There's a revolution and it starts from inside each one of us. We need to wake up and fall in love with the Earth. Our personal and collective happiness and survival depends on it.
Though we all have the fear and the seeds of anger within us, we must learn not to water those seeds and instead nourish our positive qualities — those of compassion, understanding, and loving kindness.
For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.
Guarding knowledge is not a good way to understand. Understanding means to throw away your knowledge.
When you climb a ladder and arrive on the sixth step and you think that is the highest, then you cannot come to the seventh. So the technique is to abandon the sixth in order for the seventh step to be possible. And this is our practice, to release our views. The practice of nonattachment to views is at the heart of the Buddhist practice of meditation.
Meditation is not to avoid society; it is to look deep to have the kind of insight you need to take action. To think that it is just to sit down and enjoy the calm and peace, is wrong.
Meditation is to be aware of what is going on in your body, in your feelings, in your mind, and in the world.
We should be able to bring the practice of meditation hall into our daily lives. We need to discuss among ourselves how to do it. Do you practice breathing between phone calls? Do you practice smiling while cutting carrots? Do you practice relaxation after hard hours of work? These are practical questions. If you know how to apply meditation to dinner time, leisure time, sleeping time, it will penetrate your daily life, and it will also have a tremendous effect on social concerns.
Each thought, each action in the sunlight of awareness becomes sacred.
* * * * *
Life is both dreadful and wonderful. To practice meditation is to be in touch with both aspects.
Suffering is not enough. Life is both dreadful and wonderful...How can I smile when I am filled with so much sorrow? It is natural — you need to smile to your sorrow because you are more than your sorrow.
In modern society most of us don't want to be in touch with ourselves; we want to be in touch with other things like religion, sports, politics, a book — we want to forget ourselves. Anytime we have leisure, we want to invite something else to enter us, opening ourselves to the television and telling the television to come and colonize us.
We are imprisoned in our small selves, thinking only of the comfortable conditions for this small self, while we destroy our large self.
If you have a gun, you can shoot one, two, three, five people; but if you have an ideology and stick to it, thinking it is the absolute truth, you can kill millions.
The other person has wrong perceptions about himself and about us. And we have wrong perceptions about ourselves and the other person. And that is the foundation for violence and conflict and war.
We have the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast. But in the name of freedom, people have done a lot of damage. I think we have to build a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast in order to counterbalance. Because liberty without responsibility is not true liberty. We are not free to destroy.
No single tradition monopolizes the truth. We must glean the best values of all traditions and work together to remove the tensions between traditions in order to give peace a chance.
Deep listening is the kind of listening that can help relieve the suffering of another person. You can call it compassionate listening. You listen with only one purpose: to help him or her to empty his heart.
A look filled with understanding, an accepting smile, a loving word, a meal shared in warmth and awareness are the things which create happiness in the present moment. By nourishing awareness in the present moment, you can avoid causing suffering to yourself and those around you. The way you look at others, your smile, and your small acts of caring can create happiness. True happiness does not depend on wealth or fame.
* * * * *
Understanding and Love are not two separate things, but just one. To develop understanding, you have to practice looking at all living beings with the eyes of compassion. When you understand, you cannot help but love. And when you love, you naturally act in a way that can relieve the suffering of people.
If I don't understand you, I may be angry at you, all the time. We are not capable of understanding each other, and that is the main source of human suffering.
The problem is whether we are determined to go in the direction of compassion or not. If we are, then can we reduce the suffering to a minimum? If I lose my direction, I have to look for the North Star, and I go to the north. That does not mean I expect to arrive at the North Star. I just want to go in that direction.
When we are angry, our anger is our very self. To suppress or chase away our anger is to suppress or chase away ourselves. When anger is born, we can be aware that anger is an energy in us, and we can change that energy into another kind of energy. If we want to transform it, first we have to know how to accept it.
If you cannot be compassionate to yourself, you will not be able to be compassionate to others. When we get angry, we have to produce awareness: “I am angry. Anger is in me. I am anger.” That is the first thing to do.
I
would not look upon anger as something foreign to me that I have to
fight... I have to deal with my anger with care, with love, with
tenderness, with nonviolence.
When you look deeply into your anger, you will see that the person you call your enemy is also suffering. As soon as you see that, the capacity of accepting and having compassion for them is there.
When we come into contact with the other person, our thoughts and actions should express our mind of compassion, even if that person says and does things that are not easy to accept. We practice in this way until we see clearly that our love is not contingent upon the other person being lovable.
Nonviolent action, born of the awareness of suffering and nurtured by love, is the most effective way to confront adversity.
When your mind is liberated, your heart floods with compassion.
* * * * *
Without suffering, there’s no happiness. So we shouldn’t discriminate against the mud. We have to learn how to embrace and cradle our own suffering and the suffering of the world, with a lot of tenderness.
To take good care of ourselves, we must go back and take care of the wounded child inside of us. You have to practice going back to your wounded child every day. You have to embrace him or her tenderly, like a big brother or a big sister. You have to talk to him, talk to her. And you can write a letter to the Little child in you, of two or three pages, so that you recognize his or her presence, and will do everything you can to heal his or her wounds.
Most people are afraid of suffering. But suffering is a kind of mud to help the lotus flower of happiness grow. There can be no lotus flower without the mud.
Feelings, whether of compassion or irritation, should be welcomed, recognized, and treated on an absolutely equal basis; because both are ourselves. The tangerine I am eating is me. The mustard greens I am planting are me. I plant with all my heart and mind. I clean this teapot with the kind of attention I would have were I giving the baby Buddha or Jesus a bath. Nothing should be treated more carefully than anything else. In mindfulness, compassion, irritation, mustard green plant, and teapot are all sacred.
An emotion is only an emotion. It's just a small part of your whole being. You are much more than your emotion. An emotion comes, stays for a while, and goes away, just like a storm. If you're aware of that, you won't be afraid of your emotions.
With negative energy you can make the positive energy. A flower will become compost someday, but if you know how to transform the compost back into the flower, then you don't have to worry. You don't have to worry about your anger because you know how to handle it - to embrace, to recognize, and to transform it. So this is what is possible.
Everything inside and around us wants to reflect itself in us. We don't have to go anywhere to obtain the truth. We only need to be still and things will reveal themselves in the still water of our heart.
If you touch one thing with deep awareness, you touch everything.
Impermanence and selflessness are not negative aspect of life, but the very foundation on which life is built. Impermanence is the constant transformation of things. Without impermanence, there can be no life. Selflessness is the interdependent nature of all things. Without interdependence, nothing could exist.
* * * * *
We have a lamp inside us. The oil of that lamp is our breathing, our steps, and our peaceful smile. Our practice is to light up the lamp.
We all have the seeds of love in us. We can develop this wonderful source of energy, nurturing the unconditional love that does not expect anything in return.
If you wish to have children, please do something for the world you will bring them into. That will make you someone who works for peace, in one way or another.
We
humans think we are smart, but an orchid, for example, knows how to
produce noble, symmetrical flowers, and a snail knows how to make a
beautiful, well-proportioned shell. Compared with their knowledge, ours
is not worth much at all. We should bow deeply before the orchid and the
snail and join our palms reverently before the monarch butterfly and
the magnolia tree. The feeling of respect for all species will help us
recognize the noblest nature in ourselves.
By eating meat we share responsibility for causing climate change, the destruction of our forests, and the poisoning of our air and water. The simple act of becoming a vegetarian can make a difference in the health of our planet.
The best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment.
We may think of peace as the absence of war, that if the great powers would reduce their weapons arsenals, we could have peace. But if we look deeply into the weapons, we will see our own minds — our own prejudices, fears, and ignorance.
Recognize that it is not really possible to steadily help others when we ourselves are not in good physical, mental, or emotional state. We may be able to carry on for a while, but sooner or later we end up feeling depleted, discouraged, or weak. We cannot keep on giving when we are running on an empty tank. We need to be solid.
Only your compassion and your loving kindness are invincible, and without limit.
* * * * *
The essence of love and compassion is understanding, the ability to recognize the physical, material, and psychological suffering of others, to put ourselves "inside the skin" of the other. We "go inside" their body, feelings, and mental formations, and witness for ourselves their suffering. Shallow observation as an outsider is not enough to see their suffering. We must become one with the subject of our observation. When we are in contact with another's suffering, a feeling of compassion is born in us. Compassion means, literally, "to suffer with."
If we take the time to look deeply, we see that understanding and compassion arise from suffering. Understanding is the understanding of suffering, and compassion is the kind of energy that can transform suffering. If suffering is not there, we have no means to cultivate our understanding and our compassion. This is something quite simple to see.
A
Bodhisattva is someone who has compassion within himself or herself and
who is able to make another person smile or help someone suffer less.
Every one of us is capable of this.
We
have to continue to learn. We have to be open. And we have to be ready
to release our knowledge in order to come to a higher understanding of
reality.
Many of us have been running all our lives. Practice stopping.
Our life is a manifestation, and we can very well make that manifestation beautiful and meaningful and have a good influence.
People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.
Everything we think, feel, and do has an effect on our ancestors and all future generations and reverberates throughout the Universe. Therefore, our smile helps everyone.
Our own life has to be our message.
Because you are alive, everything is possible.
— Thích Nhất Hạnh
https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/
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