What is the Purpose of This Human Life

Thich Nhat Hanh — Winter Retreat 2013–2014 Full Moon Meditation Hall, New Hamlet, Plum Village · 5 December 2013 · talk 6 of 24

Illuminates: quality of life · love and understanding as the two true needs · spirituality vs. religion · the first three Verses again (self & dharmas manifest from ālaya) · the characteristics of a seed (the classical six + Plum Village’s two: individual/collective and interbeing) — direct support for Verse 9 · the four conditions · innate vs. newly-perfumed seeds · “no increasing, no decreasing.”

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Dear Sangha, today is the 5th of December, 2013. We are in the Full Moon Meditation Hall of the New Hamlet, Plum Village, in the winter retreat.

What is our purpose in this life?

There are turtles that live three or four hundred years; there are redwood trees that live up to two thousand years. A human lifespan is about a hundred years. We can ask ourselves: what is our purpose in living these hundred years in the world? Do we have a purpose — anything to realize, to accomplish?

Old people sometimes ask, “What have I done with my life?” — because they have reached a great age and see that the years passed very quickly, and that in those days there was nothing deep, nothing special. If we are young, we should not wait until we are old to ask this question. We should ask: what do I want to do with my life? Whatever we do, so long as we are happy and joyful while doing it — and the truth is that some of us can live the moments life offers us deeply. We are talking about the quality of life: how to have a life of quality, and not merely pass through the days.

The quality of life depends on whether we are able to live each moment deeply. Many of us think it depends on the comforts we have — material comforts, emotional comforts — and so all our life we look for them. We feel we must make a lot of money, have power and fame; and while chasing these things, we have no time to live. Our life becomes only a means to get fame, power, and profit. There are people with much money, power, and prestige who nonetheless have great suffering: their life has no quality, and they have no time to take care of themselves or to love the people close to them. So we cannot say that having money, power, or fame is happiness or quality of life.

In Vietnam, during the Trần dynasty, there was a king [Trần Nhân Tông] who gave his throne to his son in order to become a monk. As a monk he had more time to practice; he went to the mountain [Yên Tử] and spent much time there. In the old days there were no buses or airplanes — the king walked all over the country and met many people. Everyone knew this was a king who had become a monk, and they came to listen to his teaching. He wore a brown robe like the monks and nuns here, because in Vietnam brown is the color of simplicity and humility — the color of the earth, of those who work in the fields. When we practice and live a simple, humble life, brown is the color of liberation and yielding. Monastics in Vietnam are very close to the people; lay people wore white, which gets dirty easily and, in the days before soap, was hard to keep clean, while brown does not show the dirt.

In his last years the Buddha also walked, traveling to many places in the country of Sāvatthī, supported by King Prasenajit, who was the same age as the Buddha. Seeing how much the Buddha traveled, the king wanted to travel too. Once they met in the northern part of the country, and the king took the opportunity to praise the Buddha; the essence of that conversation was recorded as a sutra [the Dhammacetiya Sutta]. That day the king bowed and touched the earth deeply at the Buddha’s feet, very respectfully, and the Buddha asked, “Why do you pay such respect today?” The king said, “Dear Buddha, every time I see the Sangha — standing, walking, acting as a Sangha — I have such admiration and respect for you.” That was the last meeting between two old friends, one a Buddha and one a king.

Living deeply — the waking gatha

When we become monastics, in our first days we learn the gathas for practicing mindfulness. (We have twenty-seven aspirants to be ordained this coming Sunday — seven here in Plum Village and twenty at our center in Thailand, some from Vietnam.) The first gatha we memorize, used the moment we wake, is:

Waking up this morning, I smile. Twenty-four brand-new hours are before me. I vow to live them deeply, and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.

In our daily practice there are about sixty such gathas, and the first is on waking. The first thing we do on waking is smile — because we see that we are alive, born again into this world, with twenty-four hours ahead of us, a gift of life (like the milkman who, in the old days, left a bottle of milk at the door each morning). I vow to live deeply — I vow not to waste these twenty-four hours. That is the inspiration, the deep wish to live our life fully, while many of us waste our life and our youth running after images.

This gatha is for the old, who on waking realize how much of their life they have wasted, and for the young, that they not be foolish and waste theirs. In recent months Thay has been practicing breathing and walking with this gatha: I treasure the days and hours I still have; they are precious, and I don’t want to waste them on things that are unbeneficial. Every step and every breath is a wonder, and we have to treasure every moment. The quality of our life is our awareness of how precious life is — and that depends on how we live, on our capacity to live deeply, which rests on compassion and understanding.

Love and understanding — and what spirituality is

To be understood and to be loved are two great needs of a human being; if we have love and understanding, we live our life more deeply. So instead of searching for profit, praise, money, or sex, we look for these two things. Many of us are hungry for them and feel no one offers them — we complain that nobody loves or understands us. But why do we not understand and love others? We blame people for not understanding us, while we ourselves cannot understand and love them. So we have to cultivate the energy of understanding and compassion through daily practice.

Science, too, seeks to understand — discovering stars and galaxies, time and space, photons and electrons; physiology helps us understand our body — and we can profit from this to enrich our understanding. Philosophy also does research, using the mind — logic, psychology, the meaning of life and existence. (Stephen Hawking said philosophy is falling behind, that scientists are now ahead of the philosophers — but that is a little too optimistic; philosophers have their own ways of inquiry.) Beyond science and philosophy there is spirituality — Dao, the path (mārga) — another branch of inquiry, by which we seek to understand our own suffering and our own happiness, because in life we have difficulties and frustrations, with ourselves and with those we love.

So spirituality is a practice of looking deeply in order to understand — and this understanding brings acceptance and love. Spirituality is a path to cultivate understanding and love. When we understand and love ourselves, we feel well; those who do not understand or accept themselves, who carry many complexes, cannot understand or love others — for if we cannot love and understand ourselves, we cannot offer love and understanding to anyone else. So spirituality is not running away from life to some happiness outside the world; we are not looking for a Pure Land or paradise to reach after death. Spirituality is not religion. Spirituality is a path to co-generate happiness, understanding, and love, and to live each moment deeply — and it can benefit from the discoveries of science and philosophy.

We come to Plum Village because we need a way of living that heals the disease in our body and mind, that helps us manage our difficulties and generate peace, joy, and happiness — not to avoid life or its suffering. Those who have practiced longer and can deal with their suffering and generate joy in daily life — while walking, sitting, working — can guide those who cannot yet. That is the purpose of re-establishing community: to find elder brothers and sisters, trained longer than us, who can guide us.

So walking meditation is not to cultivate merit for the future, but to have peace and joy right in the present moment. It is the path of happiness and joy, not a means to get to happiness and joy. Sitting is the same: not to become a Buddha or anything, but to calm body and mind and have peace, joy, and happiness — and joy and peace help us see deeply, with mindfulness, concentration, and insight. (Of course, if we sleep well, sitting can be truly peaceful; if illness keeps us from sleep, sitting may be less peaceful, and we accept that, resolving to take better care of ourselves so we can sleep and truly benefit from sitting with the Sangha. Half an hour is not long or short in itself — it depends on our condition; the body plays an important role.)

Meditation is not only to have peace, but a way to sort out and see deeply into our difficulties and how to come out of them. First we need calm and stillness — that is called stopping (śamatha). It is an art: how to sit so that body and mind become calm and still. For this we use the sixteen exercises of mindful breathing, which calm the body and the feelings; we should have a good grasp of them, and if we don’t, ask a dharma teacher. Then, whether we sit, walk, or work in the kitchen, we can calm the frustration in the body and the emotions in the mind. We have a sister named Diệu (it means “adorned” — adorned with the quality of harmonizing body and mind), and every step can calm us. So in Plum Village we learn how to walk: not rushing, but walking as a free person. Our habit of walking quickly to get things done comes from our parents and ancestors; we walk automatically, like a machine. Here we should not be machines — we are our own master, the master of every step and every breath. With this sovereignty we can calm ourselves; calm, we can become concentrated; and concentrated, we can see — and insight into suffering and its root liberates us. Then, walking, sitting, lying down, eating, there is joy, peace, happiness, and compassion, and the quality of our life is high; we are not wasting our life.

There is a gatha for drinking tea:

This cup of tea in my two hands — mindfulness is held completely. My body and mind dwell in the here and the now.

We bring the mind back to the body, present and aware of our breathing, and drink the tea like that — and that is a moment of living deeply. There are gathas for sweeping, for brushing the teeth, for using the toilet — all in the Plum Village chanting book. Our purpose is to live each moment deeply, and not let it flow by wastefully.

The sutra: self and dharmas manifest from store consciousness

Now we turn to the sutra. We are learning the eighth consciousness, the ālaya, store consciousness. Read the first three verses again.

The first verse: the self and the dharmas (the phenomena) we perceive are manifested in many different ways. Obama is a self; Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Lincoln are selves; “brother,” “sister” are selves — all manifested from store consciousness. And apart from the self there are dharmas, phenomena: the Pyrenees is a phenomenon, the Garonne River is a phenomenon, the Mississippi, the North Star — these are things, dharmas. So there are selves and there are things, manifested in many ways, and all of them manifested from one root: store consciousness. Store consciousness is the subject, the manifesting; the self and the dharmas are the object, the manifested.

The second verse: this store consciousness is maturation (vipāka), and it is the store of all the seeds; its capacity to receive and maintain all the seeds is beyond knowing — how the seeds are received and manifested, and the locality of the manifestation, cannot be known. We learn again that vijñapti — “manifestation, so that we can discern it” — is the more correct rendering. The ālaya does two works: it receives and maintains the seeds, and it receives and maintains our body with its five sense organs; and it also manifests the place, the locality, the environment in which the body lives.

So our karma — our action — brings retribution (vipāka), and the retribution has two parts: the body with its five sense organs [proper retribution], and the environment in which the body lives [environmental retribution, sthāna]. The ālaya manifests not only this body but the environment too — we are not only this body, but also this environment, this situation.

And the seeds are of three kinds: the images of selves and phenomena that go into the store; the names (as when we learn English or a song, the sound and the name are planted in the store); and the habit of discrimination. This last is the habit of saying “father is not the son, snow is not rain” — taking father as just father, snow as just snow, not seeing the connection, not seeing the snow in the rain or the rain in the snow. That habit of discriminating is itself a seed that goes into store consciousness.

The characteristics of a seed

The example, easy to understand from previous talks, is H₂O: two hydrogen, one oxygen — it becomes a “seed,” and this seed manifests as rain, snow, ice, clouds, rivers. When it is H₂O we call it a seed; when it becomes rain or snow or ice, we call it a formation. So seeds give rise to formations: the seed is the cause, the formation is the fruit.

(1) Momentariness (kṣaṇika). We usually think the cause is separate from the effect — but consider first the characteristic of kṣaṇa: the seed changes in every instant, in less than a millisecond. Here store consciousness is unlike a computer’s hard disk, where the information stays exactly as we put it in; the seeds in store consciousness are changing all the time, going through birth and death continually. This is impermanence — like a cinematographic series, born and dying every instant. To think a seed stays fixed, so that we could photograph it, is not correct.

(2) Coexistent with its fruit (sahabhū). When we define a true seed, its nature is that the fruit coexists with the cause — they arise together, they inter-are; we should not dissect them into two separate things. The result coexists with the cause. This is the second characteristic, and a very good one — you have to remember the H₂O example: seeds give birth to formations, yet the seed can be found in the formation; we should not look for the seed elsewhere. We can look for our father and mother in ourselves — the closest and safest place to find them is in ourselves.

(3) Continuous as a series (santati). Though the seed dies and is reborn every instant, it is continuous — store consciousness preserves all the seeds, and its nature is to be continuous and changing at once. Like the Seine: we cannot swim twice in the same Seine — it changes every second (and now it is too polluted to swim in at all) — yet it continues as a series. Not only the ālaya but the seeds too continue as a series. We think a man is the same all the time, but he is a continuum, continuing and changing every minute — biology sees that in this moment millions of cells are dying and millions being born, birth and death in every second — yet we still see “Mr. A” as Mr. A. So it is not rigid and unchanging. A cloud seems always a cloud, but it is a series of changes: made of tiny droplets of water or ice, so light that warm air lifts them; when they gather and grow heavy, they fall as rain, and the heat of the ground evaporates the water back into cloud. (A cubic meter of cloud may hold only a few grams of water, but some clouds hold tons and can flood a city; clouds look gentle but can be powerful — even compassion can be like thunder.) So a seed is continuously changing in a series, not static.

(4) Determinate in nature. A seed maintains its own nature: a good seed maintains its goodness. The seed of joy keeps being joy over time; the seeds of love, joy, equanimity — or of greed, anger, ignorance — each has its own nature and is not mixed up with the others. A bean seed always gives beans, never tomatoes; it does not get mixed up.

(5) Waiting for conditions to manifest. A seed manifests only when conditions are sufficient. Water vapor we do not see by day; when the sun sets and the earth and rivers grow cold, the cold is the condition by which the unseen vapor becomes mist or fog — and fog and vapor are the same thing, both H₂O, the nature maintained. A corn seed has the capacity to become a corn plant, but kept in a can it never will; we have to put it in the soil — the soil is a condition, the water another, the warmth another, and in seven days the seed becomes a seedling. So seeds are always waiting for conditions to manifest. Our seeds of compassion, love, and understanding, if we cultivate them — give them the conditions — stay and grow; without the conditions they wither and shrink.

These conditions are of four kinds:

1. Cause-condition (hetu-pratyaya) — the main cause; e.g., the corn seed is the cause-condition of the corn.
2. Supporting condition (adhipati-pratyaya) — the supporting conditions that help the main cause bear fruit; e.g., earth, rain, and heat help the seed become a plant.
3. Continuity condition (samanantara-pratyaya) — like the links of a chain: without one link before and one after, there is no continuity. If we plant a tree and then pull it out again, it cannot grow. So there must be continuity without disruption.
4. Object-condition (ālambana-pratyaya) — the object of perception. When we see, we see something; when we are angry, we are angry at someone. A mental state must have an object, just as eating must have something eaten.

(6) Leading to its own fruit. Sixth, by tradition, a seed leads to its own fruit: a bean leads to beans, not to corn. Here this concerns quality — wholesome, unwholesome, neutral: a wholesome seed leads to a wholesome quality, an unwholesome seed to an unwholesome one.

Two more: the Plum Village additions

These six characteristics, taken alone, can create a misunderstanding if we think dualistically — that a seed is just itself, sealed off from the others — for they do not yet show the interconnectedness of the seeds. We may imagine the seed of suffering as completely different from the seed of happiness, not seeing that it is precisely by looking deeply into suffering that we generate understanding and love — that understanding and love come from that suffering. Just as the lotus is different from the mud, yet without the mud there is no lotus, so when we look at a lotus we should see the mud. The work of the ancestral teachers is not complete; as their children we have to complete their understanding. So in the Manifestation-Only teaching we add two characteristics, drawing on what we have already learned of collective and individual manifestation:

(7) Individual and collective manifestation. Every seed has the nature of both individual and collective manifestation. Take the sun: it is a collective manifestation of all our store consciousnesses — a vijñapti, a manifestation (not “consciousness”), a collective product of all living beings — yet each of us benefits from it differently; the sun in the tropics is not the sun of the north; the temperature of Eastern Europe differs from the West. So in the collective there is the individual. France is a collective for all the French, yet at this moment the south-east has no sun but mist, so we do not benefit from the sun but from the mist. Plum Village is a collective manifestation, yet some have lived here many years and others only a few days. There is nothing completely collective and nothing completely individual — there may be more of one or the other. This is not something new; it is already there in the Manifestation-Only schools, that every seed has the character of sva- (individual) and sādhāraṇa- (collective) vijñapti.

(8) Interbeing and interpenetration. The eighth characteristic brings the spirit of the Avataṃsaka Sutra into the Manifestation-Only teaching (just as the studies of [the Avataṃsaka / Huayan] contribute to it): looking into a seed, into its manifestation, we see its interbeing and interpenetration with the other seeds. We had seen only “wholesome as wholesome, unwholesome as unwholesome, neutral as neutral”; but the eighth characteristic shows that wholesomeness, unwholesomeness, and neutrality are connected — the wholesome can be made of the unwholesome. So the fourth and sixth characteristics can create a misunderstanding, and the seventh and eighth keep us from being caught in it: the three qualities affect one another.

Non-regression — and the impermanence of insight

We have learned the idea of non-regression (avaivartika): that having attained a certain state of mind, we will not fall back into a lower one. What is it that we attain? Not just an insight as information, but an insight that leads to understanding and love. And the question: after we become a Buddha, do we fall back down and become a sentient being again? Many of us recover from depression with treatment, and then it returns; or it goes by itself and comes back. So who among us dares to say we will never fall back? Why does one person regress and another not?

The only answer is conditions: if we do not nurture and nourish that insight, that happiness, we can lose it. We have insight, we have happiness — but if we don’t know how to nourish it, we lose it. It is the same for the Buddha: the Buddha continues to practice because he knows he must keep nourishing that insight. Non-regression is possible if we know how to maintain and nourish. Nothing is permanent — even enlightenment, even liberation and happiness, is generated by impermanence; if we don’t nourish it, it changes into something else. (Why would the law of impermanence apply to us and not to a Buddha? We hold the Buddha in such love and respect that we feel distant from him — but an ancestral master said the Buddha and sentient beings are one: without sentient beings there is no Buddha.) So insight, too, is impermanent if we don’t feed it — and in the history of Manifestation-Only, many teachers held different, even conflicting, views.

Innate or newly-perfumed? — neither new nor old

On the origin of the seeds: one master — whose name means “the moon” [Candra-; name uncertain in the transcript] — held that all our seeds (of sadness and happiness, enlightenment and delusion, pure and impure) are already there in store consciousness, innate, from beginningless time. Master Nanda held that the seeds are newly planted — learned and perfumed into store consciousness from beginningless time, all of them “newly planted,” generated rather than innate, as we keep bringing in and watering new seeds.

Manifestation-Only holds that there are two kinds: seeds that are always there, innate, from beginningless time; and seeds that are newly planted — for example, when we learn a new song, the tune is not innate but newly learned. But in Plum Village we take the non-dualistic view, the insight of interbeing: if there is no old, there is no new, and if there is no new, there is no old. So we go a step further: the seeds are neither new nor old, neither increasing nor decreasing. This goes with the teaching of emptiness — nothing added, nothing lost — and is equivalent to the scientific law of conservation of energy: matter and energy neither increase nor decrease; we cannot create new energy or matter, only transform one form into another. (In Buddhism matter is rūpa. There is the realm of form and the realm of non-form; one of Thay’s poems asks what happens when form meets non-form — and science says that when matter meets antimatter, it annihilates and becomes energy; matter becomes energy and energy becomes matter, and nothing is lost.) So we must push the Manifestation-Only teaching a step further in that direction to make it complete.

Perfuming, the evolving consciousnesses, and “no increasing, no decreasing”

The key term is perfuming / permeation (vāsanā): as we mix lotus pollen with tea to make lotus tea, or jasmine with tea to make jasmine tea, so the nature of ālaya is that it can be permeated — its nature is neutral, so we can make it wholesome or unwholesome, perfuming it with lotus, jasmine, or rose. The other seven consciousnesses — manas, the mind-consciousness, and the five sense-consciousnesses — are manifested from the eighth and are called the evolving consciousnesses: as the ocean (the ālaya) raises seven kinds of waves, so from store consciousness arise the seven. What they do is perfume the ālaya: the evolving consciousness is the subject of perfuming (the jasmine), and the ālaya the object perfumed (the tea).

From the perspective of perfuming, we think new things come in to help the old ones grow: in store consciousness there are all kinds of seeds — delusion and enlightenment, happiness and suffering, purity and impurity — and as practitioners we make the wholesome seeds grow and the unwholesome ones (anger, jealousy) diminish. But the truth is that the nature of the seeds is not increasing or decreasing. In our world we plant rice, wheat, and oats in great quantity because we need bread, and try to eliminate the seeds we don’t want, like weeds or poison oak. We seem to make rice abundant — but only because we add manure, fertilizer, water; it is a cycle, like H₂O becoming cloud, rain, sun. So there is really no increasing and no decreasing. We can make more of this seed and less of that, but the nature is no-increase, no-decrease. The wholesome and unwholesome seeds in store consciousness are like that: we feel we make one grow and the other shrink — and we do practice and cultivate, as a farmer plants what he wants to harvest and not what he doesn’t — but in the end nothing is truly more or less. The ālaya is impermanent and neutral, and from that ground we plant more of one seed and less of another — yet there is no increasing and no decreasing.

We will continue next time.