Making Peace with Ourselves

Summary

This transcript captures a Dharma talk and chanting session from Plum Village on November 25, 2001, during the first talk of a three-month winter retreat. The talk is transmitted across monasteries and practice centers, including Deer Park Monastery in California and Maple Forest Monastery in Vermont, and is interwoven with multilingual chanting, singing, and technical attempts to connect the different sites by phone and audio line. The opening portion features communal chanting and singing, including references to Thanh Son and songs from monastics and sanghas across the Atlantic and Pacific. The chant evoking Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion, is presented as a protective and healing practice for the retreat. The bell of mindfulness is emphasized repeatedly, with verses in English, French, and Vietnamese describing how listening to the bell helps dissolve afflictions, calm the body and mind, and return practitioners to their “true home.” The bell is portrayed as a vehicle for awakening, peace, and transformation, extending compassion “deeply into the cosmos.” The main teaching then turns to the central theme of mindfulness as the foundation of peace. The speaker explains that the retreat offers rare conditions for collective practice, and that the purpose of the retreat is to cultivate peace within oneself and within the community. Brotherhood and sisterhood are described as the daily food of the sangha, and the speaker insists that peace in the world begins with peace in one’s own body, feelings, perceptions, and consciousness. The talk repeatedly returns to the idea that one must “go home to oneself” rather than continue running away through distraction, entertainment, or habitual consumption. A major section of the talk presents the Buddhist analysis of the person as a territory composed of five aggregates: form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. The body is described as a river of changing conditions that needs to be embraced with compassion and allowed to rest and heal. Feelings are likewise presented as a river that includes painful, pleasant, and neutral states, all of which should be recognized and calmed rather than suppressed or fought. Perceptions are treated as especially powerful because wrong perceptions can trigger fear, panic, bodily stress, and suffering. The speaker uses the example of mistaking a rope for a snake to show how perception can create a cascade of physiological reactions, including adrenaline, rapid heartbeat, and indigestion. The talk also explains the Buddhist psychology of mental formations, noting that there are 51 categories, including negative states such as anger, despair, jealousy, and fear, as well as wholesome states such as mindfulness, concentration, loving-kindness, and compassion. Consciousness is described as the storehouse of seeds that can manifest as mental formations when conditions are present. The speaker emphasizes that if one does not restore peace and order within this inner territory, one cannot help create peace outside. The outer world is presented as a collective manifestation of inner consciousness, so social and global peace depend on the transformation of individuals and communities. Practical instruction is a major focus. The speaker teaches mindful breathing, mindful walking, mindful drinking, mindful eating, and mindful looking as concrete ways to generate the energy of mindfulness. Mindfulness has several functions: it helps one be truly present, recognize what is there, embrace suffering without fighting it, and look deeply into the roots of pain. The talk stresses that healing is not only external or medical; the body and consciousness have an inherent capacity for self-healing if given the chance. The speaker cites research from Harvard University on meditation and healing, and also points to animals in the forest that instinctively rest when wounded. Human beings, by contrast, often worsen their condition through worry, overactivity, and unmindful consumption. The talk strongly links suffering to consumption. Anger, despair, and violence are said to survive because they are continually fed by toxic inputs such as wrong perceptions, hatred, and unmindful media consumption. Looking deeply reveals the sources of this nourishment and allows practitioners to cut them off. Insight then becomes the path to liberation and cessation of suffering. The speaker encourages practitioners to ask for help from brothers and sisters in the sangha when their own mindfulness is too weak to embrace pain alone. The sangha is compared to a boat that can carry many stones without sinking, making refuge in the sangha a practical necessity rather than a mere declaration of faith. The final sections broaden the teaching into a vision of sangha-building as the most important task of the time. The speaker describes the sangha as the next Buddha, associated with Maitreya, and argues that a community living in brotherhood can change the course of history. Individualism is criticized as a source of suffering, while the sangha is presented as the hope for the world. The talk concludes with reminders that every word, gesture, and look should help build brotherhood, restore communication, and support reconciliation. The speaker closes by checking audio connections, inviting the community to eat, and ending the transmission with warmth and gratitude.