The Way Out Is In / The Eight Realizations of Great Beings – Part Two (Episode #83)

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Dear listeners, welcome back to this latest episode of the podcast series The Way Out Is In.

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I’m 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 be recording the second part of our two-part series on the sutra, The Eight Realizations of Great Beings. And in a sense, this is a manual for how to see the world with the eyes of wisdom that will allow us to deal better with our sufferings and also to act with clarity in the world.

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The way out is in.

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Hello everyone, I’m Jo Confino.

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I’m Brother Phap Huu.

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And I am Sister True Dedication.

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Yes, so dear listeners, Sister True Dedication is back in the hut. So we are sitting in Thay’s, Thich Nhat Hanh’s Sitting Still Hut in Upper Hamlet, in Plum Village Monastery, in southwest France. And it’s very cozy. We’re sitting in the sort of late autumn and it’s starting to get a little bit chill and there are leaves everywhere and it’s very, very beautiful. So as we’ve said to you, dear listeners, in the past, that having Sister True Dedication here is a great joy and honor and privilege. And she makes the two of us look good. So she is always welcome here. Because at the sort of level… we have to rise to the occasion when she’s here. Isn’t that true, Phap Huu?

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That is absolutely true.

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She raises our game. So we’re on edge and Sister True Dedication is looking very relaxed.

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Very true, very true.

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So, as I said, we did the first four realizations last time. And of course, given they’re great 8 realizations of great beings, you can’t rush these. We have to give them the time that they deserve. So we got through four, I think, in two hours. We’ll see how we do today. But sister, anything you want to say before we actually crack on and say actually, OK, let’s move forward?

00:03:08

Just that I’m happy to be here with you both. I’m smiling from ear to ear because you always amuse me so much. So I’m just happy to be in your company.

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Well, thank you. You can see me as often as you want to, sister. Right. So what I’m going to do and what we did in the last episode is I’m going to read out each realization in turn, and then we will seek to understand it. And as Phap Huu, you said, this is a sort of slightly nerdy exercise to actually pick a sutra and to actually really go into it in depth. And one of the reasons we’re doing this is because there was a survey of, I think, about eight thousand people who donate money to the Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation, saying, you know, what would you like more of in general? And one of the things people said, actually, we want to have a deeper understanding of Buddhism and some of the teachings. And brother, is that important? Actually, was that surprising?

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That was surprising because we probably have perception, oh, people want to understand more how to be engaged with mindfulness in our daily life and so on, maybe more of the fundamentals, maybe. But at the same time, it all makes sense because in order to deepen our spiritual practice, it’s wonderful to understand the teachings that come directly from the Buddha or our patriarchs who have transmitted the teachings and the wisdom.

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Great. OK, so let us start. So we’re going to start with the fifth realization, which is the awareness that ignorance is the cause of the endless round of birth and death. It says Bodhisattvas always listen to and learn from others so their understanding and skillful means can develop and so they can teach living beings and bring them great joy. So, Brother Phap Huu, let’s start with you. What is the meaning of this?

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I think, first of all, it speaks on friendship. Bodhisattvas are great beings, are people with the heart of wanting to be of service, of awakening. It’s like you always want to learn from others. So there’s a lot of time, like maybe we have succeeded to become a mentor, to become a guide, to become an elder brother, sister, sibling. And then we think we have it all, we know it all because I have taught one person. But this speaks on the realization that friendship and companionship is a very big part of spiritual growth. And in order for us to continue to be developed and to develop as someone of service, to help, our ears should always be open. Our heart should always be open in order to understand what is happening in the present moment. Because sometimes we hold on to past experience, past stories, and we think we can just copy and paste it to every situation. And that makes us very small in a way. And it seems like we are also not able to connect. And I think as somebody who works with a community, connection is part of understanding. And to connect, you have to be open. And especially for those of us who start to be of help and be of a mentor, I think it is very dangerous that we can become addicted to power and authority and the feeling of like, now people listen to me… We spoke about maras in the other realization. That is one of the inner manas, manas meaning one of the layers in our consciousness that likes to be recognized, likes to be seen and be heard. But then they ignore the root of suffering and the root of ignorance. And so therefore, this part, for me, when I listen to this realization is a reminder to always be open and to understand that we have to, in order to adapt to be of service and to help, we have to learn to be flexible and be open, skillful means. That’s one of the words that I circled when I was reading this realization is when we have a solution, we may think it is a solution. But if there’s no understanding and we don’t take the time to adjust ourselves, what is this person’s culture? How is their upbringing? And we have been trained in a particular way, and we may think how we were supported, we can copy and paste it to our loved ones. But sometimes it doesn’t work. And we just have to learn and to see that everyone is conditioned differently. And this is very important when we have this understanding that each and every one of us is conditioned differently. That expands our heart, that allows us to be skillful, also allows us to be kinder also, and also not to be hard on ourselves. Because sometimes we give our heart of service to helping a situation, and it doesn’t work out. And maybe you are not the condition for this person to understand their suffering. And sometimes it’s literally you ask another friend, say, can you help this person? And you tell him or her, or they the story, and then they almost repeat the same thing, and it helps, it clicks, because they just match. It’s like magnets that click and work. And so sometimes it’s also knowing that skillful means is a very big aspect of being of support.

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Beautiful. And can I give an example of that, brother? Because there was once, I was in a weekend workshop, and there was a good friend of mine there. And he was feeling suicidal and was talking about the level of pain he was in. And I remember just standing up and saying, but Bob, it’s not his real name, but Bob, you’re so wonderful. You have all these gifts. You’re so special. You have all these strengths. And the facilitator stopped me and said, is this something that actually will help Bob at this moment or will actually just add to suffering? Because if he’s not feeling good about himself, then you saying how wonderful he is may actually cause greater harm and misunderstanding. And it was a real lesson for me that I was responding from my wish rather than actually understanding what he needed at that moment. Sister, one of the sort of key learnings I’ve had in Plum Village is deep listening, this understanding that actually we are so full of judgments and perceptions and that we often jump to conclusions and often act in a way that we think is good, but actually don’t really listen. Can you maybe just talk more about the art of deep listening and how does that help us with our ignorance?

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Thank you, Jo. So there’s something in this realization about like the real humility of a Bodhisattva. This line, Bodhisattvas always listen to and learn from others so their understanding and skillful means can develop and they can teach and be of service. And so I think what that means is this, Brother Phap Huu used the word openness, and it’s also a kind of letting go to not be too sure of ourselves, to not think that we know how to solve a situation or that we can fix it or that our own spiritual progress or realizations or insights until this point, yeah, as you and Brother Phap Huu have been sharing, it can’t necessarily apply to everyone. So that gentleness, openness, to come to any situation with this, yeah, ouverture, I don’t know, this like this spirit of mind, this openness to say, I’m not going to be too sure of myself. I’m going to still be really curious about this person and where they’re coming from. And that quality of listening, we sometimes call it in Plum Village a kind of embodied listening. So we stay grounded in our body, following our breathing, being aware of our kind of thinking mind and keep on bringing ourselves back to like this physical felt sense of being present in front of a person and allowing ourselves to say, I don’t understand this person fully. They are a mystery to me. You know, it’s wonderful to think of each other as mysteries. This person is a mystery to me. And what can I learn and discover about life, life’s beauties and life’s uglinesses, you know, by really bearing witness to this person as they are and then adapting to that and then seeing, is there something I can offer to help? Do I have another perspective to offer? But from a real unconditional openness of listening first, I think is really important. And this humility, because I think, I mean, all of us, right, when we get a breakthrough and we’re able to understand something, we just want to preach it from the rooftops, you know, friends, family. I’ve solved this in this way. Why can’t you too? You know, that’s just so natural and human. And I think this is such a powerful line to say, you know, wait, always be willing to learn from others. There’s no one right way. This is the great wide spirit of Mahayana Buddhism, to be able to say there are many paths to enlightenment and many kinds of enlightenment. That’s what I also find wonderful about this line, you know, always learn and listen so our understanding can grow. So in our kind of Buddhism, there’s not like one enlightenment and then you’ve got it. Oh, and that’s an awakened person. And then you get on and whatever you say is like gospel truth, but we can have multiple endless, infinite enlightenments. And I remember with Thay actually in 2014, and there’s a pairing in Buddhism around love and understanding, and we talk about the immeasurable minds of love, limitless love. And Thay was playing with this in some of the Dharma talks and I’d come to visit him at his hermitage and he was sitting, lying in a hammock at the back of this little garden, this hammock slung between some trees. And he knew I’d come to ask him something difficult. And so he was talking on some nice topics first.

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Skillful means.

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Yeah. And then he was just staring up at the leaves and his attendant was swinging the hammock and he’s like, if love is limitless and love and understanding go together, then understanding must also be limitless. And he was fascinated by this because you don’t see it often in the literature, in the Buddhist literature, that understanding is limitless. But that became a really important insight to Thay in his, yeah, this last year or so of teaching. So here we bring that humility to all of our relationships and everything we’re doing. Our understanding can still deepen, it can still grow, it can still be kind of limitless. And I think that’s a wonderful framing for all of us because we can think, you know, we can be attached to this idea. And in Buddhist circles, this idea of like a final enlightenment, a complete and total enlightenment is very prevalent. And it can really be an obstacle to people having smaller insights and realizations. But then once we’ve had an insight or realization, it’s not kind of get attached to it as my precious, you know, but to allow it to evolve and deepen.

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Well, there’s so much in that, sister, and it reminds me, I love what you said about allowing life to continually be a mystery. And I remember my wife, Paz, who’s sitting here, you know, she said the other day, you know, we’ve been married for 18 years, but actually, do we really know each other? Do we know everything about each other? And the answer is no. There’s, as you say, endless understanding of each other, endless understanding of life. And I think, isn’t that, and I’m not sure if this is right, brother, isn’t that where this phrase of, if you meet the Buddha along the path, kill him.

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Whoo.

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Which is that sense of actually, if you think you know, if you’re in a position where you’re being taught what you already think is true, then actually you’ve already locked yourself up.

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Exactly. It’s just speaking on the level of arrogance that we can have, like we think we know it all. And then how can you learn when you come in with that attitude? So killing the Buddha was a way, the Zen master would say it back in the day, because it’s very striking, it’s very strong, but maybe in our language today, it’s like, lower your ego, my dear. You know, lower your ego, be open, change your attitude in order to receive.

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And sister, just coming back, because it says, is the awareness that ignorance is the cause of the endless round of birth and death. So how does, sort of, if we build our understanding, and I know we talked about this a bit in the previous episode, but just for the sake of now, how does letting, going beyond our ignorance help us to understand the endless round of birth and death? What is the connection there?

00:17:19

So this pairing, for those of our listeners who might enjoy reading a lot of Buddhism, we often hear these things in conjunction, how ignorance is the root of a lot of our suffering. And here it’s saying that ignorance is the cause of the endless round of birth and death. So sometimes we might think of that as samsara or this, the idea that’s kind of suffering is endless. And some of us may recognize that these are the 12 links of interdependent co-arising.

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Wow.

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Just to put that reference in there, Jo.

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You see, that’s the great thing, now we invite sister back to do this one next. So tell us a bit.

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That’d be three episodes.

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So it’s a traditional Buddhist teaching about how to understand the causes and roots of suffering. And actually in this Rains Retreat here in Plum Village, we are studying Thay’s teachings on these 12 links and his explanation that we should always see them in the light of both the historical truth and the ultimate truth. So what’s important about this line here is it should have also its counterpart in the ultimate dimension. So if we’re saying that ignorance causes birth and death, we should also say that insight or wisdom helps us realize that birth and death are only notions and allow us to touch the deep peace and freedom of the ultimate dimension or nirvana. So we would always want to see any kind of, take any Buddhist teaching in the light, both of the historical dimension or the ultimate dimension. And to not make ignorance into a thing, I get really allergic about this sometimes when ignorance is made into a thing. And I’m like, no, but ignorance is the absence of something. It’s not a thing in itself. It’s the absence of openness, curiosity, understanding, awareness. So we shouldn’t make it a thing. And to see that, what are we ignorant of? We’re ignorant of the true nature of life, the true nature of the world. And that’s why we can get caught in the signs, in our historical dimension of birth and death, impermanence, having and not having. All of these things, they are true and they’re real, but in the historical dimension. And when we can really look with the eyes and the insight of interbeing, we start gently, gently to deepen our understanding of the ultimate dimension. So for example, say that we are feeling caught in an endless round of birth and death. We’re struggling against that. We’re striving against that. And I don’t know, like, okay, let’s take a really, really contemporary example that we might be a social worker working in zones of violence and injustice. We can feel this sense that we’re in constant struggle against the suffering of birth and death and injustice and so on. And so this realization is kind of like, you can be a bodhisattva in that setting. You can bring others joy. You can be curious about the nature of happiness and suffering, life and death, justice and injustice, humanity and inhumanity. Like, all of those things can be the object of your… , that can be the mystery that you are in daily negotiation with as a social worker, as a humanitarian worker. But at the same time, as a spiritual practitioner, we want to live these moments also in the light of the ultimate dimension, in the light of birth and death being ideas, in the light of continuation. There is always continuation. Nothing can be lost. And to see how deeply do we need to see to see the continuation of individual humans, of their actions of body, speech and mind, of cultures, of religions, of, yeah, just human transmission throughout space and time and even of our own actions in struggle against these massive forces. Can we see the continuation of our compassion, our humanity, our resilience, our endurance, our not giving up? So this realization is also to give us a frame of mind when we’re right in the face of birth and death to not be caught in thinking that that is the only dimension of reality.

00:22:08

Thank you, sister.

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And also, it’s about, can teach living beings and bring them great joy. So I think what you’re also saying is that even in the midst of difficulties, that we can also touch joy in that moment, that if we’re seeing, if we’re also feeling despair, that we can also touch joy, that those are not, we don’t have to feel only one or the other.

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Yeah. And in our spiritual tradition, I mean, we have this extraordinary example of Thay and Sister Chan Khong and their work with refugees, displaced peoples, homeless people during the war in Vietnam. And I find it extraordinary in our tradition, I mean, it’s here in this ancient sutra, but it’s also there, in the Plum Village tradition of spirituality, that in the face of great pain and despair, there must also be music. There must also be like siblinghood and solidarity and the sort of joy of togetherness to kind of hold each other tight through these really painful situations. And I mean, Sister Chan Khong and her singing, and she was always known as kind of like the singing nun throughout all their peace work in the 60s, 70s and 80s and her work with refugees and so on. And so seeing her smile, her singing, it’s like Sister Chan Khong’s first response to suffering is the light of life that comes through in her eyes and her voice. It’s like there is still this great mystery of what it means to be alive. And yeah, there is no life also without death. And I feel that our tradition has grown up with that deep insight in the kind of DNA of our spiritual practice. So this joy here is not a spiritual bypassing joy. It is a, where there is life, there is death. Where there is death, there is life. It’s a real touching what it means to, yeah, what it means for life to be happening on this planet.

00:24:15

Thank you, sister. So let’s move on. And it’s worth mentioning at this point actually that the first four that we did in the previous episode were very much around how we work with ourselves. And the second fours are really about how do we reach out into the world and act. So I think, let’s just bear that in mind. So I’m going to go on to the sixth one. And this is the one I find most difficult. And yeah, and also I find a lot of people I speak to that this is a very difficult one to take on. So I think, let’s give it a bit of time and space, but let me read it. The sixth realization is the awareness that poverty creates hatred and anger, which creates a vicious cycle of negative thoughts and actions. When practicing generosity, bodhisattvas consider everyone, friends, and enemies alike to be equal. They do not condemn anyone’s past wrongdoings or hate even those presently causing harm. So there are two parts to this actually, which I think is worth going on. One is about what it means by poverty, because obviously there’s poverty in the world as a physical reality, and then there’s a poverty of understanding. But this idea that we can treat equally, even those who are presently causing harm. I think people find very difficult to take on because it looks like it’s weak. It looks like even though if someone is beating me over the head, that I should treat them with compassion and be okay with it. So sister, let’s start off with you. What does it mean to treat someone equally even if they’re causing you harm?

00:26:16

So I think this realization is really talking about the quality, the spiritual energy we bring to our action, and to not take action from a place of hatred and to not take action from a place of kind of like favoritism and discrimination, like I’ll care for people, but only this kind of people. And so when it says, you know, in the practice of generosity, bodhisattvas consider everyone equal, it is something about, this is about engaged action, but it’s also about the mind that is taking the engaged action. Let our mind be something we are cultivating more and more to not have this discrimination and to not be a mind of kind of hatred or favoritism. And this is so important because when we’re saying that everyone’s equal, it’s more that, you know, everyone is part of this fabric of life. Everyone is part of, everyone has their role to play in this terrible mystery, let’s call it that, this glorious mystery. So everyone is life happening and people are sometimes deep in the mud and the compost, and they have all sorts of causes and conditions that lead them to be, quote unquote, the wrongdoer. And then other people who all sorts of causes and conditions lead them to be, quote unquote, the victim. But actually we can see everyone is at some level victims of the whole thing, right? So this is really about how we choose to take action in relation to all that and how also to kind of guard and take care of our mind for it not to be a hating mind, not to be a poison mind. Sometimes there’s this image in Buddhism of having a knife in our heart. And as soon as I think in myself, I see when I let that hatred creep in, and it does, I mean, I’m part of, I’m a part of the world too. I see what’s on the news. And having come from a political background, I also keep half an eye on politics, and it’s very hard not to resent people in power who I feel are not using their power to be truly of service, but more to be in service of their craving or greed or fear. And so to be able to say that true action, like the kind of action that bodhisattvas aspire to is an action where we’re not hating. That I think is the main part for most of us to be able to apply, to like really use our energy of mindfulness, to be aware, even in a professional setting, even in a dispute with friends or family, like have we let the energy of hatred to kind of creep in? And then this thing about not condemning anyone’s past wrongdoings or hating even those presently causing harm. So we may have certain political figures in our mind that are the object of who we think might be causing harm right now. I think it’s good also with this realization to start much closer to home. Like the family members, could be parents, could be grandparents, could be colleagues. What is the position of a bodhisattva when harm is happening around us? What’s our positionality? How do we place ourselves? And to recognize, for me, the insight here, especially I’m thinking of a particular family member, is to realize that people are a victim also of what they’re doing. If we really understand karma in a deep way, meaning everyone’s actions of body, speech, and mind carry their signature, and that is their continuation. So for someone who is acting from a place of selfishness, greed, or lack of kindness, or whatever, that’s not a good continuation for them. So the challenge is to relate to that with great compassion. I’m so sorry for them that they’re doing this thing that if only, forgive them, they know not what they do, I think is the line in the Christian tradition. So that is really, for me, what this realization is pointing to. And the reason I say start with family and don’t go straight to those political figures or, quote unquote, our enemies, is because, as with all practices, it’s much easier to start with something very tangible and where we have a clear realm of agency, like family members, friends, and colleagues. Your agency is vast in this setting. How are we going to listen to them? The actions we’re going to take, the words we’re going to use, how we think about them when we are ruminating on the problem or the situation. That is where we have a huge realm of agency. And I think that, as you rightly say, it can seem kind of like politically weak if we jump directly to like a global or geopolitical scale and then we say, oh, okay, I’m going to practice putting, I don’t know, a photo of this political leader who I despise on my altar as a way to force myself to practice compassion. It’s like, why start there? Just put your dad’s photo on the altar, work there and try and clear out all of those obstacles in your heart. I think sometimes we do these great symbolic acts, but they’re just so hugely challenging because, especially on the geopolitical scale, people are much more than like their physical form, right? But in the down-to-earth human scale, that is your parent, that is your colleague, that is your family member, that is your friend, and you can reach them. There’s just so much more that you can do. And a final thing on this is this very deep teaching from Thay and Dr. Martin Luther King about this idea of the beloved community, which in their few brief meetings they discussed at length together. And in the ideal beloved community of Dr. King, your enemies are included. Your enemies are included. The ones currently persecuting you are included. And I think this was such an important spiritual faith and practice of Thay and Dr. King at the time of the Civil Rights Movement. This is the 1960s, to be able to have that vast, our spiritual love should have that capacity to embrace everyone. And that is a spiritual challenge. It starts closer to home, but then it really opens up. And that’s, I think, a great vision. And for me, I find it really spiritually inspiring and, yeah, challenging. Calls me forward.

00:33:41

Thank you, sister. I was listening to a book by the Tibetan Buddhist nun Pema Chodron the other day. And she gave this example of if you’re walking under a tree and a branch falls off the tree and hits you on the head, how do you feel? And then if you’re walking down the same path under the tree, but someone throws a stick at you, that same stick at you, that same branch at you, and hits you on the head, do you feel the same? And she said, of course, normally we don’t. We sort of blame the other person. We feel angry. But she said, actually, when you look deeply, actually, it’s the same reason. There were causes and conditions for that branch to fall on the tree at that moment. And there were also causes and conditions for that person to throw that branch. And actually, at a deep level, there’s no difference. And I was telling this to one of my brothers. He said, yes, but that’s all very well, but someone threw the stick at you. So, Brother Phap Huu, I want to come to you around this of how to respond to these difficulties. And I’ll give you a live example that’s been really affecting me the last few weeks… A roofing guy who I knew and had worked with and I considered to be not a friend, but I always treated him very well, with great respect, treated him almost like a brother. And I needed the roof replacing on our barn and he came and did it. And he did a terrible job. And from day one, it leaked in several places. And I found this deeply painful because it cost a lot of money. I treated him so well and then I felt betrayed by him. And at that moment, it’s very, very difficult to see him with compassion because actually I’m feeling deep level of hurt and worries watching every time the rain comes in, the rain come, the sort of water coming through the roof, et cetera. And it took a lot for me to really work with that and to sort of come to a place where of even some understanding and compassion. So this is a very privileged problem. And then I look around the world at people who are deeply suffering from inequality or from political power or a myriad of things whose lives may be tortured by these things. When we’re in these difficult situations, it’s one thing to talk about it, it’s another to act. How can we start to act with greater compassion, even in the face of deep suffering?

00:36:36

With the practice of mindfulness, it always shines this light to our surroundings. And of course, we don’t ignore the suffering because it’s so in our life, it’s so present. But I think one of the qualities that we usually ignore is also the wonders that are still present. And that’s very hard practice. And I’m saying this, but it’s true because this is where the core teachings of Plum Village comes from. Like when Sister True D was sharing about the singing that Sister Chan Khong would activate every time that she would be involved in an event. And the singing and the recognizing of the joy and the wonders that can be generated in this moment is a practice. And believe it or not, we who are privileged, we think that what we have is what is equal, what is our views of happiness and fulfillment. And it’s very easy to place our mindset in everyone’s mindset in the world. And I think that’s a very ignorant view. And I just remember this very direct experience where I came home to my country in 2020 and I came to my direct family who lives in the country and who are in poverty compared to what we have in Plum Village, what we have in Canada, my mother and my direct family. And it was something very simple, which I realized they didn’t have a microwave. And in my mind I started to, you know, I was like, oh, let me provide them, let me give them happiness, let me give them joy. And so I go and I beg my uncle, can I please buy you a microwave? And my uncle was such a teacher at that moment, he just looked at me and he’s like, but we have enough. And I just… that was such a mirror for me and I just like stopped and I just realized that our concepts and idea of what it is to be in peace and be in joy, it’s very different for each and everyone’s experience. And that’s why mindfulness, like somebody who is under a country, maybe with a dictator, but in their little family, they have true love. They know how to care for each other. They are not being swept away by the cravings and the fighting of running after a position and ready to betray each other’s ethics because what they have deep in them is the ethics of we cannot survive without each other. So like, I think sometimes we just have to also expand our mind and knowing the capacity of our present moment actions that we can touch great joy and great happiness and still find the meaning of life in our circle that we are with. Like what Sister True D shared is such a deep teaching because it’s so easy whenever we hear these teachings, we direct it to these superpowers, right? And we give it a label and… but it’s very easy to point it outwards. But when we look directly at our present time with our situation, with our limits and capacity, what are the things that we can practice to not other each other? Like when I read this, like this is such a mantra that is to be recited every day. My practice is to see everyone as human beings. That is equality. We’re all human beings. We are born and we will die. That is something that we’re all equal. We have hunger. We have thirst. We look for love. We try to be accepted. There are some threats in humanity that if we look deeply with the lens of awareness, we can see that this is what the equality here is speaking about. In reality, we know that when we’re born, depending what conditions we are born in, it’s not equal. Somebody who has education and someone who doesn’t have education, we can already recognize that that is not equality. But because of our social norms, we create all of these status and we start to discriminate, right? And then we start to other each other. And we’re always othering each other. And this is one of the vows of a bodhisattva, of a great being, is to always shine the light of openness that we already spoke about, the light that everyone inside of them has a seed of love and a seed of compassion. And that was our teacher’s greatest transmission that he wanted to give to us again and again. He doesn’t talk much a lot about his time during the wars, but we can see it in his poetry in one of a very powerful poems that a lot of us, we still recite and even sing as Recommendation. He said, even if they crush you, you still practice to see them that humanity is not our enemy. Enemy is the ignorance of lack of understanding, the ignorance of discrimination, the ignorance of having a view that they are less than us. And I think this realization, when I bring it to my daily life, I see it active in me. I do have discrimination in me. I do have moments where I have to recite this mantra again. It’s that, no, I have to learn to see all of us as cells in one body. I have to learn to see that we’re all flowers in this garden of humanity. And one time I remember sharing to Thay one of my great transformation that I was able to forgive one of my bullies, which was a family member. And I was expecting a grand celebration with Thay, like, yeah, you did it. And Thay only said, well, that’s why you practice. And I felt a little bit defeated. I was showing off so much to Thay. And suddenly he just said, well, that’s why you practice. Bodhisattvas, these are our bread and butter every day that we have to be generating. We have to be reciting. We have to be aspiring to develop and to grow. And when we are able to see that we have that capacity, that it is in each and every one of us, then we won’t be so limited by the conditions. Because Thay said sometimes he has students, and he shared this to us monastics, he said, I have students that are in prison that are practicing better than all of you. So get your act up. Like, sit upright, be mindful. Don’t take your life for granted. I have students that have read my book in prison, and they write to me. And some of them have even seen that they are monastic because they know they don’t have the conditions to meet a teacher and to be ordained. But they are practicing the mindful action every day. And if they can do it in prison, all of you who have this freedom that you are living, can we really take a moment and realign ourselves to our deepest aspiration? So when we recite this eight realization, hopefully it activates some of our deepest desire as a human being to be able to cultivate in our daily life. And that’s how we will be able to transform this vicious cycle of negative thoughts. We can’t unless we take a moment to make a vow. But that vow is kind of like the enlightenment that Sister True Dedication was speaking about. It’s not a one-time action. We have to make a vow every day, because we’re always growing, we’re always developing, and we’re always going to meet our limits. There’s going to be times that we’re going to recognize that right now my heart is not the size of the great ocean. It’s literally a puddle. So if somebody, if I allow so many people to walk around it, it will stir up that puddle and it will become very muddy and I can’t be of service. So we also have to be able to know our capacity, our limits, and to not feel that this is something to be attained in one day, in one month, in one year, but it is a lifetime of cultivation.

00:47:14

Wow, beautiful, brother. And what you say reminds me of this book by Viktor Frankl, I think it’s called The Meaning of Life, and when he was in a concentration camp. And he said even when people were being led into the gas chamber, they had a choice of whether they were going to love or hate and that those who were, the majority of people who survived, they survived because they had meaning, they had a purpose, they could feel that love for life and didn’t succumb. Sister, I just wanted to come back to maybe the hardest part of this for me is when people say to me, if there’s someone you really despise or you think is really doing great harm in the world, and then you say, well, why don’t you try the practice of seeing yourself in them? And you say, no, the last thing I want to do is see myself in that person. And I just want to know the value of that. And just going back to what I was saying about this roofer who sort of deserted me in my hour of need, I was sitting in a group sharing in Plum Village the other night. And I was sharing this story actually, because it’s very much in my mind. And the monk who was leading the group, he said to me, he said, Jo, have you, I mean, he essentially said, have you, could you welcome him back? Could you see yourself in him? And when he did that, what I realized, I said, I could, I can see myself in him, because when I mess up, there’s a part of me that wants to hide away. I don’t want to admit that I’ve done wrong. I put my head in the sand, and actually I try to avoid dealing with a problem. And I could easily see that that was potentially what he was doing. He’d messed up. He felt bad about it. He didn’t want to come back and face what he was up to and had just basically left the scene. So is there a value in saying actually, what is the part of me that I’m seeing reflected in the other person?

00:49:41

I mean, maybe. I think that the interbeing is operating at different levels. And so it’s not exactly that we’re inside each other, but there’s an inter arising of you and with him in that moment. And the ways in which people are inside us, I mean, it’s all about also how close we are, right? So obviously, I mean, I don’t know that I’m inside Donald Trump, but interestingly, maybe Donald Trump is inside me, meaning I have a perception of Donald Trump, right, which occupies an insanely large amount of headspace, which I wish it didn’t. And because I find it fascinating, but also it echoes other aspects of relationships I have in my life. So when we’re seeing someone else, they’re not exactly outside of us. I think this is the point I’d like to get to. Thay used to say that when you see each other on the path as you’re walking through the hamlets here in the monastery, you say, hello, myself, because we’re seeing a projection of ourselves, the other person. And I think this is where the Buddhist psychology gets super deep and our understanding of things. So I guess the roofer inside your mind, Jo, is separate from the real roofer, who’s going about his daily life and trying to solve a problem because he cut a few corners. And oopsie, this is a lot of work to redo because it was probably one of the first tasks, and how can he do it without taking off the whole roof again? And maybe he can’t afford to do that. And that’s why I find this realization is so powerful. It says, awareness that poverty creates hatred and anger and this vicious cycle of negative thoughts and actions. And there are millions and billions of actions happening every day in the world where people cut corners, where people do a job not well because they can’t afford to do it well. So I find that this realization is kind of saying that poverty and material want, material lack, is a real thing that leads people to not be their best selves because you’re just struggling to survive. We’re in a cost of living crisis across Europe, across different countries. We are in a time of unstable harvests and yields and all the rest of it because of climate dysfunction and climate disintegration and so on. So I think there’s a material dimension to why we fall short in so many situations of being the best we can. Like how many families just have more anger because there’s less money. Like this is just, it’s just a real thing. And then when we are angry, we’re not clear, we’re not compassionate, and we don’t do our profession kind of well. So, and coming back to sort of your example, like we think someone is an obstacle, but a lot of that, we think someone is harming us, but we are experiencing it first and foremost kind of in our mind and then being able to create some space to be able to see kind of all the causes and conditions and why it might have come to be like that and to understand there’s really material reasons to do with poverty and inequality that might lead to certain things. And there’s something here about also this final line to not condemn anyone’s past wrongdoings. And this is like, it’s a really, really strong thing. And it’s not to say, so we shouldn’t misunderstand this to mean everything’s fine. We’ll let people just get away with everything at every level, right? People close and in our environment or people on the geopolitical stage. That’s not what this means. What this means is that the past is as it is, and it had loads of causes and conditions leading to it, including individual choices, but also a whole slew of other causes and conditions. And each present moment is the center point from which new change can happen. And if we’re so caught in the past and punishing people for the past or trying to like, yeah, have kind of a redemptive thing towards the past, we may miss the opportunity for renewal and a new direction in the present. And I’m trying to choose my words carefully because this is also a luxury, right? Not everyone can feel that we can shed the burden of the past and start from the present. And there are all sorts of reasons why that cannot be the whole truth. But what this is pointing to here is to say, because it’s the action of the bodhisattva, for us not to condemn. It’s like, it can still be wrong, but we are not lost in the condemning. And we start from the present moment. The past was wrong, we know that. But now, what can we do now? Starting today, how can we kind of reset this?