Where is the Year 2014 Right Now?

Summary

This talk, delivered on December 29, 2013 at the Stillwater Meditation Hall in the Upper Hamlet of Plum Village during a winter retreat, centers on mindfulness as a practical path to healing, renewal, and deep insight. The speaker welcomes the Sangha and begins by grounding the audience in mindful breathing, emphasizing that when attention returns to the in-breath and out-breath, the mind comes home to the body and the practitioner touches the wonders of life already present in and around them. Ordinary experiences such as breathing, hearing rain, having eyes, feet, and lungs, and being alive at all are presented as profound objects of meditation. A major theme is the nature of time, especially the transition from 2013 to 2014. The speaker invites the audience to question conventional notions of year, month, day, and hour, describing them as mental designations rather than fixed realities. The year 2013 is said to be “ending,” but the talk challenges the idea that anything truly dies or disappears. Instead, the speaker explains that the new year is already present in latent form, just as butterflies are already alive in winter even though they have not yet manifested. This leads to a broader teaching on no birth and no death: things continue in transformed forms rather than ceasing to exist. The speaker connects this insight to the first law of thermodynamics, arguing that matter and energy are neither created nor destroyed, only transformed. Childhood selves, ancestors, clouds, rain, snow, and the year itself are all used as examples of continuity through change. The talk also explores how mindfulness helps practitioners evaluate the past year and prepare for the next. The audience is encouraged to ask whether they have generated joy and happiness, and whether they have been able to care for painful emotions. The speaker stresses that a practitioner should know how to produce joy and happiness intentionally and how to transform pain, anger, fear, and despair into compassion, friendship, forgiveness, and understanding. The phrase “New year, new me” is presented as a reminder that a genuinely new year requires inner renewal. Without transforming one’s habits and emotional patterns, the new year becomes merely a repetition of the old. Another central teaching is the notion of “True Home.” The speaker explains that true home is not a distant place in space or time, but a state of understanding and practice available in the present moment. Drawing on the Buddha’s teaching of atta-dipa-sarana, or being an island unto oneself, the talk describes the body as the first element of true home. Mindful breathing, mindful walking, and mindful sitting help practitioners return to the body, release tension, and reconcile with bodily pain. The speaker outlines the Buddha’s exercises of mindful breathing, especially the practices of being aware of the whole body, smiling to the body, and releasing tension in the body. The next exercises concern feelings and emotions: recognizing joy, happiness, and painful emotions, and embracing suffering tenderly rather than fleeing from it. The talk emphasizes that painful emotions are organic and impermanent. If handled with mindfulness and concentration, anger can be transformed into understanding and compassion. The speaker uses the image of a mother holding a suffering baby to illustrate how mindfulness can embrace pain with tenderness. This same insight is extended to interpersonal conflict: when one sees that another person is suffering, anger gives way to compassion, and the other person no longer needs punishment but help. The speaker presents this as a practical path for reducing suffering in oneself and others. The teaching then expands from the individual to the collective. True home is not only within the body and feelings, but also in the Sangha. A community practicing deep listening, compassionate listening, loving speech, and mindful living becomes a home for its members. The speaker describes Plum Village monastics as living simply without salaries or private homes, yet feeling deeply at home through shared practice. The talk also applies this model to families and corporations, arguing that a company can become a Sangha if its members share the aspiration to help people suffer less. The speaker recounts conversations with the World Bank, Google, Hulu, and a Hong Kong businessman, suggesting that organizations can be transformed by training people in compassionate listening and mindfulness. The talk concludes by presenting the Sangha as the living Dharma, and the Sangha, Dharma, and Buddha as the Three Jewels that are not distant abstractions but touchable realities. The true Buddha is not a statue but the living quality of mindfulness, concentration, understanding, and compassion embodied in a community. Each practitioner can become a cell in the Sangha body, the Dharma body, and the Buddha body by generating these qualities in daily life. The final message is that Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha are the true home and island within oneself, and that with this understanding the community is ready to welcome 2014 with clarity, peace, and renewal.