The Embodied Mind

Thich Nhat Hanh — Winter Retreat 2013–2014 Assembly of Stars Meditation Hall, Lower Hamlet, Plum Village · 9 February 2014 · talk 24 of 24 (final)

Illuminates: the passing of Brother Pháp Ê (“this body is not me; I am life without boundaries”) · the embodied mind — body and mind together is life; apart is dispersion · the sixteen exercises of mindful breathing, the first eight in depth (recognize breath · follow breath / the “non-stop-thinking radio” · aware of body / reconciliation · release tension · generate joy · generate happiness · recognize suffering · calm suffering) · the art of generating happiness and the art of suffering (the mother embracing the baby) · happiness and suffering as organic (compost ↔ flowers) · bringing the practice into schools (youth suicide) · vitality (mạng căn) and manas read against Freud (id / ego / superego) — and Buddhism going one step further to non-discriminative wisdom (“your suffering is my suffering”).

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[Opening — guided mindful breathing led with the Sangha: Breathing in, I am aware of my body; breathing out, I smile to my body. Breathing in, I am aware of the tension in my body; breathing out, I release the tension. Breathing in, I feel joyful; breathing out, I feel joyful. Breathing in, I see this body is not mine but of all my ancestors and all my descendants; breathing out, I smile to my ancestors, my parents, and my descendants in my body — this body is collective.]

We are in the Assembly of Stars Meditation Hall, Lower Hamlet, Plum Village, in the winter retreat. Today is the last day of the winter retreat.

Brother Pháp Ê

Every morning in the Upper Hamlet, Brother Pháp Ê went very early to sitting meditation — one of the oldest brothers present, and though he had been sick for many years, very diligent in his practice, knowing how to treasure the days left to him. At lunch he would sit on Thay’s left, and Thay would offer him food. On the 6th of February, Brother Pháp Ê came out to get his food, and at eleven o’clock he had complications and passed away very quickly — and we are happy for him. When he was young he had been a member of the Italian Communist Party, and did not believe in a soul; then he went to India and received the novice precepts in the Tibetan tradition, came to Plum Village as a novice, changed into the brown robe of the Plum Village monastics, and later received the lamp transmission as a Dharma teacher. He had practiced in Plum Village for twenty years, and was seventy-five when he passed. Once, going to teach in Italy as an elder brother, he took the Sangha on an outing — and one day, angry with [Sister Chân Không], he wrote about it; Thay heard, and sent him a one-sentence letter by the attendant: “Dear Pháp Ê, do you know who loves you most in Plum Village? That person is Sister [Chân Không].” And he let go of his anger very quickly.

In the purification ceremony these days we say: this body is not me; I am not caught in this body; I am life without limits. This body is not me, and I am not limited by it; I am life without boundaries, and I continue as a river with my Sangha. And it is very true.

The embodied mind

Last Thursday we learned practices to generate joy, happiness, and peace. We are wealthy people who act as though we were very poor. Peace, first of all, is in the body. When we practice breathing in, I am aware of my body, we come back to our body — the third exercise of the Sutra on Mindful Breathing. Working three hours at the computer, sucked into the screen, we forget we have a body; so this practice brings the mind back to the body. (The monks and nuns set a bell of mindfulness on the computer to chime every fifteen minutes; hearing it, they stop and breathe and come back.) At that moment the body has a mind and the mind has the body — the embodied mind. When body and mind are together, we truly have life; when the mind is not with the body, there is no life — that is the state of dispersion.

The first four exercises

Breathing in, I am aware of my body — and breathing in and out three times like that, we can release the tension in the body, which is the fourth exercise: breathing in, I am aware of my body; breathing out, I release the tension in my body. These practices are easy to understand and easy to do.

The first exercise: breathing in, I know I am breathing in; breathing out, I know I am breathing out — pure recognition of the in-breath and the out-breath. It is very easy, but its function is great: recognizing the breath, we let go of everything else and live in the breath, and become a free person — simple, but its effect is profound.

The second exercise: breathing in, I follow my in-breath from beginning to end. The in-breath may last three or five seconds, and during that time we follow it completely, with no thought interfering — and so the thinking ends. In us there is always a non-stop thinking radio station — mental discourse, day and night, until we grow hot with it, and it is not productive. Concentrating on the breath, following it, this radio stops — breathe like this for five minutes, and it stops for five minutes. When we need to think, we think, and that can be fruitful; but endless mental discourse is not beneficial. So these exercises bring freedom, that we may live each moment deeply.

The third exercise — aware of the body, and smiling to it — is the practice of reconciliation between body and mind: sometimes we banish our body, letting tension and pain accumulate, punishing it without knowing; now we come back, aware of it, and smile — a smile of reconciliation. Then the fourth: aware of the tension, and releasing it. We need only breathe in and out three or four times, and there is peace in the body — and when the body is at peace, we have the foundation to bring peace to the feelings and emotions, and then to generate joy and happiness. Peace first, then joy and happiness — this is the art of generating happiness, and a practitioner is one who knows how to do it: to generate peace, joy, and happiness in every breath and every step, from the parking lot to the workplace.

Anyone can do this who really wants to. In the past we were used to running — a strong habit energy that pushes us to run, and running, we have no joy. So we begin by resisting that habit energy, giving ourselves a little more time to walk slowly, so each step brings joy. Here in Plum Village everyone wants to walk like that, and those who already can generate a collective energy of peace and joy that we lean on, until after a week or two it becomes a good new habit energy. We generate joy and peace to nourish ourselves — and then to nourish those we love. We do not nourish them with food or clothing; people cannot live on bread alone — even crunchy baguette is not enough. We nourish them with peace, joy, and happiness — and we can only do so because we love them, and only if we have these elements in ourselves. So do not say you cannot do it: stop the rushing way of living, which wastes our days, running after an illusory image of happiness — when happiness is possible right here, right now. The breathing exercises are the buttons that turn off the non-stop-thinking radio, and they need no hard struggle — breathing in can be comfortable, a gentle step comfortable; this practice brings pleasure. When we breathe, walk, drink tea, eat, brush our teeth, even urinate — we should have pleasure — and we train ourselves to do so.

Happiness and suffering are organic

To generate joy, peace, and happiness we generate the energies of mindfulness, concentration, and insight — and the first four exercises generate them; the other twelve are in the chant book. But happiness is intimately connected with suffering: as flowers need compost, lotuses need mud — without mud, no lotus. We tend to run from suffering and chase happiness; but happiness is made of elements that include suffering. So if we have suffered, that is not merely negative — knowing how to practice, we can use the suffering to generate happiness, as a gardener uses compost to grow flowers. They are organic: the flower wilts into compost — and happiness is impermanent too: two people fall in love, beautiful as a flower, but without practice the flower lasts three months, six months, a year, and becomes anger, frustration, jealousy — the flower becoming compost. But looking into suffering, we see it too is organic — and a good practitioner knows how to turn compost back into flowers. So we should not be afraid of suffering; we should fear only one thing — not knowing how to manage it. A person who does not know how to suffer suffers immensely, and the suffering spreads; one who knows how to suffer suffers less, and can even use the suffering to generate happiness.

Exercises five to eight

The fifth exercise is generating joy, the sixth generating happiness — and it is not difficult: with any breath, any step, we can generate joy and happiness. This needs insight: mindfulness brings us to the present moment, and being present, we recognize the conditions of happiness we already have — two bright eyes to see the sky and our loved ones, good ears to hear the birds, two good legs to walk. Coming back to the present, we recognize so many conditions that we have more than enough to be happy here and now, with no need to seek more in the future. If we wrote them on paper, one page would not be enough, nor two, nor three — and we would see how lucky we are. It takes only seconds to recognize them.

The seventh exercise is recognizing suffering. Suffering surfaces as a painful feeling or emotion, rooted in the body or in a wrong perception (which breeds anger, jealousy, sadness, fear). When it surfaces, the practitioner is present to recognize it: breathing in, I know this is a painful feeling — and we call it by its true name: hello, my sadness; hello, my anger. Do not suppress it. Most of us suppress suffering and cover it up by consumption — turning on music, picking up a newspaper, phoning someone, driving, going to the refrigerator — because we cannot face it. But a practitioner lets it surface, and keeps it from overwhelming us by inviting another energy up from the depths of store consciousness — the energy of mindfulness, whose seed is there alongside the seed of suffering. (In one who does not practice, the seed of mindfulness is small; after three or four weeks of practice it grows.) We only need to breathe or walk mindfully to generate it; and when it comes up, it says: hello, my pain — I know you are there, and I will take care of you; you need not be afraid. So in mind consciousness there are two energies: left alone, the suffering overwhelms; so mindfulness comes up to recognize and embrace it — as an older brother embraces a suffering younger one, as a mother embraces her crying baby. The mother is mindfulness; the crying baby is the suffering; we do not suppress it but embrace it. The mother’s energy of gentleness and love enters the baby’s body, and the baby — even before she knows the cause — suffers less immediately; so even without yet knowing the roots of our suffering, the very embracing eases it. Holding the baby a few minutes, the mother finds the cause — and that is insight (where there is mindfulness and concentration, there is insight): if the baby is hungry, she feeds it; if sick, she gives medicine. The eighth exercise is calming the suffering.

So the first two of these (5–6) generate joy and happiness to nourish us; the second two (7–8) recognize and calm our suffering. When the suffering comes down, we can survive, and with the next exercises do better — transforming suffering into happiness, compost into flowers.

Bringing it into the schools

We do not need to be Buddhist to do this — anyone can, and so these practices can be brought into schools. Already in elementary school children suffer and do not know how to handle it; teachers should learn to generate happiness and to manage suffering, and then they can help their students; if parents know how to practice, they teach their children — and if not, the children still have the chance to learn from their teachers. There are young people of sixteen or twenty with enormous suffering who do not know how to manage a strong emotion, and think the only way to end the suffering is to end their life — and so many young people kill themselves, in France, England, Hong Kong, Japan. So we need to bring these practices into schools. People say we must teach morality and ethics in the classroom but do not know how — and these practices are ethics, are morality; future teachers should learn them so they can teach their students, for a suffering student cannot study. We should write textbooks on these practices for schools. (Each summer in Plum Village children come from more than thirty countries and learn them well.)

The lotus, vitality, and manas — the Freud comparison

We learned verses five, six, and seven. Now draw a lotus: at the bottom, roots and mud; then water; then air; then the lotus flowers. In store consciousness there is the mental formation vitality (mạng căn) — a life-force; store consciousness collaborates with many formations, and one is vitality, by which it maintains life. And manas is rendered as a mind-organ — indriya, the base, the ground of life, the foundation that gives birth to mind consciousness, just as the ear is the ground for ear-consciousness and the eye for eye-consciousness.

Thanks to the mud we have the lotus; without mud, no lotus. Manas is the survival instinct, the mechanism for survival — it embraces the body and says “this is my body,” though the body is not ours but belongs to our ancestors, our parents, our descendants. So manas is obstructed, covered. It has the characteristics we have learned — among them, it seeks pleasure and avoids suffering, a tendency in each of us; it does not know the dangers of pleasure-seeking (while seeking pleasure we can destroy body and mind — like a fish biting the bait with a hook in it), and many young people destroy themselves not knowing moderation; and it does not see the benefit of suffering, so it runs from suffering — though mud grows lotuses, and suffering generates happiness. Manas does not know this because it is covered — and manas is equivalent to what Freud called the id: it seeks pleasure, avoids suffering, and knows no moderation. That is the mud.

But above the mud is the water, which represents what Freud called the ego. The ego sees reality and sheds light on the id: it is more realistic — we cannot run from suffering, nor merely seek pleasure; we have to know moderation. (A thirsty man in a bar wants the glass of lemon drink in front of him, but the ego says: no — it is not yours; if the owner sees you, you will be in trouble — so the ego inhibits the id when the situation does not allow it; though sometimes the ego identifies with the id, and sometimes inhibits it.) And above the ego is the superego, which finds every way to transform the mud of the id into something beautiful — through art, music, architecture, literature: sublimation. Instead of going along with the id to create suffering, it uses the id’s energy to make something beautiful, to serve.

In Buddhism it is similar: the ego is mind consciousness — and if mind consciousness knows how to practice and generate mindfulness, concentration, and insight, it can begin to transform the mud of manas into the lotus. But Buddhism goes one step further than Freud: above the superego there is non-discriminative wisdom. With it we do not see a separate self: we see that the suffering and happiness of others are connected with ours — “your suffering is my suffering; my happiness is your happiness” — so there is no individual suffering, no individual happiness, no belief in a separate self. The superego’s sublimation makes artwork and serves; but Buddhism reaches a place where there is no self, and that is where there is no more war, no more discrimination. (And the non-discriminative wisdom cannot be there without the mud of the id — for without mud there is no lotus.)

So, before we chant, we read: please practice as one body, chant as one body, listen as one body, transcending the complexes of inferiority, superiority, and equality.