Cracking the Walnut, page 15
亦名為他性
There must be a self-nature for an other-nature to exist. For example, this is Brother Minh Niệm, and that is Brother Pháp Niệm. You believe that Brother Pháp Niệm has a self-nature inside, and his self-nature is not the self-nature of Brother Minh Niệm. As far as Pháp Niệm is concerned, the self-nature of Minh Niệm is an other-nature. What other people call their self-nature (svabhāva), we call other-nature (parabhāva). We call our self “self-nature.” Other-nature goes along with self: we call the self of someone else other-nature. If our self-nature exists, the self-nature of the other also exists. If our self-nature does not exist, the self nature of the other does not exist either. From the no self-nature we realize the no other-nature.
If phenomena, things, have no self-nature, how can you conclude there is an other-nature?
What you call your self-nature is only a self-nature for you. As far as others are concerned, your self-nature is other-nature. Others have their self-nature; that is why they see us as other-nature. Therefore, if the self-nature of phenomena does not exist, the other-nature of phenomena also cannot exist.
4. Without self-nature and other-nature
How can anything exist?
When there is self-nature and other-nature
phenomena are established.
離自性他性
何得更有法
若有自他性
諸法則得成
If self-nature and other-nature are not there, then how can things really be there?
Things are truly there because there is self-nature and other-nature. Observing Minh Niệm or the lily flower carefully, we do not see a self-nature or an other-nature. Therefore, we cannot be sure that things really exist. If we remove self-nature and other-nature, how can what we call phenomena be there? When self-nature and other-nature are there, things can formally be established, but because they do not have a self-nature and an other-nature, things cannot be formally established. They are not really there. It seems like they are there, but they are not real; they are false.
These verses teach us to begin to re-examine our view of being and nonbeing. Our daily activities are based on a foundation; that foundation is made of our ideas of being and nonbeing, self and other. Since these ideas are not in accord with reality, our actions of body, speech, and mind are mistaken. We have to look deeply to see that in truth we and others do not have a self-nature—which means that there is no self-nature or other-nature. We are there due to the conditions that allow us to manifest. The other person is there due to the conditions that allow them to manifest. Seeing this, we no longer get caught in the idea of what is self and what is not self. When we are able to see things in this way, our thinking is right thinking, our speech is right speech, and our actions are right actions. This is not a theory or philosophy.
A mother who lives with her daughter sees that she, the mother, is not a self-nature and that her daughter is not an other-nature. Both mother and daughter are free of a separate self-nature. The happiness and suffering of mother and daughter are closely related. The mother sees the no-self of herself and her daughter, and her thinking becomes right thinking.
The same is true for a young man. He sees that he and his father do not have separate self-natures. He is his father, and his father is him. He is the continuation of his father. Seeing this, all discrimination, anger and suffering disappear naturally. He wants to help his father to be free of his present state of mind, and he sees that in helping his father, he helps himself; likewise, in helping himself, he helps his father. In the same way, the father can be happy when he helps his child to breathe freely and to smile.
The suffering we incur comes from being caught in the idea of a self-nature, of a self. This kind of meditation is not philosophy, but a search for the truth. Once we discover the truth, discrimination and intolerance naturally disappear, and there is real harmony.
A teacher looks at his disciples and sees that they are his continuation. If they lose their way in the future, it is the teacher’s responsibility; it is as if he, the teacher, has lost his way. He has to take care of the difficulties and weaknesses of his disciples just as he takes care of his own difficulties and weaknesses. When he resolves his disciple’s difficulties, he resolves his own difficulties. With such an insight the teacher does not blame the disciple, and is not angry, upset, or prone to punishing the disciple; he is able to love them. This is the insight into no self-nature.
If we study the Verses on the Middle Way just to understand their philosophy and teach it to others, it will bring us no benefit. Our study of the Verses on the Middle Way is to help us meditate more effectively. During our practice of sitting meditation in the morning, at midday, in the evening, and while we do our work, we do not let our mind be carried away by our surroundings. We come back to ourselves and meditate to see that we and our father are not two separate realities. We meditate to see that we and our teacher are not two separate realities. When we can do this, the relationship between father and child, and between teacher and disciple, becomes very enjoyable. This is because of right view. The Verses on the Middle Way are not metaphysical speculation. They guide us to right view.
The morning sitting meditation is a precious time for us to nourish ourselves and our sangha. If you are present every morning and your presence is fresh, you nourish the sangha. Imagine if, in a sangha of three hundred people, only three or four were there for the morning sitting. When you are not present you yourself go hungry, and you make the sangha go hungry. You have to nourish the sangha and yourself with your practice. You are not present just for yourself; you are present for the sangha. Your physical presence is something beneficial. It nourishes the sangha and it nourishes you because when you sit amidst the sangha, you are able to open your heart and let the energy of the sangha enter you. Your energy also enters the sangha. The sangha nourishes you, and you nourish the sangha.
Say a mother goes into the garden to pick vegetables or dig potatoes. Her awareness that she is digging potatoes to cook a soup for her family brings her joy. You are the same. On the way from the monastic residence to the meditation hall, if you know that each step nourishes the sangha, just as the love of a mother nourishes her children, you will feel happy. If you say, on the other hand, “Good grief! Why do they make us go out in this freezing cold weather”? then there is no love. Just as a mother cannot let her child go hungry, we cannot let the sangha go hungry. When a mother nourishes her child, the child nourishes her mother. Although the child is still small and does not yet know how to dig potatoes or cook them, the child’s presence and smile nourish the mother a great deal.
All of the sangha practices are designed to nourish the sangha and nourish you. While you are sitting in meditation, do not sit as an individual. Sit as a part of the sangha. You are aware that your older and younger brothers and sisters are sitting with you—like a flock of birds flying in the same direction—and this makes you overjoyed. You feel you are flowing as a river. You just have to be physically present and everyone already benefits—how much more so when your practice has real content. Real content means that the practice is correct: you follow your breathing, enjoying each in-breath and out-breath. In that way your energy nourishes the sangha even more. First, your physical presence nourishes the sangha; second, your mind is present as you breathe and smile, and this nourishes the sangha even more. This presence is something sublime. You have to open your body and mind for the energy of the sangha to enter you. Even if in the sangha there are a couple of people who are nodding off, you can love them because you also sometimes nod off. Someone nodding off is something normal; the fact that they are present is good enough already. The first thing to remember is to nourish the sangha and to nourish yourself. Whether it is walking meditation, sitting meditation, or eating mindfully in the sangha, the purpose of the practice is to nourish the sangha and you.
The practice of meditation has a use and a purpose. Its first benefit is to calm the body and mind. While sitting in meditation you relax your body and help it calm down. Your breathing plays an important role in this. First of all you sit beautifully, upright and relaxed. With the help of your breathing, your posture is at ease: beautifully relaxed. Tell yourself: this is an opportunity to nourish myself and realize freedom. Freedom means self-sovereignty. Usually we do not choose to live our lives. We allow our thinking and our feelings to drag us around in different directions. In this way we become nothing but the victim of our thoughts, our feelings, and our fear. A hoisted flag flaps in the wind; it is the victim of the wind. A cork thrown into the sea floats up and down on the waves; it is the victim of the waves. In your daily life you are the victim of the waves of feelings, thoughts, and mental formations.
Sitting meditation provides a chance to learn to be free. You learn to remain firm, to sit solidly, not allowing your feelings to pull you here and there. Your breathing is the anchor; you are the boat that keeps still in the middle of the ocean. Thirty or forty five minutes of sitting is there for you to learn how to be a free person. If you are not able to be free during that time, when will you be free? While working you are pulled away by the work. In conversation you are pulled away by the conversation. In your daily life you keep being pulled away. When can you be master of yourself? When can you have freedom and self-sovereignty? Sitting meditation is the time when you practice reclaiming your sovereignty. If at times you are pulled away, just smile and come back to yourself. You feel compassion; you recognize an old habit energy—pulling you after this or that—and you do not become angry with yourself. When you see that habit energy pulling you away you just smile and say: “Hey, stop pulling me away!” You return to your sitting and breathing; you reclaim your sovereignty. Your sovereignty comes back right away.
You use your abdomen and your lungs as you breathe in. Breathing out, you contract your abdomen to expel the air from your lungs. As you begin to breathe in, you can touch your index finger with your thumb as you follow the in-breath from beginning to end. When the lungs are full, you can smile and allow the air to flow out. Your mind is wholly with your breathing. When you can maintain your attention fully on the breath, thoughts and other mental formations can no longer drag you out to sea. You are sovereign of yourself on the island of mindfulness—the island of yourself. At that moment, you find yourself on the most secure island—the island of mindfulness and concentration—where you can gradually learn to reclaim your sovereignty. If you cannot do this, you will remain a victim, drifting and sinking without stability.
So sitting meditation time is precious. While you practice, you nourish the sangha. You deserve to be nourished because you are offering the sangha good food. You know that you are giving the sangha good food, because you are receiving good food. Every day you have more freedom and more sovereignty. You do not let things carry you away. You know where you are going and what you want to do. These are the preliminaries in the practice of sitting meditation. If you can bring harmony into your body and your breathing, and be stably present on the island of yourself, that is already a success. After that you can go further. You can look into yourself and ask: “Do I have any difficulties with another person—with a friend, a parent, a partner, a brother or sister? Where do those difficulties come from? Is it because I believe in my own self-nature and the other-nature of that person? We both make each other suffer and say unkind things.” You may meditate like this towards that person: “You suffer, and, at the same time, I suffer. How can we free ourselves from this situation? We need to see that we are both in the same boat. If you are happy I am happy. If you are at ease I can be at ease. If you want to abandon our relationship, that is partly my responsibility.”
When you see you are both interrelated and that you condition each other, you will see there is no self-nature. The happiness of the other helps you to be happy, and the suffering of the other makes you suffer. It is crystal clear that your peace and joy contribute to the other’s peace and joy.
In the beginning, the object of your mindfulness is the breath. As you continue to maintain awareness of your breathing, your mind stops wandering. It remains in one place. The object of your mindfulness can continue to be your breathing, or it can extend to your whole body. When you hold to that object and calm your mind, you cannot be blown away by the wind of your feelings and mental formations or swept away by the waves of your thinking. After this you gradually acquire the ability to look deeply. When the mental formations of anger and anxiety come up, you are able to recognize and look into them in order to discover their source.
The basic condition for these mental formations is ignorance. Craving, anger, and ignorance are the three poisons which rot the lives of human beings. Craving and anger, like the other unwholesome mental formations such as fear, hatred, and despair, arise from the basic mental formation of ignorance. Ignorance is the inability to see the truth because of confusion. We are brothers and sisters, teacher and students, father and son, but we behave as if the other were our enemy—a completely separate reality. That is ignorance, and it can only be shattered by the practice of looking deeply. The Verses on the Middle Way are like hammers that help us shatter the mass of ignorance.
The Vietnamese poet Vũ Hoàng Chương, in his poem “Fire of Compassion,” written soon after Venerable Quảng Đức immolated himself, used the word brotherhood. Brotherhood is possible when we recognize that we are brothers and not enemies. We are of the same nation; we are brothers. So why does someone who is Catholic discriminate against someone who is Buddhist? Those flames that consumed the Venerable Quảng Đức were the message burning up ignorance, so that we could clearly see we are brothers:
The enormous mass of anger and ignorance has opened people’s eyes,
so they can look at each other and see the immensity of brotherhood.
Anger and ignorance create so much separation and destruction because we are unable to see the truth—and the truth is brotherhood. One person immolated himself in order to remind everybody that we are brothers and sisters. Why do we make each other suffer?
Heaven is truly present today.
Now is the splendid and propitious hour.
The enormous mass of anger and ignorance has opened people’s eyes,
so they can look at each other and see the immensity of brotherhood.
Suffering, jealousy, anger, fear, and despair all grow on a plot of land called ignorance. Ignorance goes by the name of coming and going, being and nonbeing, birth and death, self-nature and other-nature. This is not philosophy. This is a theme of our meditation, helping us see the truth in our own heart, in the heart of the other person, and in the heart of reality. Looking deeply, we see there is no self-nature and no other-nature. When we can see this, right view is there; when right view is there, right thinking, right speech, and right action are also there. We no longer make ourselves and the other person suffer.
When you teach your students the Verses on the Middle Way, teach them in such a way that they will be able to apply them in their daily lives. When I teach the Manifestation-only teachings, I teach in a way that my students can apply those teachings to transform their daily lives. When I teach the Diamond Sutra, I also teach in such a way that the sutra can become a companion for people on their path of practice. The sutra is related to your joys and sorrows and to your jealousy. It is not removed from your daily experience.
Yesterday, I received a letter from a German practitioner. He comes from the Christian tradition and says that his tradition gives him the feeling that he is living in a two-story house. The ground floor is for his everyday life, and the top floor is where there are peace, joy, and liberation, and he has been unable to find a staircase to go up to the top floor. Now that he has come to Buddhism, he has found the staircase. He wants to leave the Church and follow Buddhism. I did not agree with him, and told him that he should not abandon his religion. He was not happy, and he replied, “I have found my staircase in Buddhism. Why do you force me to be a Christian? Why don’t you allow me to be a Buddhist?” I did not want to force him to be Christian; I wanted to help him not to lose his roots. Since he had found the staircase, I wanted him to bring it home, and install it in his house so that the people who had long been stuck on the ground floor would finally have a chance to go upstairs. If you are missing a staircase in your home it is better to make one rather than leave your home and go somewhere else.
Next year (2003) in May, I have been invited to attend a Christian conference in Berlin. This will be the first time in German history that the Catholic and the Protestant churches will meet in a conference. Four other spiritual leaders from different traditions and I have been invited to give an address. Each address can only last fifteen minutes, but because I will speak in English and need translation they are allowing me a little longer. After this conference I will speak to about 6,000 young people on the subjects of happiness, the future, and peace. The invitation letter impressed me; two sentences in particular especially moved me: “We would like to invite you to speak, in the spirit of interreligious dialogue, on how there can be peace in the world. We also would like you to make some concrete proposals which we could apply in our congregations.”
I was delighted by their openness in this letter: they want a Buddhist to offer them a method of practice which they can apply in the heart of Christianity and in the spirit of the Christian teachings. They are open to learn. Many Buddhists do not have such a spirit of openness; they are closed and prejudiced. They are much less Buddhist than these Christians, who are eager to learn new practices which they can apply in their own tradition. These Christians are not proud and prejudiced. They are able to see the no self-nature and the no other-nature better than many Buddhists. Some Buddhists can talk until their throat is dry, but they are not open and they do not have the insight these Christians have. They may fight to the death for the sake of defining a term. They talk on and on about what they claim to be deep and mysterious teachings, but at the same time they are dying of hunger in their spiritual life. They think that they are rich, but in fact they have run away from home—they are lonely, homeless, and without food.
There must be a self-nature for an other-nature to exist. For example, this is Brother Minh Niệm, and that is Brother Pháp Niệm. You believe that Brother Pháp Niệm has a self-nature inside, and his self-nature is not the self-nature of Brother Minh Niệm. As far as Pháp Niệm is concerned, the self-nature of Minh Niệm is an other-nature. What other people call their self-nature (svabhāva), we call other-nature (parabhāva). We call our self “self-nature.” Other-nature goes along with self: we call the self of someone else other-nature. If our self-nature exists, the self-nature of the other also exists. If our self-nature does not exist, the self nature of the other does not exist either. From the no self-nature we realize the no other-nature.
If phenomena, things, have no self-nature, how can you conclude there is an other-nature?
What you call your self-nature is only a self-nature for you. As far as others are concerned, your self-nature is other-nature. Others have their self-nature; that is why they see us as other-nature. Therefore, if the self-nature of phenomena does not exist, the other-nature of phenomena also cannot exist.
4. Without self-nature and other-nature
How can anything exist?
When there is self-nature and other-nature
phenomena are established.
離自性他性
何得更有法
若有自他性
諸法則得成
If self-nature and other-nature are not there, then how can things really be there?
Things are truly there because there is self-nature and other-nature. Observing Minh Niệm or the lily flower carefully, we do not see a self-nature or an other-nature. Therefore, we cannot be sure that things really exist. If we remove self-nature and other-nature, how can what we call phenomena be there? When self-nature and other-nature are there, things can formally be established, but because they do not have a self-nature and an other-nature, things cannot be formally established. They are not really there. It seems like they are there, but they are not real; they are false.
These verses teach us to begin to re-examine our view of being and nonbeing. Our daily activities are based on a foundation; that foundation is made of our ideas of being and nonbeing, self and other. Since these ideas are not in accord with reality, our actions of body, speech, and mind are mistaken. We have to look deeply to see that in truth we and others do not have a self-nature—which means that there is no self-nature or other-nature. We are there due to the conditions that allow us to manifest. The other person is there due to the conditions that allow them to manifest. Seeing this, we no longer get caught in the idea of what is self and what is not self. When we are able to see things in this way, our thinking is right thinking, our speech is right speech, and our actions are right actions. This is not a theory or philosophy.
A mother who lives with her daughter sees that she, the mother, is not a self-nature and that her daughter is not an other-nature. Both mother and daughter are free of a separate self-nature. The happiness and suffering of mother and daughter are closely related. The mother sees the no-self of herself and her daughter, and her thinking becomes right thinking.
The same is true for a young man. He sees that he and his father do not have separate self-natures. He is his father, and his father is him. He is the continuation of his father. Seeing this, all discrimination, anger and suffering disappear naturally. He wants to help his father to be free of his present state of mind, and he sees that in helping his father, he helps himself; likewise, in helping himself, he helps his father. In the same way, the father can be happy when he helps his child to breathe freely and to smile.
The suffering we incur comes from being caught in the idea of a self-nature, of a self. This kind of meditation is not philosophy, but a search for the truth. Once we discover the truth, discrimination and intolerance naturally disappear, and there is real harmony.
A teacher looks at his disciples and sees that they are his continuation. If they lose their way in the future, it is the teacher’s responsibility; it is as if he, the teacher, has lost his way. He has to take care of the difficulties and weaknesses of his disciples just as he takes care of his own difficulties and weaknesses. When he resolves his disciple’s difficulties, he resolves his own difficulties. With such an insight the teacher does not blame the disciple, and is not angry, upset, or prone to punishing the disciple; he is able to love them. This is the insight into no self-nature.
If we study the Verses on the Middle Way just to understand their philosophy and teach it to others, it will bring us no benefit. Our study of the Verses on the Middle Way is to help us meditate more effectively. During our practice of sitting meditation in the morning, at midday, in the evening, and while we do our work, we do not let our mind be carried away by our surroundings. We come back to ourselves and meditate to see that we and our father are not two separate realities. We meditate to see that we and our teacher are not two separate realities. When we can do this, the relationship between father and child, and between teacher and disciple, becomes very enjoyable. This is because of right view. The Verses on the Middle Way are not metaphysical speculation. They guide us to right view.
The morning sitting meditation is a precious time for us to nourish ourselves and our sangha. If you are present every morning and your presence is fresh, you nourish the sangha. Imagine if, in a sangha of three hundred people, only three or four were there for the morning sitting. When you are not present you yourself go hungry, and you make the sangha go hungry. You have to nourish the sangha and yourself with your practice. You are not present just for yourself; you are present for the sangha. Your physical presence is something beneficial. It nourishes the sangha and it nourishes you because when you sit amidst the sangha, you are able to open your heart and let the energy of the sangha enter you. Your energy also enters the sangha. The sangha nourishes you, and you nourish the sangha.
Say a mother goes into the garden to pick vegetables or dig potatoes. Her awareness that she is digging potatoes to cook a soup for her family brings her joy. You are the same. On the way from the monastic residence to the meditation hall, if you know that each step nourishes the sangha, just as the love of a mother nourishes her children, you will feel happy. If you say, on the other hand, “Good grief! Why do they make us go out in this freezing cold weather”? then there is no love. Just as a mother cannot let her child go hungry, we cannot let the sangha go hungry. When a mother nourishes her child, the child nourishes her mother. Although the child is still small and does not yet know how to dig potatoes or cook them, the child’s presence and smile nourish the mother a great deal.
All of the sangha practices are designed to nourish the sangha and nourish you. While you are sitting in meditation, do not sit as an individual. Sit as a part of the sangha. You are aware that your older and younger brothers and sisters are sitting with you—like a flock of birds flying in the same direction—and this makes you overjoyed. You feel you are flowing as a river. You just have to be physically present and everyone already benefits—how much more so when your practice has real content. Real content means that the practice is correct: you follow your breathing, enjoying each in-breath and out-breath. In that way your energy nourishes the sangha even more. First, your physical presence nourishes the sangha; second, your mind is present as you breathe and smile, and this nourishes the sangha even more. This presence is something sublime. You have to open your body and mind for the energy of the sangha to enter you. Even if in the sangha there are a couple of people who are nodding off, you can love them because you also sometimes nod off. Someone nodding off is something normal; the fact that they are present is good enough already. The first thing to remember is to nourish the sangha and to nourish yourself. Whether it is walking meditation, sitting meditation, or eating mindfully in the sangha, the purpose of the practice is to nourish the sangha and you.
The practice of meditation has a use and a purpose. Its first benefit is to calm the body and mind. While sitting in meditation you relax your body and help it calm down. Your breathing plays an important role in this. First of all you sit beautifully, upright and relaxed. With the help of your breathing, your posture is at ease: beautifully relaxed. Tell yourself: this is an opportunity to nourish myself and realize freedom. Freedom means self-sovereignty. Usually we do not choose to live our lives. We allow our thinking and our feelings to drag us around in different directions. In this way we become nothing but the victim of our thoughts, our feelings, and our fear. A hoisted flag flaps in the wind; it is the victim of the wind. A cork thrown into the sea floats up and down on the waves; it is the victim of the waves. In your daily life you are the victim of the waves of feelings, thoughts, and mental formations.
Sitting meditation provides a chance to learn to be free. You learn to remain firm, to sit solidly, not allowing your feelings to pull you here and there. Your breathing is the anchor; you are the boat that keeps still in the middle of the ocean. Thirty or forty five minutes of sitting is there for you to learn how to be a free person. If you are not able to be free during that time, when will you be free? While working you are pulled away by the work. In conversation you are pulled away by the conversation. In your daily life you keep being pulled away. When can you be master of yourself? When can you have freedom and self-sovereignty? Sitting meditation is the time when you practice reclaiming your sovereignty. If at times you are pulled away, just smile and come back to yourself. You feel compassion; you recognize an old habit energy—pulling you after this or that—and you do not become angry with yourself. When you see that habit energy pulling you away you just smile and say: “Hey, stop pulling me away!” You return to your sitting and breathing; you reclaim your sovereignty. Your sovereignty comes back right away.
You use your abdomen and your lungs as you breathe in. Breathing out, you contract your abdomen to expel the air from your lungs. As you begin to breathe in, you can touch your index finger with your thumb as you follow the in-breath from beginning to end. When the lungs are full, you can smile and allow the air to flow out. Your mind is wholly with your breathing. When you can maintain your attention fully on the breath, thoughts and other mental formations can no longer drag you out to sea. You are sovereign of yourself on the island of mindfulness—the island of yourself. At that moment, you find yourself on the most secure island—the island of mindfulness and concentration—where you can gradually learn to reclaim your sovereignty. If you cannot do this, you will remain a victim, drifting and sinking without stability.
So sitting meditation time is precious. While you practice, you nourish the sangha. You deserve to be nourished because you are offering the sangha good food. You know that you are giving the sangha good food, because you are receiving good food. Every day you have more freedom and more sovereignty. You do not let things carry you away. You know where you are going and what you want to do. These are the preliminaries in the practice of sitting meditation. If you can bring harmony into your body and your breathing, and be stably present on the island of yourself, that is already a success. After that you can go further. You can look into yourself and ask: “Do I have any difficulties with another person—with a friend, a parent, a partner, a brother or sister? Where do those difficulties come from? Is it because I believe in my own self-nature and the other-nature of that person? We both make each other suffer and say unkind things.” You may meditate like this towards that person: “You suffer, and, at the same time, I suffer. How can we free ourselves from this situation? We need to see that we are both in the same boat. If you are happy I am happy. If you are at ease I can be at ease. If you want to abandon our relationship, that is partly my responsibility.”
When you see you are both interrelated and that you condition each other, you will see there is no self-nature. The happiness of the other helps you to be happy, and the suffering of the other makes you suffer. It is crystal clear that your peace and joy contribute to the other’s peace and joy.
In the beginning, the object of your mindfulness is the breath. As you continue to maintain awareness of your breathing, your mind stops wandering. It remains in one place. The object of your mindfulness can continue to be your breathing, or it can extend to your whole body. When you hold to that object and calm your mind, you cannot be blown away by the wind of your feelings and mental formations or swept away by the waves of your thinking. After this you gradually acquire the ability to look deeply. When the mental formations of anger and anxiety come up, you are able to recognize and look into them in order to discover their source.
The basic condition for these mental formations is ignorance. Craving, anger, and ignorance are the three poisons which rot the lives of human beings. Craving and anger, like the other unwholesome mental formations such as fear, hatred, and despair, arise from the basic mental formation of ignorance. Ignorance is the inability to see the truth because of confusion. We are brothers and sisters, teacher and students, father and son, but we behave as if the other were our enemy—a completely separate reality. That is ignorance, and it can only be shattered by the practice of looking deeply. The Verses on the Middle Way are like hammers that help us shatter the mass of ignorance.
The Vietnamese poet Vũ Hoàng Chương, in his poem “Fire of Compassion,” written soon after Venerable Quảng Đức immolated himself, used the word brotherhood. Brotherhood is possible when we recognize that we are brothers and not enemies. We are of the same nation; we are brothers. So why does someone who is Catholic discriminate against someone who is Buddhist? Those flames that consumed the Venerable Quảng Đức were the message burning up ignorance, so that we could clearly see we are brothers:
The enormous mass of anger and ignorance has opened people’s eyes,
so they can look at each other and see the immensity of brotherhood.
Anger and ignorance create so much separation and destruction because we are unable to see the truth—and the truth is brotherhood. One person immolated himself in order to remind everybody that we are brothers and sisters. Why do we make each other suffer?
Heaven is truly present today.
Now is the splendid and propitious hour.
The enormous mass of anger and ignorance has opened people’s eyes,
so they can look at each other and see the immensity of brotherhood.
Suffering, jealousy, anger, fear, and despair all grow on a plot of land called ignorance. Ignorance goes by the name of coming and going, being and nonbeing, birth and death, self-nature and other-nature. This is not philosophy. This is a theme of our meditation, helping us see the truth in our own heart, in the heart of the other person, and in the heart of reality. Looking deeply, we see there is no self-nature and no other-nature. When we can see this, right view is there; when right view is there, right thinking, right speech, and right action are also there. We no longer make ourselves and the other person suffer.
When you teach your students the Verses on the Middle Way, teach them in such a way that they will be able to apply them in their daily lives. When I teach the Manifestation-only teachings, I teach in a way that my students can apply those teachings to transform their daily lives. When I teach the Diamond Sutra, I also teach in such a way that the sutra can become a companion for people on their path of practice. The sutra is related to your joys and sorrows and to your jealousy. It is not removed from your daily experience.
Yesterday, I received a letter from a German practitioner. He comes from the Christian tradition and says that his tradition gives him the feeling that he is living in a two-story house. The ground floor is for his everyday life, and the top floor is where there are peace, joy, and liberation, and he has been unable to find a staircase to go up to the top floor. Now that he has come to Buddhism, he has found the staircase. He wants to leave the Church and follow Buddhism. I did not agree with him, and told him that he should not abandon his religion. He was not happy, and he replied, “I have found my staircase in Buddhism. Why do you force me to be a Christian? Why don’t you allow me to be a Buddhist?” I did not want to force him to be Christian; I wanted to help him not to lose his roots. Since he had found the staircase, I wanted him to bring it home, and install it in his house so that the people who had long been stuck on the ground floor would finally have a chance to go upstairs. If you are missing a staircase in your home it is better to make one rather than leave your home and go somewhere else.
Next year (2003) in May, I have been invited to attend a Christian conference in Berlin. This will be the first time in German history that the Catholic and the Protestant churches will meet in a conference. Four other spiritual leaders from different traditions and I have been invited to give an address. Each address can only last fifteen minutes, but because I will speak in English and need translation they are allowing me a little longer. After this conference I will speak to about 6,000 young people on the subjects of happiness, the future, and peace. The invitation letter impressed me; two sentences in particular especially moved me: “We would like to invite you to speak, in the spirit of interreligious dialogue, on how there can be peace in the world. We also would like you to make some concrete proposals which we could apply in our congregations.”
I was delighted by their openness in this letter: they want a Buddhist to offer them a method of practice which they can apply in the heart of Christianity and in the spirit of the Christian teachings. They are open to learn. Many Buddhists do not have such a spirit of openness; they are closed and prejudiced. They are much less Buddhist than these Christians, who are eager to learn new practices which they can apply in their own tradition. These Christians are not proud and prejudiced. They are able to see the no self-nature and the no other-nature better than many Buddhists. Some Buddhists can talk until their throat is dry, but they are not open and they do not have the insight these Christians have. They may fight to the death for the sake of defining a term. They talk on and on about what they claim to be deep and mysterious teachings, but at the same time they are dying of hunger in their spiritual life. They think that they are rich, but in fact they have run away from home—they are lonely, homeless, and without food.
