The Joy of the Dharma

Thich Nhat Hanh — Winter Retreat 2013–2014 Stillwater Meditation Hall, Upper Hamlet, Plum Village · 6 February 2014 · talk 23 of 24

Illuminates: vitality (mạng căn / jīvitendriya) — rūpa- and nāma-jīvitindriya; the mother’s and the fetus’s vitality are one · the non-distinction of animate and inanimate (the corn grain, the subatomic particle have consciousness) · the cloud living deeply (no-birth-no-death) · mindful breathing generating mindfulness · concentration · insight; the bell (three breaths per sound) · dharma joy (dharma-prīti, “joy of meditation as food”) · walking gathas (“I am walking legendary steps”) · eating meditation (mindfulness of food & of the Sangha) · the Thirty Verses, vv. 5–7 on manas — the second manifester (manifestation ≠ creation; vapor/cloud); manas grasps the body as a self (satkāya-dṛṣṭi); the four afflictions (self-delusion · self-view · self-pride / the three complexes · self-love) + the five universals; manas obstructed and indeterminate, following store consciousness “like a shadow,” becoming the wisdom of non-discrimination · don’t eliminate the mud (manas) — use it.

---

[Opening chant — French invocation to breathe and chant as one body, freeing us from the three complexes; then the chant to Avalokiteśvara, seen as present here and now.]

Dear Sangha, today is the 6th of February, 2014. We are in the Stillwater Meditation Hall of the Upper Hamlet, in the winter retreat.

Vitality — and the fetus and the mother

Among the mental formations we have learned is vitality (mạng căn / [jīvitendriya]) — life-force; jīva is life, indriya the base, the ground. We already have this energy as a fetus in the mother’s womb. The tradition distinguishes two kinds: rūpa-jīvitindriya (the vitality of form, the material aspect) and nāma-jīvitindriya (the vitality of name — similar to what we call “soul”: feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness). As a fetus there is already a force that pushes forward, in body and in mind. And in the womb the fetus’s vitality is intermingled with the mother’s — her vitality flows into the child, the child’s into her, so the “soul” of mother and fetus are not two separate things; at the beginning they were one. After birth we think them two separate spirits — but looking at the mother we can see the child, and at the child the mother.

Animate and inanimate are not two

We usually distinguish animate objects (which “have a soul,” like animals) from inanimate ones — but this is not a correct distinction, for even in the so-called inanimate there is vitality. A grain of corn looks inanimate, yet it has understanding, consciousness: planted in soil, it knows how to sprout, to make leaves and fruit — so we cannot call it inanimate. Quantum physics now sees that even subatomic particles have their wisdom; and looking at the moon and stars, we see they too are consciousness — and that we are also the moon and stars. (In this retreat we have studied the Manifestation-Only teaching; a summary booklet, in Vietnamese, is being translated into English so our non-Vietnamese-speaking friends can learn it, and copies will be made for each of us.) So we cannot draw a border between living matter and inert matter — for in the inert there is life; as the Diamond Sutra teaches, the animate is made of the inanimate.

Look at a patch of cloud: it has its life span, its life. When it is no longer there we think it has died — but the cloud only becomes rain, and the rain becomes river or cloud again; it goes in a cycle, continuing its life. And when it is a cloud, it lives its life as a cloud deeply; when rain, it lives deeply as rain. It is the same for us: we have to live our life deeply — for, like the cloud, nothing can really die; science has found that the nature of matter and energy is no birth, no death, and what we call death is only continuation in a different form. Most of us waste our life, not knowing how to live deeply, how to have peace and happiness in each moment — and learning Buddhism is learning to live deeply each moment of the life given to us.

Living each breath — the bell

With an in-breath, we find peace and joy in the in-breath, living it deeply, experiencing it — and then the in-breath can generate peace. But most of us breathe in only for the sake of breathing in, with anger and anxiety, and so the breath has no quality. In the Sutra on Mindful Breathing the Buddha teaches us how to breathe so as to release the tension in body and mind.

When you hear the bell, live with the sound of the bell. The invited sound may last a few seconds; with it we can breathe in for four seconds and out for six — ten seconds — and do this three times, so one sound of the bell is three breaths. When the bell-master invites three sounds, we have nine breaths, and can generate much peace. While breathing we stop all thinking and concentrate only on the breath, letting go of anxiety and projects, becoming light like a cloud.

And as we breathe like this, other energies are generated. First, mindfulness — knowing what is happening: I am breathing in, and I know it. Concentrating the mind on the in-breath, the anxieties of past and future dissipate — and that is concentration, one-pointedness of mind, by which we are truly present, a free person. And then the third energy, insight, brings joy: I recognize that I am breathing, that I am still alive, that I have two good eyes to see the blue sky, ears to hear the birds, two lungs to breathe — these are insights that arise naturally when the mind is concentrated. So with mindfulness, concentration, and insight, the in-breath and out-breath carry peace and happiness. This is a training — so coming to Plum Village, we should not waste time talking or thinking too much, but stop, and live in each breath.

When we breathe like this — letting go of past and future and of tension in body and mind, able to enjoy the breath — the breath has the capacity to heal and nourish. A practitioner is one who can feel the joy of breathing in and out; if breathing tires us, we do not yet know how to breathe. This joy is the joy of the dharma [dharma-prīti] — “the joy of meditation as food,” the daily food that nourishes and heals us. If we have joy and peace, we have something to offer our beloved; if not, we have nothing to offer.

Walking, and the gathas

Our life is made of every breath and every step. From our living quarters to the meditation hall, we train to walk so that each step generates peace and joy — for a young novice who has just shaved her head, this is the opportunity. To walk in a hurry is to waste our life; why run? Our teachers have transmitted gathas for every step: “I am walking legendary steps; I am breathing legendary breaths; I am living legendary moments — happiness is available on my path.” Walking with the Sangha we keep a normal pace; walking alone, we can go slower, one step to an in-breath, one step to an out-breath, tasting the joy in each step (slow walking meditation). These verses are not thinking — they are meditation words to lean on, like a railing as we climb the stairs, helping us maintain the insight that we are lucky, with two good legs, making peaceful steps. Climbing a hill, the steps per breath grow fewer — walking (in), legendary steps (out) — and even climbing we are not tired, but enjoy every step.

Eating meditation

Meditation brings joy. As a beginner, we breathe to calm the breath and let the body rest, upright and relaxed (calming the body). And when we eat, we are not thinking but feeling the food — for mindfulness, concentration, and insight let us see how wonderful it is to sit with our teacher and friends. When we bring our food to the table, we need not wait for others — we simply breathe; and even before eating we feel the joy. When the last person sits down, the collective energy of mindfulness is already powerful, because everyone is breathing — and we nourish one another with it. (This is Sangha-building: at home we eat together with our family as we eat in the Sangha.) Taking a spoonful of food, the mind not thinking, we attend to two things: the food, and the friends around us — mindfulness of food, mindfulness of Sangha. We are aware that this food is the gift of the whole universe, the earth and sky working to bring this grain of rice — and it takes only a second to recognize it. There is a sister whose name means “she adorns herself with her presence” — for when the mind is not present, “we look but do not see, listen but do not hear, eat but do not know the flavor” (a line from a sutra); that is forgetfulness, the lack of mindfulness. So we chew — at least thirty times, until the food becomes small, liquid, and very tasty — breathing, in touch with earth and sky, not chewing our projects or anxiety, but the food. We need not eat much to feel nourished — nourished not only by the food but by the practice of mindfulness, joy, and peace. The secret is no thinking; if we must think, we think with mindfulness and concentration, and that is productive — while endless mental discourse only makes us busy and cuts us off from life. So we would not regret, when one day we “become rain,” that as a cloud we did not live the cloud’s life deeply.

The Thirty Verses — manas (vv. 5–7)

Please take out the Thirty Verses; we will learn verses five, six, and seven, which speak of manas.

Verse 5 — the second manifester. The word here means manifestation, and a force that brings it about — the manifester. Manifestation is not creation: creation means something from nothing; manifestation means what is already there comes into existence in a different form. A cloud does not come from nothing — it was already there as water vapor, unseen, not yet manifested as cloud. So the manifester is like the water vapor, the manifested like the cloud — and the two cannot be separated: the vapor is present in the cloud; you cannot take it out. (In Christianity the creator and the created are thought to be two separate things, able to exist apart — but cloud and vapor cannot.) When we look at the moon, the stars, the rivers and mountains — the manifested — the manifester is the store consciousness. The first manifester is store consciousness; now we learn the second, which is manas. Manas leans on store consciousness to manifest, then returns to it and grasps onto it — like a vine that puts out a branch and grips the trunk of a tree. From the vitality in store consciousness arises this second manifester, manas, whose nature and function are mentation (cogitation) — the base from which thoughts arise. Manas grasps onto the body — which is made of the five elements (form, feeling, perception, mental formations, consciousness) — and takes it as itself. In store consciousness this body is something wondrous, free, not an object of grasping; but manas seizes it as its object of love and calls it “myself” — the view of the body (satkāya-dṛṣṭi). So manas has a direct but erroneous perception: the body, which is “things in themselves” in store consciousness, becomes, for manas, a creation — a self — and manas holds it day and night, “this is mine,” not knowing the body is made of mountains, rivers, vegetation — the environment. Take the environment out of manas, and manas does not see it; it says, “this body is mine, the environment is not me.”

Verse 6 — the four afflictions. Manas is accompanied by four afflictions: self-ignorance (delusion about the self), self-view (wrong view of the self), self-pride (which gives rise to the three complexes — superiority: “I am better, I am number one”; inferiority: “I have no value”; and equality: “I am no worse than the other”), and self-love (attachment to itself). This is why manas is called the lover — and in each of us there is this lover. Manas also goes with the five universal mental formations — contact, attention, feeling, perception, volition. So manas accompanies the four afflictions and the five universals together.

Verse 7 — obstructed and indeterminate. Manas is indeterminate — neither wholesome nor unwholesome — and obstructed, covered up, because it is born of the life-force, the will to live, and grasps the body, and so does not see the truth. Store consciousness is unobstructed and indeterminate; manas is obstructed and indeterminate. Wherever store consciousness is, manas follows it like a shadow — when store consciousness comes to Plum Village, manas comes too. But when we attain the deep concentration called cessation, or become an arhat, manas is no longer present, and in its place arises the wisdom of non-discrimination (the wisdom of sameness) — no longer seeing a separate self and object, with no more ignorance or attachment. This is the understanding of the Manifestation-Only teachers.

Don’t eliminate the mud

But those two lines do not yet express the deeper understanding. The issue is not that manas must be completely gone for wisdom to arise. We have to use the mud of manas to make the wisdom — for as long as there is mud, there is the lotus. In each of us there is suffering, sexual energy, the formations of attachment, of complexes, of wrong view, of ignorance — all mud. If a church or another center says, “I have a way to get rid of this mud completely,” we in Plum Village do not say that — we do not want to get rid of the mud, because we make use of it to grow the lotus. The reason we are unhappy is that we let the mud grow and do not know how to use it. Happiness is made of suffering; the lotus is made of mud; without mud there is no lotus. So we accept the mud in ourselves — “I have mud, and that is okay” — and just that acceptance brings peace; we need not hurry to eliminate it. The point is only not to let the mud overwhelm us, but to use it to grow lotuses. As long as there is manas, there is the wisdom of non-discrimination — so we make use of manas to grow that wisdom; we do not have to reach a point where manas is wholly gone. Indeed, without manas there is no consciousness — without it we could not hear or see, could not have mind consciousness or the five sense-consciousnesses, which are our tools for practice. Grasp this well, so that reading the original text we do not fall into the misleading idea that the goal is to destroy manas.