Does A Dog Have Buddha Nature?

Summary

This retreat talk, given on the fifth day of the 2012 Plum Village retreat titled “Body and Mind are One,” centers on a question-and-answer session with children, teenagers, young adults, and adults. The speaker opens by grounding the audience in mindful breathing and explains that the “seatbelt” for the retreat is breathing awareness. The session is structured carefully: participants are invited to come forward, sit near Thay, and breathe three times before asking a question. The talk emphasizes that a good question can benefit many people, especially when it comes from the heart and concerns suffering, happiness, and practice. A substantial portion of the talk addresses children’s questions. The speaker explains why people have bad dreams, linking them to daytime impressions such as television, scary games, anger, fear, overeating, poor circulation, and unresolved conflict. He also notes that suffering transmitted from ancestors, including war and disaster, can appear in dreams. Mindful breathing, walking, calming the body, and simple physical actions after waking are recommended to reduce this suffering. Another child asks why he became a monk. The speaker describes the five-year monastic training program for those 17 and older, explaining that monastic life includes study, practice, service, and play. He stresses that monks and nuns can begin serving immediately, even as novices, and that the joy of practice includes building brotherhood and sisterhood. When asked whether he is sometimes angry, he says yes—especially in response to injustice, war, poverty, and violence—but explains that a practitioner transforms anger into compassion and understanding, using it as energy for helpful action rather than being overwhelmed by it. Teenagers’ questions move into relationships and transformation. One question asks how to transform another person. The answer is that one cannot force transformation; instead, one should quietly practice oneself and become fresher, more loving, and more gentle, thereby inspiring change. The speaker connects this to the Buddhist teaching of interbeing: if one transforms oneself, the effect naturally influences others. Another question asks how to know a real friend. The answer highlights time, mutual cultivation, and the seeds of loyalty and betrayal in everyone. Rather than worrying about betrayal, one should nourish loyalty in oneself and in the other person. A question about loving someone who seems opposite in preferences leads to a teaching on love as discovery. The speaker says that to love is to discover what is wonderful in the other person, even what the person has not yet seen in themselves. He also introduces the Buddhist idea of true love as inclusive, equanimous, and without frontiers, referring to the Brahmavihara and to his book on the Buddha’s teaching on love. The talk then turns to adults and more complex dilemmas. One participant asks about the difficulty of choosing between two actions when either choice may hurt someone. The speaker explains the fourth mindfulness training on loving speech and deep listening: truth should be spoken in a way the other person can receive, at the right time and place, and with compassion. He describes his own practice of waiting months before speaking to a disciple, using indirect methods, stories, or another Dharma sibling to help the person transform. He emphasizes skillful means and says that compassion and understanding protect the practitioner from suffering. Another adult expresses confusion about apparently contradictory teachings—such as letting go versus taking action. The response is that different people need different teachings, like different medicines. A Zen story about Chaozhou and the dog’s Buddha nature illustrates that a teacher may give opposite answers depending on what will help a particular disciple. The speaker concludes that one must find the teaching that is right for one’s own condition. A later question concerns activism and environmental protection after being inspired by Thay’s teaching in New York. The speaker affirms that action is important, but says that the energy for action should come from awakening, and that one should maintain peace and happiness without excessive consumption. He describes Plum Village as a community that lives simply, without private cars, bank accounts, computers, or telephones, as a model of low-consumption living. The key point is that being is more important than doing: if one is already peaceful, one’s actions naturally embody peace. The final major theme is love as a concrete practice, especially in relation to a child’s loneliness and a parent’s inability to feel love as an abstraction. The speaker explains that love begins with oneself: caring for the body, releasing tension, breathing with painful feelings, and speaking to oneself with compassion. Patience is presented as a mark of true love, and transformation is compared to soaking beans in warm water before cooking. The talk then includes a deeply moving testimony from a woman in the Jewish tradition who has cared for her traumatized husband for decades after his experience in the concentration camps. She describes exhaustion, grief, and the burden of family trauma. The speaker responds that such accumulated suffering is like a great mass of mud that cannot be transformed alone. He stresses the need for a sangha, or community of practice, to support healing and transformation. Even the Buddha needed a sangha after enlightenment. The talk closes by returning to the retreat schedule: walking meditation, a communal picnic in the park, music, an exhibition of calligraphies, and the celebration of Plum Village’s 30th anniversary, all framed as opportunities to enjoy the day together as a sangha.