society, our extractive economy in the West, is that it’s built on increasing, ever increasing, even when we haven’t got the resources to support that. So tell us a bit. Those with little desire and ambition are able to relax their body and mind free from entanglement.

00:48:22

That is so ideal.

00:48:27

If only.

00:48:28

I… we have to remember that in a lot of the sutra, the context of it, it speaks directly towards suffering. So that’s very important, because I feel that what is being represented in this second realization is the mind of running after, the mind of running after desire that doesn’t allow us to be who we are. So we have teachings that are our teacher has given us, be beautiful, be yourself. But in today’s world, I don’t want to be myself, I’m chasing after a different image. So in our understanding in the context and the teachings of Buddhism, the desire Sister True already mentioned it in the first realization, that we all have to really be mindful and have a practice towards our sensual desire. So sensual desire is definitely a source of energy that pulls us into many directions leading to addiction, leading to losing ourself and not being able to have a connection with ourself whether it is physical contact, whether it is sex, whether it is indulging ourselves with images, with drugs, with a kind of substance to numb ourselves even, or to fall into a different kind of feeling a high, and so on. So all of these sensual desires don’t allow us to touch the present moment, so it takes us away from the ability to be in touch with our being, be in touch with what we have in the present moment. And the second desire it touches the desire that we want to be something else, we don’t have the ability to embrace our own history, we don’t have the wisdom of seeing the beauty inside of us because, especially today, in our times of screens, and our time of doom scrolling, which I have publicly shared, I am a victim of it too, it’s such an easy place to just take refuge in. It’s like because when I see suffering in myself, I want to look for happiness outside of me. And that maybe, at the beginning, you know, maybe you… Even I have created this perception like oh, let me look at something that I can then work towards, but then that becomes a hook in itself. So there, the desires are all baits for us that can drag us away. And the desire of not having the capacity to see the beauty inside of us it’s actually very common today. And we have a lot of teenagers that come through the monastery during the summer, and sometimes I always ask them, I always ask them, do you feel like you’re being pressured to be someone else? And they always say yes, brother. Because not a lot of times people teach you to be yourself, they’re always teaching you to be something else. And that kind of education and that kind of culture of thinking is so rooted in our modern ways, without us even knowing. So we have to be very attentive and very mindful, especially now, as a monastic, when I first ordained, I was only 14 years old and there was a big question in the community is like do we send these young teenage monks and nuns to school? Which we would then go to a local school about 20 minutes away from here. And there was a lot of discussion around it because it was the first time the community had all these teenagers in the monastic world in Plum Village. And fortunately, like, I still like, so grateful to Thay, he said, absolutely not. Because if they go there, to school, I don’t know, five hours a day, six hours a day, then their environment, their conditions around them will not make the monks and nuns anymore. They will be living within the world of desire and especially outside of the monastery, and we are so young, we’ll be hooked. I know for sure I wouldn’t have been able to survive because I know I’m so conditioned by the environment around me. And because when I am still a young practitioner, my mind is not yet tamed and doesn’t have the insight of don’t do that, don’t go down that path, but it is easily attracted by the baits. And I know this for a fact because I was very addicted to gaming when I was growing up. I would go to the temple with my mom and I can’t wait to go home just play games. And every time, like every day, that was my routine after after school. Right? It’s like, what do you do with your free time? It’s just gaming. So I know that there is a deep desire of getting all of these particular stimulation and, you know, when you win a game, like there’s no prize, but you just feel like there’s a victory, so that desire to have a kind of feeling is also very rooted in our nature of being human. And so it’s to recognize there is that desire. And the third desire is to eliminate self, to eliminate others, whatever we don’t like, get rid of it. So that is in our view, that’s wrong view. So we think even suffering and happiness, we want to get rid of suffering. Like you said, Jo, like people come here and they want to be enlightened after a week, or they want to be happier. And it is… that’s a desire. That’s a desire. And if we shine the light towards that we can actually look, well, there’s also an aspiration there is to relieve our suffering. And I’ve heard our teacher also made very strong statement is yes, you can be happy. But do you have the insight that you have joy and happiness that are present? You just don’t see it. Like if you take a breath and you allow that breath to truly ground your mind to your body and you can just be in touch with your breathing, you can calm all your whole nervous system, you can feel alive, you can feel that you are not alone, you are a stream of continuation from your ancestors, from your society, like you are just not a separate self. So you can touch something very deeply. And Thay would say, that is an enlightenment right there. And there’s a lot of enlightenment, there’s a lot of moments of realizations that we are just not opening our eyes and we’re not allowing ourselves to touch because we are being dragged and pulled by these desires. So when they speak about this hardship here, it talks about this hardship to run after fame, power, money, wealth, because we think that that is the ultimate destination in life. And I had that, I had those goals when I was really young, but it doesn’t mean that they’re like, we do a lot. And there’s a lot of service that we are able to offer in life and that can be looked at a kind of hardship, a kind of like I want because I… The happiness that I have, and the peace that I’ve been able to touch, I don’t want to be selfish, I want to be able to share these teachings, I want to be able to create this refuge of what we call our spiritual home for so many other people to come and experience and that all takes work. But when the desire becomes an aspiration that becomes a very different energy and our teacher was very aligned by always asking us what is our deepest desire to the monastics. It’s like, okay, now you’re all monks and nuns, but what is your deepest desire in life as a monk and a nun? Because you can also lose your practice in your monastic life very easily if there is no deeper desire to have impact of change of compassion of love and of transformation.