The Art of Power

by Thich Nhat Hanh

Nonself doesn’t mean that you don’t exist; it means you are not a completely separate entity. A lot of our suffering is born from the discrimination between self and others and our notion of a separate self.

When you are in a power struggle, if you know how to meditate on nonself, you will know what to do. You can stop your own suffering and the suffering of the other people in the struggle. You know that his anger is your anger, his suffering is your suffering, and his happiness is your happiness.

In Buddhism there is a kind of wisdom called the wisdom of nondiscrimination. Nondiscrimination is one element of true love. I am right-handed, so I do most things with my right hand: brushing my teeth, inviting the bell to sound, writing calligraphy. I have written all my poems with my right hand. But my right hand is never proud of itself. It never says, “Left hand, you are good for nothing! I have to do everything by myself.” And my left hand does not have an inferiority complex. It never suffers, it’s wonderful. My right and left hands are always at peace with each other. They collaborate in a perfect way. This is the wisdom of no-self that is alive in us.

If you cultivate the five powers mentioned in the previous chapter, you naturally begin to acquire another source of power, the power of leadership, as people turn to you for advice and influence. Three virtues are required if we are to be true leaders: the virtue of cutting off, the virtue of loving, and the virtue of insight.

Misuse of power is the primary cause of suffering for many of us.

No one can practice the Five Mindfulness Trainings perfectly, not even the Buddha. The goal is not to be perfect but simply to be mindful of ourselves, even when we make mistakes. If you are lost in a forest at night, you can follow the North Star to find your way out. You follow the North Star, but your goal is to get back home; it’s not to arrive at the North Star. The mindfulness trainings are like the North Star; we don’t have to be perfect in practicing them. They are our guide, and we know we’re on a good path. If you have a spiritual path, the path of love, compassion, and understanding, you feel happy because you know where you’re going. You are on the path of compassion, of protecting life so that happiness becomes possible. That is very important.

The First Noble Truth is that suffering exists. The Second Noble Truth is that suffering has causes. The Third Noble Truth is that happiness is possible. The Fourth Noble Truth is that there is a path that leads to happiness. We have to distinguish between the first truth and the third one. The first is called dukkha in Sanskrit, suffering. The third is called sukha, happiness. They are quite different. Very often, we mistake our desire or craving for happiness.

the Buddha said, “If at some point in your life you adopt an idea or a perception as the absolute truth, you close the door of your mind. This is the end of seeking the truth. And not only do you no longer seek the truth, but even if the truth comes in person and knocks on your door, you refuse to open it. Attachment to views, attachment to ideas, attachment to perceptions are the biggest obstacle to the truth.” It’s like when you climb a ladder. When you get to the fourth rung, you may think you are on the highest step and cannot go higher, so you hold on to the fourth rung. But in fact there is a fifth rung; if you want to get to it, you have to be willing to abandon the fourth rung. Ideas and perceptions should be abandoned all the time, to make room for

So if you can be yourself, this is already love, this is already action. Action is based on nonaction, and nonaction is the practice of being. There are people who “do” a lot, who cause a lot of trouble. Even if they have the best of intentions, the more they try to help, the more trouble they create. There are a lot of activists around us who are not peaceful, not happy, and so what they do causes more trouble. This is why what we want to do is to be in such a way that peace and compassion are possible in every moment. Words and actions coming from that foundation can be only helpful. If you can make a person suffer less, make her smile, you will feel very happy, very rewarded.

People asked the Buddha how to be happy, and he said that all buddhas teach the same thing: The bad things, don’t do them. The good things, try to do them. Try to purify, subdue your own mind. That is the teaching of all buddhas.*

When you refrain from doing bad things, you are practicing compassion, because you refrain from bringing suffering to yourself and other people. Practicing compassion is practicing happiness, because happiness is the absence of suffering. Then, try to do good things. Try to do whatever brings peace, stability, and joy to you and other people.

The Buddha said that all suffering comes from the mind but all happiness also comes from the mind. To purify your mind is to transform your way of perceiving things, to remove wrong perceptions. When you remove your wrong perceptions, you also remove your anger, your hate, your discrimination, and your craving. Our minds can be intoxicated by three kinds of poison: the first is craving, the second is hate or violence, and the third is delusion. To purify your mind is to neutralize and transform these poisons in you. You neutralize these poisons with the three wisdoms, the energies of mindfulness, concentration, and insight.

Happiness is impermanent, but it can be renewed. You are also impermanent and also renewable, like your breath, like your steps. You are not something permanent experiencing something impermanent. You are something impermanent experiencing something impermanent. If happiness can be renewed, so can you, because you in the next moment is a renewal of you in this moment. It’s wonderful to know that happiness lasts only as long as one in-breath or one step, because we know we can renew our happiness in another breath or another step, provided we know the art of generating mindfulness, concentration, and insight.

The insight of impermanence leads to the insight of no-self. When we pursue individual happiness, our satisfaction is always ultimately fleeting, because individual happiness is not possible. Our happiness, our existence, is dependent on the existence and happiness of everyone and everything else. This is the insight of interbeing, the interconnectedness of all things. The father knows that if the son is not happy he himself cannot be truly happy, so when the father seeks his own happiness, he also seeks happiness for his son. Your mindful steps are not for you alone; they are for your partner and friends too, because the moment you stop suffering, others benefit.

Practice mindfulness of breathing and walking in order to recognize the feeling of anger, to embrace the anger and transform it. When the element of ignorance is no longer there, the element of anger will be transformed. You don’t transform it just for the benefit of others; you do it for yourself as well, because you see that there is no distinction between the two. With the insight of no-self, you no longer seek the kind of happiness that will make other people suffer. This kind of insight can liberate you and liberate the world.

The French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said that to love another doesn’t mean we sit and look at each other; it means we both look in the same direction.

Sitting at the foot of the bodhi tree on the night when he realized the truth, the Buddha discovered something that was very surprising to him and also to us. He saw that the good, the beautiful, and the true are to be found in everyone, but very few people know that. People think that the true, the beautiful, and the good exist somewhere else, in someone else. They don’t know that they are true, beautiful, and good at their core. Our whole life, we are looking for someone else to replace what we feel is missing. This is what the Buddha said at the moment of enlightenment: “How strange—all living beings have the fully awakened nature, but none of them knows it. And because of that they drift and sink from lifetime to lifetime in the great ocean of samsara, in suffering.” When we recognize that in us there is the essence of goodness, beauty, and truth, we will stop going in search of something. We will stop wandering around feeling that we lack something. And we are able to stop deceiving others. We don’t have to adorn ourselves because we have discovered the true, the beautiful, and the good here within us.

The practice of love as taught by the Buddha is very clear. It involves cultivating the equanimity that comes from the insight of no-self. When we understand that every thing is made of everything else, we stop searching for the perfect partner or for individual recognition. We can learn to look in this way when we look at another person and when we look at ourselves. Everything that manifests itself in this world is a wonder. Practicing seeing things through these eyes can help us see ourselves as wonders of life.

There are occasions when the lack of understanding between you and another is really there. You may be misunderstood by many people, and yet you don’t have to suffer. Just live your life properly and, after a while, others will correct their misperception of you. You know what is going on inside you. You know how your mind is. If every day you produce positive thinking, good ideas, with understanding and compassion; if every day you practice loving speech; if every day you do good actions, you know it yourself. Your value will reveal itself to the people around you. It may take a few days or several weeks, it may even take years. But if you know who you are, you don’t have to suffer anymore. The practice of understanding yourself and training yourself to produce more and more beautiful thoughts, words, and actions gives you self-confidence, and that will transform everything else.

Remember that the first spiritual power is faith. The Buddha, or any of the other great spiritual teachers, didn’t want us to be slaves, dependent on someone else for our confidence. He didn’t want people to lean on him. He was very clear: “You have what you are looking for within yourself.” In our own nature, there is a teacher we can turn to and take refuge in. You can have faith in the basic goodness, the basic beauty, and the basic truth that is in yo...

The Buddha spoke about four elements that constitute true love: the capacity to be kind and offer happiness, maitri in Sanskrit; compassion, the capacity to relieve suffering, karuna; the capacity to bring joy every day, mudita; and finally, the capacity of nondiscrimination, upeksha. When there is true love, there is nondiscrimination. The pain of the other is our own pain; the happiness of the other is our own happiness. In the light of nondiscrimination, happiness and pain are collective and not individual. If we do not understand our partner, if we do not share in her suffering, this is not love at all; it’s just consuming the other person to satisfy our own individual needs. True love is characterized by attentiveness, respect. If we have this attention, then when we see the suffering of the other person, we can’t go on causing them pain. If we have respect, we cannot go on like that.

When we meditate, we look deeply to nourish our joy and peace, and to embrace our suffering and transform it into wisdom and liberation. Love is no different from meditation. It is what we do with our love that makes it into a spiritual power. Our aim is to transform our limited love into true love, boundless love, offering ourselves and others the great gifts of compassion, transformation, and healing.

Just as our true teacher is within us, the real object of our love is ourselves. We have to know how to love ourselves, how to return to our true nature, to see the wholesome, the good, the true, and the beautiful within us. Then we will be able to see it in others. When we have seen real beauty, goodness, and truth in ourselves and others, we will no longer be deceived by outer displays. When we love someone, we have the duty to look at that person in such a way that our vision is not obscured by wrong perceptions. True goodness contains true beauty and authentic truth. This is the insight of interbeing. Truth is always beautiful. Kindness is always beautiful. And beauty is always true and kind.