The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation

by Thich Nhat Hanh

The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.

Usually when we hear or read something new, we just compare it to our own ideas. If it is the same, we accept it and say that it is correct. If it is not, we say it is incorrect. In either case, we learn nothing.

While reading or listening, don’t work too hard. Be like the earth. When the rain comes, the earth only has to open herself up to the rain.

Like all traditions, Buddhism needs to renew itself regularly in order to stay alive and grow.

The Buddha said many times, “My teaching is like a finger pointing to the moon. Do not mistake the finger for the moon.”

When we are attached to a certain table, it is not the table that causes us to suffer. It is our attachment.

There is a story in Zen circles about a man and a horse. The horse is galloping quickly, and it appears that the man on the horse is going somewhere important. Another man, standing alongside the road, shouts, “Where are you going?” and the first man replies, “I don’t know! Ask the horse!” This is also our story.

going, and we can’t stop. The horse is our habit energy pulling us along, and we are powerless. We are always running, and it has become a habit. We struggle all the time, even during our sleep. We are at war within ourselves, and we can easily start a war with others.

With mindfulness, we have the capacity to recognize the habit energy every time it manifests. “Hello, my habit energy, I know you are there!” If we just smile to it, it will lose much of its strength.

The first function of meditation — shamatha — is to stop.

Stopping, calming, and resting are preconditions for healing. If we cannot stop, the course of our destruction will just continue. The world needs healing. Individuals, communities, and nations need healing.

If after reading the newspaper, hearing the news, or being in a conversation, we feel anxious or worn out, we know we have been in contact with toxins.

Movies are food for our eyes, ears, and minds. When we watch TV, the program is our food. Children who spend five hours a day watching television are ingesting images that water the negative seeds of craving, fear, anger, and violence in them.

We need the insight that position, revenge, wealth, fame, or possessions are, more often than not, obstacles to our happiness.

We always try to accumulate more and more, and we think these “cows” are essential for our existence. In fact, they may be the obstacles that prevent us from being happy.

Release your cows and become a free person. Release your cows so you can be truly happy.

We don’t want to suffer, but our deep-seated habit energies drag us into the fire of suffering.

So we should not spend time close to or in a community that has a great deal of hatred and despair.

If we sit there and allow the negative thinking connected to past experiences to come up, we are eating the toxic matter of consciousness. Many of us sit and think, and the more we think, the more angry, upset, and in despair we become.

Every time we think about being abused, we are abused once again.

When we have a toothache, we know that not having a toothache is happiness. But later, when we don’t have a toothache, we don’t treasure our non-toothache.

Please ask yourself, “What nourishes joy in me? What nourishes joy in others? Do I nourish joy in myself and others enough?” These are questions about the Third Noble Truth.

You know that suffering and joy are both impermanent. Learn the art of cultivating joy.

If learning is not followed by reflecting and practicing, it is not true learning.

The Buddha said, “The moment you know how your suffering came to be, you are already on the path of release from it.”

If you are a loyal person, it is because the seed of loyalty is in you. But don’t think that the seed of betrayal isn’t also in you.

We have to ask ourselves again and again, “Am I sure?”

Buddhism is not a collection of views. It is a practice to help us eliminate wrong views. The quality of our views can always be improved.

Thinking is the speech of our mind.

Mindful breathing helps us stop being preoccupied by sorrows of the past and anxieties about the future.

Please write the words “Are you sure?” on a large piece of paper and hang it where you will see it often.

We tend to stick to our habits, even the ones that cause us to suffer.

Workaholism is one example. In the past, our ancestors may have had to work nearly all the time to put food on the table. But today, our way of working is rather compulsive and prevents us from having real contact with life. We think about our work all the time and don’t even have time to breathe. We need to find moments to contemplate the cherry blossoms and drink our tea in mindfulness. Our way of acting depends on our way of thinking, and our way of thinking depends on our habit energies. When we recognize this, we only need to say, “Hello, habit energy,” and make good friends with our habitual patterns of thinking and acting. When we can accept these ingrained thoughts and not feel guilty about them, they will lose much of their power over us. Right Thinking leads to Right Action.

If you do not practice appropriate attention, how can you say you love her?

If we look deeply into the realm of joy, we can see whether it is authentic or whether it is just covering up our suffering and anxiety. Anxiety, the illness of our time, comes primarily from our inability to dwell in the present moment.

I will not spread news that I do not know to be certain and will not criticize or condemn things of which I am not sure.

When no one listens to us or understands us, we become like a bomb ready to explode.

When we listen with our whole being, we can defuse a lot of bombs.

So if you really love someone, train yourself to be a listener.

They sit very quietly with a lot of compassion and listen to you. Listening like that is not to judge, criticize, condemn, or evaluate, but to listen with the single purpose of helping the other person suffer less.

Before you speak, understand the person you are speaking to.

Words can travel thousands of miles. May my words create mutual understanding and love. May they be as beautiful as gems, as lovely as flowers.3

Present Moment Wonderful Moment: Mindfulness Verses for Daily Living

The more we consume, the more we suffer, and the more we make our society suffer.

Waking up this morning, I smile. Twenty-four brand new hours are before me. I vow to live fully in each moment and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.5 Reciting this gatha can give us energy to live the day well. Twenty-four hours are a treasure-chest of jewels. If we waste these hours, we waste our life.

We become arrogant when things go well, and we are afraid of falling, or being low or inadequate.

The Buddha recommends we live our daily life in this way, seeing everything in the light of interbeing. Then we will not be caught in our small self.

What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.

When you get into an argument with someone you love, please close your eyes and visualize yourselves three hundred years from now. When you open your eyes, you will only want to take each other in your arms and acknowledge how precious each of you is. The teaching of impermanence helps us appreciate fully what is there, without attachment or forgetfulness.

If we continue to live the way we do and organize society the way we do, we will continue to produce so many thousands of young people who will need to be imprisoned.