Stars, Moon and Consciousness

Summary

This talk is a Dharma teaching centered on mindfulness, non-duality, and the ongoing nature of practice after awakening. It opens with chanting and devotional language honoring the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, then moves into a teaching given at the Still Water Meditation Hall in the Upper Hamlet during the Winter Retreat of 2013–2014. The speaker emphasizes that even after the Buddha became enlightened, he continued to practice sitting meditation, walking meditation, looking deeply, and solitary retreat. The reason, as explained in Plum Village teaching, is that wisdom and happiness must be continually nourished; otherwise, because of impermanence, they can fade. Practice is therefore not a means to reach a final static state, but a way of sustaining insight and joy in daily life. A major section of the talk recounts the speaker’s friendship with Father Daniel Berrigan, a poet and peace activist, whom he met in 1968 during anti-war efforts related to Vietnam. Their shared practice and conversations led to the book The Raft Is Not the Shore. The speaker uses this relationship to illustrate how practice can bridge traditions and how walking meditation can be introduced even to someone unfamiliar with it. He also reflects on reading Berrigan’s work on the Psalms and noticing a dualistic tendency to separate wholesome from unwholesome, suffering from happiness, and good from evil. To respond, he tells a story about the Buddha and Mara that demonstrates non-duality: Buddha and Mara are not absolute enemies, but mutually dependent roles in a larger reality. In the story, Mara visits the Buddha during retreat, and the Buddha welcomes him as a guest, showing that wisdom includes the ability to embrace what is usually rejected. The talk then expands into a teaching about the symbolic and practical meaning of the territory of the Buddha and the territory of Mara. The speaker explains a folk story in which the Buddha throws his sanghati robe into the sky, and its shadow covers the whole earth, symbolizing that the whole world can become a place for practice. This story is connected to a Vietnamese New Year custom: families erect a pole with a piece of robe attached as a reminder to practice mindfulness before Tet. The pole signifies that the coming year should be lived as the territory of the Buddha rather than the territory of Mara, meaning a life guided by mindfulness, compassion, and transformation rather than anger, fear, craving, and suffering. The speaker notes that in Plum Village the New Year celebration will include several days of observance, ceremony, and communal practice. The talk also turns to Vietnamese cultural traditions, especially the making of banh chung, the square earth cake associated with Tet and ancestral offerings. The speaker recounts the legend of a poor son of King Hung Vuong who, guided by a dream from his mother, created round and square cakes representing the sky and the earth. The story emphasizes gratitude to ancestors, the equality of rich and poor in spiritual offering, and the importance of making food with one’s own hands and heart. The cakes become a symbol of filial piety, community, and the continuity of culture. The audience is told that after the ceremony and market visit, they will make earth cakes together, cook them overnight, and offer them to ancestors, thereby creating brotherhood, sisterhood, and a living connection to lineage. In the latter part of the talk, the speaker shifts to a more technical exposition of manifestation-only teachings, store consciousness, and the nature of consciousness. Using examples such as the moon, stars, oysters, clouds, rain, and H2O, he explains that subject and object, cause and effect, and left and right are interdependent and cannot truly be separated. He argues that consciousness and its objects arise together from seeds in store consciousness, and that these seeds are neither inherently wholesome nor unwholesome, neither pure nor impure, neither being nor non-being. This is linked to the Buddha’s teaching to Kaccayana on right view, which transcends the extremes of existence and non-existence. The speaker also critiques simplistic theological ideas that place God only on the side of being or goodness, suggesting that ultimate reality must transcend such dualistic categories. The final portion focuses on impermanence, moment-to-moment change, and maturation. Seeds, consciousness, and the body are described as changing in milliseconds, with birth and death understood as continuous processes rather than isolated events. The speaker distinguishes between momentary impermanence and periodic impermanence, using examples such as a child becoming a teenager and a cloud becoming rain. He stresses that practitioners should recognize their continuation in their actions, speech, thoughts, and karma, rather than clinging to a fixed self. The talk concludes by noting that one maturation ends and another continues, and that this understanding is refined in the teachings on the thirty verses and the fifty verses of manifestation-only doctrine. Overall, the talk combines chanting, storytelling, cultural memory, and philosophical analysis to show that mindfulness practice, ancestral gratitude, and non-dual insight are all part of one living path.