I only glanced at the review copy of The Heart Of Understanding when it arrived in the office a few months ago. Intimidated by the subtitle — Commentaries On The Prajñaparamita Heart Sutra — and hardly in the mood that day for a romp through Buddhist philosophy, I set the book aside.
But my respect for its author, Thich Nhat Hanh, eventually drew me to the book. As I started reading, my prejudice lifted, and the clear light of this remarkable man’s understanding shone through. I didn’t want to stop reading when I got to the end, for in this brief work Thich Nhat Hanh penetrates to the heart of the human condition in a simple, direct, and genuinely inspiring way.
No less than his words, Thich Nhat Hanh’s life has been an expression of his passion for truth and his yearning for world peace. Born in central Vietnam in the mid-1920s, he entered the monkhood at the age of sixteen. When war broke out in Vietnam, he and many of his fellow monks came out of isolation to speak out against the violence. He traveled to the United States to describe to Americans “the aspirations and the agony of the voiceless masses of the Vietnamese people.” He met with many leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
As a result of his outspoken neutrality, Thich Nhat Hanh was threatened with arrest if he returned to Vietnam. He lives in France now, teaching, writing, and continuing to help refugees worldwide.
Last year, he offered a series of retreats and lectures in the United States aimed at revealing the true face of “American Buddhism.” The teaching of Buddhism in this country, he said, “will be different from that in other countries. Buddhism, in order to be Buddhism, must be suitable, appropriate to the psychology and the culture of the society that it serves.”
Several of his talks on the Prajñaparamita Heart Sutra — regarded as the essence of Buddhist teaching, and recited daily in Buddhist temples around the world — were compiled by editor Peter Levitt, a poet and translator, into The Heart Of Understanding. Each section begins with a line or two from the sutra, followed by Thich Nhat Hanh’s commentary.
We’re thankful to Parallax Press (P.O. Box 7355, Berkeley, California 94707) for permission to publish these excerpts. The Heart Of Understanding is available for $7.50 postpaid from Parallax Press, which has published other books by Thich Nhat Hanh, including Being Peace and The Sun My Heart. A catalogue is available.
— Ed.
If you look into this sheet of paper, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in it. Without a cloud, there can be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Inter-being” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, “to inter-be.”
If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that, without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.
Looking even more deeply, we can see that we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, it is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. You cannot point out one thing that is not here — time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think “to inter-be” should be in the dictionary. “To be” is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.
Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source. Suppose we return the sunshine to the sun. Do you think that this sheet of paper will be possible? No, without sunshine nothing can be. And if we return the logger to his mother, then we have no sheet of paper either. The fact is that this sheet of paper is made up only of “non-paper elements.” And if we return these non-paper elements to their sources, then there can be no paper at all. As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe within it.
But the Heart Sutra seems to say the opposite. Avalokita tells us that things are empty. Let us look more closely.
“The Bodhisattva Avalokita, while moving in the deep course of Perfect Understanding, shed light on the five skandhas and found them equally empty.”
Bodhi means being awake, and sattva means a living being, so bodhisattva means an awakened being. All of us are sometimes bodhisattvas, and sometimes not. Avalokita is the name of one bodhisattva.
Perfect Understanding is prajñaparamita. The word “wisdom” is usually used to translate prajña, but I think that wisdom is somehow not able to convey the meaning. Understanding is like water flowing in a stream. Wisdom and knowledge are solid and can block our understanding. In Buddhism, knowledge is regarded as an obstacle to understanding. If we take something to be the truth, we may cling to it so much that even if the truth comes and knocks at our door, we won’t want to let it in. We have to be able to transcend our previous knowledge the way we climb up a ladder. If we are on the fifth rung and think we are very high, there is no hope for us to step up to the sixth. We must learn to transcend our own views.
According to Avalokita, this sheet of paper is empty; but according to our analysis, it is full of everything. There seems to be a contradiction between our observation and his. Avalokita found the five skandhas empty. But, empty of what? The key word is “empty.” To be empty is to be empty of something.
If I am holding a cup of water and I ask you, “Is this cup empty?” you will say, “No, it is full of water.” But if I pour out the water and ask you again, you may say, “Yes, it is empty.” But, empty of what? My cup is empty of water, but it is not empty of air. When Avalokita says that the five skandhas are equally empty, to help him be precise we must ask, “Empty of what?”
The five skandhas — which may be translated into English as heaps, or aggregates — are the five elements that comprise a human being. These five elements flow like a river in every one of us. In fact, there are really five rivers flowing together in us: the river of form, which means our body; the river of feelings; the river of perceptions; the river of mental formations; and the river of consciousness. They are always flowing in us. So according to Avalokita, who looked deeply into the nature of these rivers, all five are empty. And if we ask, “Empty of what?” he answers, “They are empty of a separate self.” That means none of these five rivers can exist by itself alone. Each of the five rivers has to be made by the other four. They have to co-exist; they have to inter-be with all the others.
In our bodies we have lungs, a heart, kidneys, a stomach, and blood. None of these can exist independently. Your lungs and your blood are two things, but neither can exist separately. The lungs take in air and enrich the blood, and, in turn, the blood nourishes the lungs. Lungs and blood inter-are. The same is true with kidneys and blood, kidneys and stomach, lungs and heart, blood and heart, and so on.
When Avalokita says that our sheet of paper is empty, he means it is empty of a separate, independent existence. It cannot be just by itself. It has to inter-be with the sunshine, the cloud, the forest, the logger, the mind, and everything else. But empty of a separate self means full of everything. So it seems that our observation and that of Avalokita do not contradict each other after all.
Avalokita looked deeply into the five skandhas of form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness, and he discovered that none of them can be by itself alone. Each can only inter-be with all the others. So he tells us that form is empty. Form is empty of a separate self, but it is full of everything in the cosmos. The same is true with feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness.
Usually we say humans come from dust and are going back to dust, and this does not sound very joyful. We don’t want to return to dust. There is a discrimination here that humans are very valuable, and that dust has no value at all. But scientists do not even know what a speck of dust is! It is still a mystery.
“After this penetration, he overcame all pain.”
A wave on the ocean has a beginning and an end, a birth and a death. But Avalokita tells us that the wave is empty. The wave is full of water, but it is empty of a separate self. A wave is a form which has been made possible thanks to the existence of wind and water. If a wave sees only its form, with its beginning and end, it will be afraid of birth and death. But if the wave sees that it is water, identifies itself with water, then it will be emancipated from birth and death. Each wave is born and is going to die, but the water is free from birth and death.
When I was a child, I used to play with a kaleidoscope. I took a tube and a few pieces of ground glass, turned it a little bit, and saw many wonderful sights. Every time I made a small movement with my fingers, one sight would disappear and another would appear. I did not cry at all when the first spectacle disappeared, because I knew that nothing was lost. Another beautiful sight always followed. If you are the wave and you become one with the water, looking at the world with the eyes of water, then you are not afraid of going up, going down, going up, going down.
But please do not be satisfied with speculation, or take my word for it. You have to enter it, taste it, and be one with it yourself, and that can be done through meditation, not only in the meditation hall, but throughout your daily life. While you cook a meal, while you clean the house, while you go for a walk, you can look at things and try to see them in the nature of emptiness. Emptiness is an optimistic word; it is not at all pessimistic. When Avalokita, in his deep meditation on Perfect Understanding, was able to see the nature of emptiness, he suddenly overcame all fear and pain. I have seen people die very peacefully, with a smile, because they see that birth and death are only waves on the surface of the ocean, only one spectacle in the kaleidoscope.
Penetration means to enter something, not just to stand outside of it. When we want to understand something, we cannot just stand outside and observe it. We have to enter deeply into it and be one with it in order really to understand. If we want to understand others, we have to feel their feelings, suffer their sufferings, and enjoy their joy. The word “comprehend” is made up of the Latin roots com, which means “to be one with,” and prehendere, which means “to grasp or pick up.” To comprehend something means to pick it up and be one with it. There is no other way to understand something.
If we look at the sheet of paper only as an observer, standing outside, we cannot understand it completely. We have to penetrate it. We have to be a cloud, be the sunshine, and be the logger. If we can enter it and be everything that is in it, our understanding of the sheet of paper will be perfect. There is an Indian story about a grain of salt that wanted to know just how salty the ocean was, so it jumped in and became one with the water of the ocean. In this way, the grain of salt gained perfect understanding.
We are concerned with peace and we want to understand the Soviet Union, so we cannot just stand outside and observe. We have to be one with a Russian citizen in order to understand his or her feelings, perceptions, and mental formations. This is Buddhist meditation — to penetrate, to be one with, in order really to understand. Any meaningful work for peace must follow the principle of non-duality, the principle of penetration.
In the Sutra of the Four Abodes of Full Awareness, the Buddha recommended that we observe in a penetrating way. He said we should contemplate the body in the body, the feelings in the feelings, the mental formations in the mental formations. Why did he use this kind of repetition? Because in order to be one with what you want to observe and to understand you have to enter it. Nuclear scientists are beginning to say this also. When you enter the world of elementary particles, you have to become a participant in order to understand something. You can no longer stand outside and remain an observer. Today many scientists prefer the word “participant” to the word “observer.”
In our effort to understand each other, we should do the same. Husbands and wives who wish to understand each other have to be in the skin of their partners in order to feel — otherwise they cannot really understand. In the light of Buddhist meditation, love is impossible without understanding. You cannot love someone if you do not understand him or her. If you don’t understand and you think you love, that is not love; it is something else.
Avalokita’s meditation was a deep penetration into the five skandhas. Seeing deeply into the rivers of form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness, he discovered the empty nature of all of them, and suddenly he overcame all pain. All of us who would like to arrive at that kind of emancipation will have to look deeply in order to penetrate the true nature of emptiness.
“Listen, Shariputra, form is emptiness, emptiness is form, form does not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from form. The same is true with feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness.”
Form is the wave and emptiness is the water. You can understand through that image. People in India speak in a language that can scare us, but we have to understand their way of expression in order really to understand them. In the West, when we draw a circle, we consider it to be zero, nothingness. But in India, a circle means totality, wholeness. The meaning is the opposite. So “form is emptiness, emptiness is form” is like wave is water, water is wave. “Form does not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from form. The same thing is true with feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness,” because these five contain each other. Because one exists, everything exists.
In the Vietnamese literature, there are two lines of poetry by a Zen master of the Ling dynasty, twelfth century. He said:
If it exists, then one speck of dust exists. If it doesn’t exist, then the whole cosmos doesn’t.
He means that the notions of existence and non-existence are just created by our minds. He also said, “The entire cosmos can be put on the tip of a hair, and the sun and the moon can be seen in a mustard seed.” These are images that show us that one contains everything, and everything is just one. You know that modern science has perceived the truth that not only are matter and energy one, but matter and space are also one. Not only are matter and space one, but matter, space, and mind are one, because mind is in it.
Because form is emptiness, form is possible. In form we find everything else — feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. It is full of everything, full of life. The word “emptiness” should not scare us. Thanks to emptiness, everything is possible. That is a declaration made by Nagarjuna, the Buddhist philosopher of the second century. Emptiness is quite an optimistic concept. If I am not empty, I cannot be here. And if you are not empty, you cannot be there. Because you are there, I can be here. This is the true meaning of emptiness.
If we are not empty, we become a block of matter. We cannot breathe; we cannot think. To be empty means to be alive, to breathe in and to breathe out. Emptiness is impermanence; it is change. We should not complain about impermanence, because without impermanence nothing is possible. A Buddhist who came to see me from Great Britain complained that life was empty and impermanent. (He had been a Buddhist for five years and had thought about emptiness and impermanence a great deal.) He said that one day his fourteen-year-old daughter told him, “Daddy, please don’t complain about impermanence. Without impermanence, how can I grow up?” Of course she is right.
When you have a grain of corn, and you entrust it to the soil, you hope that it will become a tall corn plant. If there is no impermanence, the grain will remain a grain forever, and you will never have an ear of corn to eat. Impermanence is crucial to the life of everything. Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible. And it is the same with emptiness. Thanks to emptiness, life itself is possible.
Because we live with someone for twenty or thirty years, we have the impression that we know everything about the person. So, while driving in the car with that person sitting right next to us, we think about other things. We aren’t interested in him or her anymore. What arrogance!
“Hear, Shariputra, all dharmas are marked with emptiness; they are neither produced nor destroyed. . . .”
Dharmas, here, mean things. A human being is a dharma. A tree is a dharma. A cloud is a dharma. The sunshine is a dharma. Everything that can be conceived is a dharma. So when we say, “All dharmas are marked with emptiness,” we are saying, everything has emptiness as its own nature. And that is why everything can be. There is a lot of joy in this statement. It means nothing can be born, nothing can die. Avalokita has said something extremely important.
Every day in our lives, we see birth and we see death. When a person is born, a birth certificate is printed. After they die, a death certificate is made. These certificates confirm the existence of birth and death. But Avalokita said there is no birth and death. We have to look more deeply in order to see whether his statement is true.
What is the date on which you were born, your birthdate? Before that date, did you already exist? To be born means that from nothing you became something. My question is, before you were born, were you already there? If you say, “Yes,” I think you are correct. Before your conception, you were there already, half in your father, half in your mother. Can you name one thing that was once a nothing? A cloud? Before becoming a cloud, it was water, maybe flowing in a river. It was something.
Please look back even further and you will see that you exist not only in your father and mother, but also in your grandparents and in your great-grandparents. As I look more deeply, I can see that in a former life I was a cloud. This is not poetry; it is fact, because I am still a cloud. Without the cloud, I cannot be here. I am the cloud, the river, and the air at this very moment, so I know that in the past I have been a cloud, a river, and the air. I was a rock. I was the minerals in the water. This is not a question of belief in reincarnation. This is the history of life on Earth. We have been gas, sunshine, water, fungi, and plants. We have been single-celled beings. The Buddha said that, in one of his former lives, he was a tree. He was a fish. He was a deer. These are not superstitions. Every one of us has been a cloud, a deer, a bird, a fish, and we continue to be these things.
Just as nothing can be born, nothing can die. That is what Avalokita said. Do you think that a cloud can die? To die means that from something you become nothing. Do you think that we can make something into nothing? Let us go back to our sheet of paper. We may have the illusion that, to destroy it, all we have to do is light a match and burn it up. But if we burn a sheet of paper, some of it will become smoke, and the smoke will rise and continue to be. The heat that is caused by the burning paper will enter into the cosmos and penetrate other things, because the heat is the next life of the paper. The ash that is formed will become part of the soil and the sheet of paper, in its next life, might be a cloud and a rose at the same time. We have to be very attentive in order to realize that this sheet of paper has never been born, and it will never die. It can take on other forms of being, but we are not capable of transforming a sheet of paper into nothingness.
Look at your hand and ask yourself, “Since when has my hand been around?” If I look deeply into my hand, I can see it has been around for a long time, more than 300,000 years. I see many generations of ancestors in there, not just in the past, but in the present moment, still alive.
The French scientist Lavoisier said, “Nothing is created, and nothing is destroyed.” This is exactly the same as in the Heart Sutra. Even the best contemporary scientists cannot reduce something as small as a speck of dust or an electron to nothingness. One form of energy can only become another form of energy.
Usually we say humans come from dust and are going back to dust, and this does not sound very joyful. We don’t want to return to dust. There is a discrimination here that humans are very valuable, and that dust has no value at all. But scientists do not even know what a speck of dust is! It is still a mystery. Imagine one atom of that speck of dust, with electrons traveling around its nucleus at 180,000 miles per second. It is very exciting. To return to a speck of dust will be quite an exciting adventure!
Sometimes we have the impression that we understand what a speck of dust is. We even pretend that we understand a human being — a being who we say is going to return to dust. Because we live with someone for twenty or thirty years, we have the impression that we know everything about the person. So, while driving in the car with that person sitting right next to us, we think about other things. We aren’t interested in him or her anymore. What arrogance! The person sitting there beside us is really a mystery! We only have the impression that we know the person, but we don’t know anything yet. If we look with the eyes of Avalokita, we will see that even one hair of that person is the entire cosmos. One hair can be a door, opening to the ultimate reality. One speck of dust can be the Kingdom of Heaven, the Pure Land. When you see that you, the speck of dust, and all things inter-are, you will understand that this is so.
We must be humble. “To say you don’t know is the beginning of knowing,” says a Chinese proverb.
One autumn day, I was in a park, absorbed in the contemplation of a very small but beautiful leaf, in the shape of a heart. Its color was almost red, and it was barely hanging on the branch, nearly ready to fall. I spent a long time with it. Usually we think that the tree is the mother and the leaves are just children, but as I looked at the leaf I saw that the leaf is also a mother to the tree. The roots take up only water and minerals, not enough to nourish the tree, so the tree distributes that sap to the leaves. And the leaves transform that rough sap and send it back to nourish the tree. Therefore, the leaves are also a mother to the tree.
Unlike the leaf, we do not have a stem linking us to our mother any more, but when we were in her womb we had a very long stem, an umbilical cord. The oxygen and the nourishment we needed came to us through that stem. Unfortunately, on the day that we call our birthday, it was cut off and we received the illusion that we are independent. That is a mistake. We continue to rely on our mother for a very long time, and we have several other mothers as well. The Earth is our mother. We have a great many stems linking us to our mother Earth. There is a stem linking us with the cloud. If there is no cloud, there is no water for us to drink. We are made of at least ninety percent water, so the stem between the cloud and us is really there. This is also the case with the river, the forest, the logger, and the farmer. There are hundreds of thousands of stems linking us to everything in the cosmos, and therefore we can be. Do you see the link between you and me? If you are not there, I am not here. That is certain. If you do not see it yet, look more deeply and I am sure you will see.
I wondered if a leaf is scared in autumn when the other leaves are falling. I watched the leaf and saw that during the whole spring and summer it was very alive. It worked hard and helped nourish the tree, and much of it was in the tree. The form of leaf is only a tiny part of a leaf. It is also the whole tree. It is inside the tree, and when it goes back to the soil, it will continue to nourish the tree. So it does not worry in autumn.
Suddenly I saw a kind of wisdom very much like the wisdom contained in the Heart Sutra. You have to see life. You should not say, life of the leaf, you should speak of life in the leaf and life in the tree. That day there was a wind blowing and, after a while, I saw the leaf leave the branch and float down to the soil, dancing joyfully, because, as it floated, it saw itself already there in the tree. It was so happy. I bowed my head, and I knew that we have a lot to learn from the leaf because it is not afraid — it knows that nothing can be born and nothing can die.
The cloud in the sky will also not be scared. When the time comes, the cloud will become rain. It is fun to become rain, fall down, chant, and become part of the Mississippi River, or the Amazon River, or the Mekong River, or to fall onto vegetables and later become part of a human being. It is a very exciting adventure. The cloud knows that if it falls to the earth it might become part of the ocean. So the cloud is not scared. Only humans get scared.
So you see there are many lessons we can learn from the cloud, the water, the wave, the leaf, and the kaleidoscope; from everything else in the cosmos, too. If you look at anything carefully, deeply enough, you discover the mystery of inter-being, and once you have seen it you will no longer be subject to fear — fear of birth, or fear of death. Birth and death are only ideas we have in our minds, and these ideas cannot be applied to reality. It is just like the idea of above and below. We are very sure that when we point our hand up, it is above, and when we point our hand down, it is below. Heaven is above, and hell is below. But the people who are sitting right now on the other side of the planet will disagree. The idea of above and below does not apply to the cosmos, nor does the idea of birth and death.
“Hear, Shariputra, all dharmas are marked with emptiness; they are neither produced nor destroyed, neither defiled nor immaculate. . . .”
Defiled or immaculate. Dirty or pure. These are concepts we form in our minds. A beautiful rose we just cut and placed in our vase is immaculate. It smells so good, so pure, so fresh. The opposite is a garbage can. It smells horrible, and it is filled with rotten things.
But that is only when you look on the surface. If you look more deeply you will see that in just five or six days, the rose will become part of the garbage. You do not need to wait five days to see it. If you just look at the rose, and you look deeply, you can see it now. And if you look into the garbage can, you see that in a few months its contents can be transformed into lovely vegetables, and even a rose. If you are a good organic gardener and you have the eyes of a bodhisattva, looking at a rose you can see garbage, and looking at garbage you can see a rose. Roses and garbage inter-are. Without a rose, we cannot have garbage; and without garbage, we cannot have a rose. The rose and garbage are equal. The garbage is just as precious as the rose. If we look deeply at the concepts of defilement and immaculateness, we return to the notion of inter-being.
In the Majjima Nikaya there is a very short passage on how the world has come to be. It is very simple, very easy to understand, and yet very deep: “This is, because that is. This is not, because that is not. This is like this, because that is like that.” This is the Buddhist teaching of Genesis.
In the city of Manila, there are many young prostitutes, some of them only fourteen or fifteen years old. They are very unhappy. They did not want to be prostitutes. Their families are poor and these young girls went to the city to look for some kind of job, to make money to send back to their families. Of course this is true not only in Manila, but in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, in New York City, and in Paris. It is true that in the city you can make money more easily than in the country, so we can imagine how a young girl may have gone there to help her family. But after only a few weeks, she was persuaded by a clever person to try to earn perhaps one hundred times more money. Because she was so young and did not know much about life, she accepted, and became a prostitute. Since that time, she has carried the feeling of being impure, defiled, and this causes her great suffering. When she looks at other young girls, dressed beautifully, belonging to good families, a wretched feeling wells up in her, and this feeling of defilement has become her hell.
But if she had an opportunity to meet with Avalokita, he would tell her to look deeply at herself and the whole situation and see that she is like this because other people are like that. “This is like this, because that is like that.” So how can a so-called good girl, belonging to a good family, be proud? Because their way of life is like this, the other girl has to be like that. No one among us has clean hands. No one of us can claim it is not our responsibility. The girl in Manila is that way because of the way we are. Looking into the life of that young prostitute, we see the non-prostitute. And looking at the non-prostitute, and the way we live our lives, we see the prostitute.
Let us look at wealth and poverty. The affluent society and the impoverished society inter-are. The wealth of one society is made of the poverty of the other. “This is like this, because that is like that.” Wealth is made of non-wealth elements, and poverty is made by non-poverty elements. It is exactly the same as with the sheet of paper. So we must be careful. We should not imprison ourselves in concepts. The truth is that everything is everything else. We can only inter-be, we cannot just be. And we are responsible for everything that happens around us. Avalokita will tell the young prostitute, “My child, look at yourself and you will see everything. Because other people are like that, you are like this. You are not the only person responsible, so please do not suffer.” Only by seeing with the eyes of inter-being can that young girl be freed from her suffering. What else can you offer her to help her be free?
We are imprisoned by our ideas of good and evil. We want to be only good, and we want to remove all evil. But that is because we forget that good is made of non-good elements. Suppose I am holding a lovely branch. When we look at it with a non-discriminative mind, we see this wonderful branch. But as soon as we distinguish that one end is the left and the other end is the right, we get into trouble. We may say we want only the left, and we do not want the right (as you hear very often), and there is trouble right away. (If the rightist is not there, how can you be a leftist?) Let us say that I do not want the right end of this branch, I want only the left. So, I break off half of this reality and throw it away. But as soon as I throw the unwanted half away, the end that remains becomes the new right. Because if the left is there, the right must be there also.
In the West you have been struggling for many years with the problem of evil. How is it possible that evil should be there? It seems that it is difficult for the Western mind to understand. But in the light of non-duality, there is no problem: as soon as the idea of good is there, the idea of evil is there. When you perceive reality in this way, you will not discriminate against garbage for the sake of a rose. You will cherish both. You need both right and left in order to have a branch. Do not take sides. If you take sides, you are trying to eliminate half of reality, which is impossible. For many years, the United States has been trying to describe the Soviet Union as the evil side. Some Americans even have the illusion that they can survive alone, without the other half. But that is the same as believing that the right side can exist without the left side.
And this very same feeling exists in the Soviet Union. The American imperialists, it is said, are on the bad side and must be eliminated for the possibility of happiness in the world. But that is the dualistic way of looking at things. If we look at America very deeply, we see the Soviet Union. And if we look deeply at the Soviet Union, we see America. If we look deeply at the rose, we see garbage; if we look deeply at garbage, we see the rose. In this international situation, each side is pretending to be the rose, and calling the other side garbage.
So the idea is clear: “This is because that is.” You have to work for the survival of the other side if you want to survive yourself. It is really very simple. Survival means the survival of humankind as a whole, not just a part of it. And we know now that this must be realized not only between the United States and the Soviet Union, but also between the North and the South. If the South cannot survive, then the North is going to crumble. If countries like Brazil cannot pay their debts, you are going to suffer here in the North. If you do not take care of South America and the Third World, your well-being is not going to last, and you will not be able to continue living in the way you have been for much longer.
We are not separate. We are inextricably interrelated. The rose is garbage, and the non-prostitute is the prostitute. The rich man is the very poor woman, because we inter-are. The emancipation of the young prostitute will come as she sees into the nature of inter-being. She will know that she is bearing the fruit of the whole world. And if we look into ourselves and see her, we bear her pain, and the pain of the whole world.
As soon as the idea of good is there, the idea of evil is there. When you perceive reality in this way, you will not discriminate against garbage for the sake of a rose. You will cherish both. You need both right and left in order to have a branch. Do not take sides. If you take sides, you are trying to eliminate half of reality, which is impossible.
“. . . Neither increasing nor decreasing.”
We cannot destroy even one sheet of paper. We are incapable of destroying anything. When they assassinated Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr., they hoped to reduce them into nothingness. But these people continue to be with us, perhaps even more than before, because they continue in other forms. We ourselves continue their being. So let us not be afraid of decreasing. It is like the moon. We see the moon increasing and decreasing, but it is always the moon.
“Therefore, in emptiness there is neither form, nor feeling, nor perception, nor mental formations, nor consciousness; no eye, or ear, or nose, or tongue, or body, or mind; no form, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object of mind; no realms of elements (from eyes to mind consciousness); no interdependent origins and no extinction of them (from ignorance to death and decay); no suffering, no origination of suffering, no extinction of suffering, no path; no understanding, no attainment.”
This sentence begins with a confirmation that the five skandhas are all empty. They cannot exist by themselves. Each one has to inter-be with all the other skandhas.
The next part of the sentence is an enumeration of the eighteen realms of elements. First we have the six sense organs: eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind. Then there are the six sense objects: form, sound, smell, taste, touch, and object of mind. Form is the object of eyes, sound is the object of ears, and so on. Finally the contact between these first twelve brings about the “six consciousnesses”: sight, hearing, and so on, and the last is mind consciousness. So, with eyes as the first realm of elements and mind consciousness as the eighteenth, this part of the sutra is saying that not one of these realms can exist by itself, because each can only inter-be with every other realm.
The next part speaks of the twelve interdependent origins, which begin with ignorance and end with decay and death. The meaning in the sutra is that none of these twelve can exist by itself. It can only rely on the being of the others in order to be. Therefore, all of them are empty, and because they are empty, they really exist. The same principle applies to the Four Noble Truths: “no suffering, no origination of suffering, no extinction of suffering, no path.” The last item on the list is “no understanding, no attainment.” Understanding is the essence of a Buddha. “No understanding” means understanding has no separate existence. Understanding is made of non-understanding elements, just as Buddha is made of non-Buddha elements.
I want to tell you a story about Buddha and Mara. One day the Buddha was in his cave, and Ananda, who was the Buddha’s assistant, was standing outside near the door. Suddenly Ananda saw Mara coming. He was surprised, and he wished Mara would get lost. But Mara walked straight to Ananda and asked him to announce his visit to the Buddha.
Ananda said, “Why have you come here? Don’t you remember that in olden times you were defeated by the Buddha under the Bodhi tree? Aren’t you ashamed to come here? Go away! The Buddha will not see you. You are evil. You are his enemy.” When Mara heard this he began to laugh and laugh. “Did you say that your teacher told you that he has enemies?” That made Ananda very embarrassed. He knew that his teacher had not said that he had enemies. So Ananda had to go in and announce the visit of Mara, hoping that the Buddha would say, “Go and tell him that I am not here. Tell him that I am in a meeting.”
But the Buddha was very excited when he heard that Mara, such a very old friend, had come to visit him. “Is that true? Is he really here?” the Buddha said, and he went out in person to greet Mara. Ananda was very distressed. The Buddha went right up to Mara, bowed to him, and took his hands in his in the warmest way. The Buddha said, “Hello! How are you? How have you been? Is everything all right?”
Mara didn’t say anything. So the Buddha brought him into the cave, prepared a seat for him, and told Ananda to go and make herb tea for both of them. “I can make tea for my master one hundred times a day, but making tea for Mara is not a joy,” Ananda thought to himself. But since this was the order of his master, how could he refuse? So Ananda went to prepare some herb tea for the Buddha and his so-called guest, but while doing this he tried to listen to their conversation.
The Buddha repeated very warmly, “How have you been? How are things with you?” Mara said, “Things are not going well at all. I am tired of being a Mara. I want to be something else.”
Ananda became very frightened. Mara said, “You know, being a Mara is not a very easy thing to do. If you talk, you have to talk in riddles. If you do anything, you have to be tricky and look evil. I am very tired of all that. But what I cannot bear is my disciples. They are now talking about social justice, peace, equality, liberation, non-duality, nonviolence, all of that. I have had enough of it! I think that it would be better if I handed them all over to you. I want to be something else.”
Ananda began to shudder because he was afraid that the master would decide to take the other role. Mara would become the Buddha, and the Buddha would become Mara. It made him very sad.
The Buddha listened attentively, and was filled with compassion. Finally, he said in a quiet voice, “Do you think it’s fun being a Buddha? You don’t know what my disciples have done to me! They put words into my mouth that I never said. They build garish temples and put statues of me on altars in order to attract bananas and oranges and sweet rice, just for themselves. And they package me and make my teaching into an item of commerce. Mara, if you knew what it is really like to be a Buddha, I am sure you wouldn’t want to be one.”
We cannot destroy even one sheet of paper. We are incapable of destroying anything. When they assassinated Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr., they hoped to reduce them into nothingness. But these people continue to be with us, perhaps even more than before, because they continue in other forms.
“Because there is no attainment, the bodhisattvas, supported by the Perfection of Understanding, find no obstacles for their minds. Having no obstacles, they overcome fear, liberating themselves forever from illusion and realizing perfect Nirvana. All buddhas in the past, present, and future, thanks to this Perfect Understanding, arrive at full, right, and universal Enlightenment.”
These obstacles are our ideas and concepts concerning birth and death, defilement, immaculateness, increasing, decreasing, above, below, inside, outside, Buddha, Mara, and so on. Once we see with the eyes of inter-being, these obstacles are removed from our minds and we overcome fear, liberating ourselves forever from illusion, and realizing perfect Nirvana. Once the wave realizes that it is only water, that it is nothing but water, it realizes that birth and death cannot do it any harm. It has transcended all kinds of fear, and perfect Nirvana is the state of non-fear. You are liberated; you are no longer subject to birth and death, defilement and immaculateness. You are free from all that.
“Therefore, one should know that Perfect Understanding is a great mantra, is the highest mantra, is the unequalled mantra, the destroyer of all suffering, the incorruptible truth. . . . This is the mantra: Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha.”
A mantra is something that you utter when your body, your mind, and your breath are at one in deep concentration. When you dwell in that deep concentration, you look into things and see them as clearly as you see an orange that you hold in the palm of your hand. Looking into the five skandhas deeply, Avalokita saw the nature of inter-being and overcame all pain. He became completely liberated. It was in that state of deep concentration, of joy, of liberation, that he uttered something important. That is why his utterance is a mantra.
When two young people love each other, but the young man has not said so yet, the young woman may be waiting for three very important words. If the young man is a very responsible person, he probably wants to be sure of his feeling, and he may wait a long time before saying it. Then one day, as they are sitting together in a park, when no one else is nearby and everything is quiet, after the two of them have been silent for a long time, he utters these three words. When the young woman hears them, she trembles, because it is such an important statement. When you say something like that with your whole being, not just with your mouth or your intellect, it can transform the world. A statement that has such power of transformation is called a mantra.
Avalokita’s mantra is “Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha.” Gate means gone. Gone from suffering to the liberation of suffering. Gone from forgetfulness to mindfulness. Gone from duality into non-duality. Gate gate means gone, gone. Paragate means gone all the way to the other shore. So this mantra is said in a very strong way. Gone, gone, gone all the way over. In Parasamgate, sam means everyone, the sangha, the entire community of beings. Everyone gone over to the other shore. Bodhi is the light inside, enlightenment, or awakening. You see it, and the vision of reality liberates you. And svaha is a cry of joy or excitement, like “Hallelujah!” “Gone, gone, gone all the way over, everyone gone to the other shore, enlightenment, svaha.”
That is what the bodhisattva uttered. When we listen to this mantra, we should bring ourselves into that state of attention, of concentration, so that we can receive the strength emanated by Avalokita. We do not recite the Heart Sutra like singing a song, or with our intellect alone. If you practice the meditation on emptiness, if you penetrate the nature, of inter-being with all your heart, your body, and your mind, you will realize a state that is quite concentrated. If you say the mantra then, with all your being, the mantra will have power and you will be able to have real communication, real communion with Avalokita, and you will be able to transform yourself in the direction of enlightenment. This text is not just for chanting, or putting on an altar for worship. It is given to us as a tool so that we may work for our liberation, for the liberation of all beings. It is like a tool for farming, given to us so that we may farm. This is the gift of Avalokita.
There are three kinds of gifts. The first is the gift of material resources. The second is the gift of know-how, the gift of the dharma. The third, the highest kind of gift, is the gift of non-fear.
The Prajñaparamita gives us solid ground for making peace with ourselves, for transcending the fear of birth and death, the duality of this and that. In the light of emptiness, everything is everything else; we inter-are; everyone is responsible for everything that happens in life. When you produce peace and happiness in yourself, you begin to realize peace for the whole world. With the smile that you produce in yourself, with the conscious breathing you establish within yourself, you begin to work for peace in the world. To smile is not to smile only for yourself; the world will change because of your smile. When you practice sitting meditation, if you enjoy even one moment of your sitting, if you establish serenity and happiness inside yourself, you provide the world with a solid base of peace. If you do not give yourself peace, how can you share it with others? If you do not begin your peace work with yourself, where will you go to begin it? To sit, to smile, to look at things and really see them — these form the basis of peace work.
Yesterday, in our retreat, we had a tangerine party. Everyone was offered one tangerine. We put the tangerine on the palm of our hand and looked at it, breathing consciously — and the tangerine became real. Most of the time when we eat a tangerine, we do not look at it. We think about many other things. To look at a tangerine is to see the blossom forming into the fruit, to see the sunshine and the rain. The tangerine in our palm is the wonderful presence of life. We are able really to see that tangerine and smell its blossom and the warm, moist earth. As the tangerine becomes real, we become real. Life in that moment becomes real.
Mindfully we began to peel our tangerine, and smell its fragrance. We carefully took each section of the tangerine and put it on our tongues, and we could feel that it was a real tangerine. We ate each section of the tangerine in perfect mindfulness until we finished the entire fruit. Eating a tangerine in this way is very important, because both the tangerine and the eater of the tangerine become real. This, too, is the basic work for peace.
In Buddhist meditation, we do not struggle for the kind of enlightenment that will happen five or ten years from now. We practice so that each moment of our life becomes real life. And, therefore, when we meditate, we sit for sitting; we don’t sit for something else. If we sit for twenty minutes, these twenty minutes should bring us joy, life. If we practice walking meditation, we walk just for walking, not to arrive. We have to be alive with each step, and if we are, each step brings real life back to us. The same kind of mindfulness can be practiced when we eat breakfast, or when we hold a child in our arms. Hugging is a Western custom, but we from the East would like to contribute the practice of conscious breathing to it. When you hold a child in your arms, or hug your mother, or your husband, or your friend, breathe in and out three times and your happiness will be multiplied at least tenfold. And when you look at someone, really look at them with mindfulness, and practice conscious breathing.
At the beginning of each meal, I recommend that you look at your plate and silently recite, “My plate is empty now, but I know that it is going to be filled with delicious food in just a moment.” While waiting to be served or to serve yourself, I suggest you breathe three times and look at it even more deeply: “At this very moment many, many people around the world are also holding a plate, but their plate is going to be empty for a long time.” Forty thousand children — children alone — die each day because of lack of food. We can be very happy to have such wonderful food, but we also suffer because we are capable of seeing. But when we see in this way, it makes us sane, because the way in front of us is clear — the way to live so that we can make peace with ourselves and with the world. When we see the good and the bad, the wondrous and the deep suffering, we have to live in a way that we can make peace between ourselves and the world. Understanding is the fruit of meditation. Understanding is the basis of everything.
Each breath we take, each step we make, each smile we realize, is a positive contribution to peace, a necessary step in the direction of peace for the world. In the light of inter-being, peace and happiness in our daily life mean peace and happiness in the world.
Copyright © 1988 by Thich Nhat Hanh
