The Act of Sitting Down is a Revolution

Summary

The talk centers on a teaching about returning home to oneself through mindfulness, framed by chanting, refuge verses, and a meditation talk delivered to the Sangha at the Tangram Meditation Hall, Full Moon Meditation Hall, New Hamlet, during the winter retreat of 2012–2013. The speaker begins with communal chanting and refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, emphasizing that these refuges are not merely external ideals but living realities to be realized in oneself. The Sangha is invited to breathe, chant, and listen as one body, transcending the illusion of a separate self and the complexes of superiority, inferiority, and equality. A major theme is loneliness in modern life. The speaker argues that contemporary people are often “lonely together,” surrounded by technology yet disconnected from themselves and from others. Email, messaging, and devices create an illusion of connection, but they do not resolve the deeper vacuum inside. The real problem, according to the talk, is that people have lost contact with their own bodies, feelings, and present-moment experience. In the Plum Village tradition, sitting down on the cushion is described as a revolutionary act because it interrupts the habit of self-loss and restores contact with one’s own breathing, body, and inner life. The teaching of “going home” is presented as the practical answer to loneliness. Home is not an external place but an inner island, the “island of self,” where one can dwell in safety, warmth, and fulfillment. Through mindful breathing and mindful steps, a person can return to the here and now, recognize bodily tension, and embrace emotions such as sadness, fear, anxiety, and loneliness with tenderness. The speaker repeatedly emphasizes that one can say to loneliness, “I know you are there; I am home to take care of you.” This practice is described as healing, both for the individual and for society. It is also connected to the Christmas season, which the speaker suggests can become a time for practicing return, care, and renewal rather than distraction. The talk then shifts into a detailed doctrinal analysis of Buddhist concepts, especially formations, dependent origination, and the Twelve Nidanas. The speaker explains that “formations” should be understood broadly as all conditioned phenomena: physical, mental, and physiological. Ordinary people, lacking insight, mistakenly see formations as separate, permanent entities with self-nature. This mistaken view leads to the notions of actor and receiver, being and non-being, birth and death. By contrast, right view reveals that all things inter-are and arise dependently; nothing exists independently or permanently. The speaker cites the Buddha’s teaching found in the Itivuttaka and Udana: there is the born, the becoming, the made, and the formed, but also the unborn, unbecoming, unmade, and unformed. This is used to show that the ultimate dimension transcends birth and death. The speaker critiques common presentations of the Twelve Nidanas as overly linear and misleading. He argues that the standard sequence can wrongly suggest a first cause, imply that ignorance alone produces everything, and distort the meaning of “formations” by treating them as karmic impulses rather than as all phenomena. He also objects to the way feeling is reduced to pleasant feeling, ignoring unpleasant and neutral feelings, and to the way craving is presented without its opposite, aversion. Likewise, grasping should be paired with letting go, and being should be paired with non-being. Without these opposites, the teaching can be misunderstood as implying that Buddhism seeks non-being or eternal death. The speaker strongly rejects this interpretation, noting that some Western scholars have mistakenly concluded that nirvana means annihilation. Instead, the talk presents nirvana as freedom in the here and now. The speaker insists that nirvana is not an abstract afterlife state but the lived experience of release from fear, anger, discrimination, wrong perceptions, and the notions of self, being, and death. He compares afflictions to thorns in the flesh: when the thorn is removed, one feels immediate relief, and that relief is a taste of nirvana. The Five Mindfulness Trainings are described as a concrete expression of this path, embodying the insight of interbeing and no birth and no death in daily life. The talk concludes that liberation is achieved not by prayer but by looking deeply, cultivating insight, and living mindfully so that freedom becomes part of ordinary experience.