Search for the beauty, the truth and the good
Thich Nhat Hanh
Compassion: We all known what love is and suffered because of it. May
be we haven't had the time to be able to look deeply into the nature of
our love, to sum up what our love was about, to be able to understand
what we did when we loved, and to understand why suffering arose from
it.
Pic. by Saman Sri Wedage |
In Buddhism, the meaning of love is very deep, but also very clear,
and it is necessary to have time to look deeply into the nature of our
love, in order to be able to cultivate the elements which make true
love.
All of us need to love. We need something beautiful, true and good,
and we are looking for the beauty, the true, and the good. We feel that
these things don't exist in us, that what is really beautiful, what is
really truth, and what is really good, is not in us.
Therefore, we look for it, and sometimes we feel that we have found
the object of our love. The person before us is a symbol of what is
beautiful, of what is true, and we fall in love with that person. We
have found the object of our love.
There are two things to be looked into. The first is the impression
that this beauty, this truth, this goodness, is not in us. The second is
that we feel what we are looking for must be outside us, and therefore
we feel that this person is the object of our love, and we feel
satisfied and happy.
That is the foundation of our love, but after sometime we discover
reality is not what we thought of. The other person, the object of our
love, shows herself or himself to be different from what we thought in
the first place. We are disappointed, and we keep looking for the
beauty, the good, and the truth.
Antoine de St. Exupery wrote something like this: "To love is not to
look at each other, but to look in the same direction." But when we love
each other, we have to look at each other. Because the other symbolises
beauty, truth, and goodness for us, we really need to look at each
other.
Beauty and truth seem to be one thing. And when we love, we tend to
see in the other person the combination of the beauty, the good and the
truth, and it gives us great pleasure to look.
That is our happiness. But since we do not know the art of mindful
living, we make mistakes in our daily lives, and internal formations
arise in us and in the other. Pain, anger, jealousy, all these things
being shown bit by bit in ourselves, and in the other, the object of our
love.
We make the object of our love suffer, we do not understand them well
enough, we are not patient enough, we are not tolerant enough, and we
make them suffer. There is a slow change in each of us, and one day we
find that looking at the other person no longer brings us happiness.
At the beginning, when I looked at you, it made me happy. Just
looking at you give me so much happiness, but now, that is not true
anymore.
When I look at you I suffer. It is because you symbolise suffering
for me. I am already suffering, but you are also suffering, so looking
at suffering is not something pleasant.
So both of us sign a contract: we won't look at each other any more,
we will look in the same direction. And usually that direction is the
television set, so we don't have to look at each other anymore.
Because we no longer see the truth, the beauty and the goodness in
the other person, we are disappointed, and we are tempted to look for
the beauty, the good and truth elsewhere in the universe, to find
another person who can really offer us beauty, goodness and truth.
We have travelled throughout the world looking for that person. Each
one of us is like a pot without a lid, and we travel around the world
looking for the lid. The same thing happens in the spiritual realm.
We are thirsty for truth, we are thirsty for goodness, for
compassion, we are thirsty for spiritual beauty, and we are looking for
these things. We meet someone, a spiritual teacher, a spiritual friend,
and we feel so happy.
To be able to sit there and look at the teacher, look at the
spiritual friend, brings us a great deal of happiness, but this does not
last very long, because the discovery may be a false discovery. We may
have a wrong perception of this person who represents truth, goodness
and beauty, just as in the realm of falling in love.
We think we had found the ideal woman, the ideal man, in our life,
but maybe it is a wrong perception, and in the spiritual realm it is the
same thing. We think we have found someone who stands for truth,
compassion and beauty, but once again, this can be a wrong perception on
our part.
When we have contemplated, when we have spent time with that teacher,
that spiritual friend, we discover slowly that this person is not really
the object of our love. We are disappointed over that person, and we
keep looking in the cosmos.
If you are lucky, you will meet a master, a spiritual teacher like
the Buddha, and the teacher will say to you, "Look deeply in yourself,
don't look for these things somewhere else." The true teacher is someone
who helps you to discover again the real teacher in yourself.
When He woke up at the foot of the Bodhi Tree, the Buddha Shakyamuni
said, "How strange-all beings possess in themselves the capacity to
understand, the capacity to love, the capacity to be free.
Everyone has that capacity, but everyone allows himself or herself to
be carried away on the ocean of suffering. How strange." This is what
the Buddha declared at the time of his enlightenment under the Bodhi
tree.
He noticed that what we are looking for, day and night, is already
there within oneself. What is beautiful, what is truth, what is good, is
already there in oneself. We can call it the Buddha-nature, the
Buddhahood, the awakened nature, the true freedom, which is the
foundation for all peace and happiness.
This wonderful thing is in us, and a real teacher is someone who can
help you to touch that thing in yourself, who helps give birth, to bring
about the real teacher which already exists in yourself.
In the process of love, when you love someone, you can be lucky
enough to recognise in the person you love the elements of beauty, of
goodness, and of truth. If these elements are real, you have an
opportunity to go back to yourself and rediscover the same things which
already exist in you. It is possible that the person who is the object
of your love also possesses within him or herself the elements of
beauty, goodness and truth.
Then you are lucky. And if you are lucky like this, you are happy to
have this.
Therefore, you have an opportunity to rediscover the reality of these
things in yourself. And the person who can help you to rediscover and
touch the source of peace in yourself, the source of freedom, the source
of happiness in yourself, is a spiritual friend.
You are under the illusion that you don't have goodness, truth and
beauty in yourself, and that is why you look for them in somebody else.
But when you meet the Buddha, the Buddha would tell you what you have
within yourself, it is the foundation of freedom, of peace, and of love
within yourself.
These you cannot obtain from outside source. These are things that
are already available within you, and you should practise in order to
bring these things to the light, to bring freedom, fearlessness to the
light.
The person and the instrument which you use in order to find these
things is the deep looking and the deep listening to yourself. In you,
there are elements which make up your personality, and we can call these
elements the five skandhas.
I am drawing an orange on the board, with five sections. The first
section represents form of body, our physical body. The second section
represents feelings; the third: perceptions; the fourth: mental
formations; and the fifth: consciousness.
The five elements are the territory of our being, and if we practise
deep looking into these five elements, we will discover the true nature
of our being. We would discover the true nature of our suffering, of our
happiness, of peace, of fearlessness.
The Buddha gave us very concrete ways to be able to come back to our
own territory, in order to be able to look deeply, observe, embrace and
understand these things, and to transform them.
In our daily lives we have the habit of neglecting and running away
from this territory of the five skandhas. We always want to run away
from ourselves, from our territory. That is because we have the feeling
that if we come back to our territory, we will have to face the
suffering.
Each one of us is a king or a queen, reigning over the territory of
the five skandhas, but we are not responsible kings or queens - we have
abandoned our territory. We have tried to run away from our territory
every day. That is because we have allowed things to get worse.
We have allowed war to happen, we have allowed conflicts and disorder
to arise in our territory. In the past we did not practise, we did not
take care of our territory. That is why there are so many conflicts, so
much disorder and suffering in our territory.
We have the feeling that if we were to go back to our territory, we
would have to face so many difficulties, so many problems.
Our daily practice, therefore, is to run away from this territory.
Every time we have one or two hours, fifteen minutes, we don't use this
time to come back to ourselves in order to restore some harmony and
well-being in our territory.
We try to forget about our territory. We use the television,
newspapers, music, conversation, the telephone, in order to run away
from the reality of our five skandhas.
I'm suffering too much. I have too many problems. I don't want to go
back to them any more. That is the situation of so many of us.
The Buddha with a great deal of understanding and compassion, says,
"My dear child, you have to go back to these things, and put things in
order there." And how does the Buddha tell us to do this? We have to
cultivate the energy of right mindfulness, and doing that we will have
the strength to go back to ourselves. Right mindfulness is something
concrete.
When we practise walking meditation, making steps in mindfulness,
establishing ourselves in the present moment, when we are surrounded by
the Sangha, and we practise mindful walking, we can make solid steps,
peaceful steps, which will bring us back to the present moment.
Each step will be able to bring about the energy of mindfulness. When
we are seated, and we are following our breathing, breathing deeply,
mindfully, aware of in-breath, aware of out-breath, we also cultivate
the energy of mindfulness.
When we are sitting with the Sangha to have a meal in mindfulness, we
live in the present moment, and we eat, being aware of our food and our
community of practice. We cultivate the energy of mindfulness, and a few
days practising like that can increase the energy of mindfulness in you,
and that will help you, protect you, and give you courage in order to go
back to yourself, to see what is there, and embrace what is there in the
territory of the five skandhas.
There are feelings, painful feelings; there are emotions, strong
emotions; there are perceptions which trouble us, which agitate us. We
have to go back to all these things, and offer our real presence to all
these things, and be able to embrace them all.
"Darling, I am here for you; I have come back; I am going to take
care of you." This is what we do with all our emotions, all our feelings
and all our perceptions. There are perceptions which trouble us, which
make us afraid.
There are strong emotions which can trouble us, but if we are armed
with the energy of mindfulness, we can return to them.
What is the energy of mindfulness? It is the energy of the Buddha. A
Buddha is someone who is made of mindfulness, and mindfulness is
something which can be cultivated. At a meditation center, that is what
we do. We cultivate the energy of mindfulness while we walk, while we
breathe, while we eat, while we work. When we are in the kitchen, we
practise mindfulness as we work.
When we are in the meditation hall we practise mindfulness as we sit
and breathe. When we are washing our clothes, it is an opportunity to
cultivate the energy of mindfulness. We do all these things with the
support and the help of the whole community.
One day, two days, ten days in a practice center, that is the time to
cultivate the energy of mindfulness which will protect you, and make you
strong, so that you can embrace what is there in you.
The writer is a Vietnamese-born Buddhist monk and a widely read
author. He is the founder of Plum Village, a Buddhist monastery in
France. |