The Personal Roots of Peace
Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh

The Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh is a poet, Zen Master, and peace activist. He served as chair of the Buddhist Peace Delegation to the Paris Peace talks during the Vietnam War, and was nominated by Dr Martin Luther King,Jr., for the Nobel Peace Prize. He is author of seventy-five books including Living Buddha, Living Christ, Old Path White Clouds and Peace Is Every Step. A talk given at Kagyu E-Vam Buddhist Institute - November 1986

I think the practice of meditation is to realise harmony, and to make peace with harmony. To practise meditation is to make peace with 'me', because you have to make peace with yourself first. Your 'self' is, first of all, your body. Therefore, you have to establish a good relationship with your body, too. It may sound funny, but sometimes you are not in your body; you are somewhere else and your body is a stranger to you. Being in touch with your body is the first effort of peace-making. Another thing about the body is that we do not understand it, even if we have studied biology. Our breathing also belongs to the body. If you have tried Buddhist meditation you will know that to meditate is, first of all, to contemplate the body in the body. The breathing is the first object of your meditation. You establish a relationship with your breathing. You become your breathing.

I think we care about too many things that are less important. Have you ever looked carefully at your toe during a bath? Next time you take a bath, hold one of your toes mindfully and feel that it is you. You have very much been neglecting your toe, while taking care of everything else. Your toe has been very faithful to you. Your toe has behaved wonderfully, it has done its best and yet you neglect it. You have to be thankful to your toe for being a toe.

Have you looked at your body in mindfulness and contemplated where it has come from? Who has transmitted that body? Who is the receiver of that body and who watches the objects that have been transmitted? You may say that your parents gave you this body. But that is not correct, because the object of transmission is none other than themselves. They transmitted themselves, so the transmitters and the object transmitted are not separate.

When you make peace with your breathing, with your body, you will be able to make peace with your feelings. Sometimes you are angry and you are angry at yourself for being angry. You do not know how to deal with your anger and you become violent towards your anger. However, in Buddhist meditation, we try to make peace with our feelings, even if those feelings are uncomfortable.

How do we do this? Buddha taught the way of non-duality. Every time you are angry, you should treat your anger with love, with tenderness, with care, like a girl taking care of her younger sisters. We are it, we are the anger at that time. Therefore, we should not fight the anger, we should not be making an extra effort to oppress our anger. We should not regard our anger as an evil element that has penetrated us. This is the Buddhist message of non-duality. From non-duality comes non-violence, because if you know that you are angry, you will not do violence to yourself. Meditation is not about transforming oneself into a battlefield. That may be true somewhere else, but not in Buddhist meditation.

What the Buddha recommended is that when we are feeling angry, we should not say anything at that time because angry speech will only make people suffer. It will only cause damage to yourself and to the people around you. When you are angry you should not do anything, because doing something while you are angry will also only cause damage. Therefore, do not say anything, do not do anything, just follow your breathing and produce awareness from your anger. We should just observe our anger, thinking, 'I am looking in, knowing that I am angry; I am looking out, knowing that I am angry'. 'I am looking in, knowing that anger is still in me; I am looking out, knowing that anger is fading'. 'I am looking in, knowing that I and anger are the same; I am looking out, knowing anger at this moment'. You just tend to your anger in the most loving way. You do not have to fight it. You just accept it like that and produce awareness from your anger. Awareness is the light that shines upon your anger and keeps the light alight.

This is about all that you can do at that moment, but it is very important. There is a big difference between being angry and not knowing that you are angry, and being angry and just being aware that you are angry at that time. In the first case, you lose control. You are under the spell of anger and you can do and say bad things that you will regret later. In the second case, you are safe even if anger is still there. If you do not try to suppress your anger, if you just deepen your awareness of that anger and notice that light or awareness, your anger will be slowly transformed. It is like the sun shining on a lotus flower in the morning. After fifteen minutes the lotus flower is still closed, but a after few hours, the lotus has to open itself and show its heart to the sun.

With the shining of awareness there will be a transformation in the nature of anger. If the sun continues to shine on vegetation it will transform that vegetation; we all know that the green colour on the bushes is the product of the sun. If we continue to shine the light of awareness on our anger, it will change colour, because anger is a kind of energy and it cannot become nothing. It can only be transformed into another kind of energy that is less destructive and more constructive. If your anger is a minor irritation and you keep breathing and smiling, you should be able to change that anger into compassion and understanding. If your anger is something more resistant, you will need to keep practising for some time. It is like when you try to cook something spicy - you have to keep the fire going, underneath the pot, for two or three hours, with the cover over the pot, rather than just for fifteen minutes.

Meditation practice is like that, awareness is shining upon it. 'Shining' is a very good word in meditation. You produce awareness and you have this kind of lampshade, which is concentration. You concentrate on that, because concentration is concentrating on something. In this case, you concentrate on your feelings. When you concentrate, the power of mindfulness is stronger and shines on whatever the object of concentration may be. If you are strong enough and concentrated enough, you will be able to look more deeply into the anger. You can shine; you can look into the nature of anger and find its root. When you have seen its root, you will be liberated from that anger.

We are only afraid of something when we do not understand it. Once we understand something, we will be liberated from it. That is why Buddhism has been described as a way of salvation by understanding, not by divine grace. The word for 'understanding' in Sanskrit is prajna. The word for 'the great understanding' is mahaprajna; which is the power of liberation in Buddhism. The object, the role, the purpose of meditation - is to understand. When you understand, you attract and then you will be able to love.
I would like to tell you the story of the mother of Mencius. She practised weaving in order to make a living, as her husband was no longer alive. She was living with her young son. One day he came home talking very unpleasantly, like a delinquent child and she suddenly became aware of this. This story is from a Confucian book, not a Buddhist book, on meditation. So, she became aware and she looked at her child. She did not say anything. She did not scold him; she did not give him a spanking. She just looked at the young boy and because she was calm, because she was concentrated, she stopped weaving and she saw the roots of his behaviour. She thought, 'Oh, my dear, I was not careful when I picked this neighbourhood for residence. The children here are delinquent and my child has begun to imitate them so I have to do something'. She did not say anything to the child and did not punish him. She simply worked silently for many months in order to save enough money to move into another neighbourhood. After that the child was okay.

Although she did not claim to be a Buddhist, she was practising meditation, because she knew how to be calm, she knew how to look deeply at the human person and understand why the person in front of her was saying and doing things like that. She understood that she has been neglecting him and that his behaviour was partly her fault. Knowing that, she accepted it, she did not blame or argue with the child. She simply acts. In her hand there is an eye.

In Tibetan and Vietnamese temples have you seen the bodhisattvas, each with a thousand arms that reach out? In the palm of each hand there is an eye. That eye symbolises understanding. When you understand, you accept, and then you are moved and you act. Let us look at the palms of our hands and see whether we have an eye there already or not. If we do have one, we can be sure that our hand will not do anything to create suffering for other people. With an eye in the palm of your hand, you will not be capable of shooting and killing another human being. So, do not worry if you see that there is an eye there!

The practice of meditation is about putting an eye in your palm, by looking, realising and understanding your relationships with humans and other living beings. Children practise by looking at snails; we practise by looking at human beings. We should also practise by looking at trees. If the trees cannot live, how are human beings going to be alive? Hundreds of millions of forest hectares have been destroyed because of acid rain. This is a cause for alarm, because we know that if trees cannot be alive, human beings cannot be alive for very long either.

In Paris, I told children the story of planting lettuce. I told them that the farmer does not blame the lettuce when it does not grow well. Instead, he examines the way that he is growing the lettuce and then he changes his methods. However, in our families, we do not know how to grow lettuce, because human beings are not very different from lettuce. If we do not take good care of them, if we do not understand them, if we do not accept them and if we do not help them, they will wither. They will not be able to grow well. If you do not blame a lettuce, why do you blame people in your family? If the 'lettuce' in your family do not grow well, you blame them, you argue with them, you use reason and logic - and you become very good at doing so. But blaming and arguing will not lead anywhere. It only deepens the wrath between you and the other person. It is only by looking deeply into the other person - to understand, to accept and to try to help them - that you can transform the person.

Therefore, if a person says or does something that we do not like, we should be quiet and look deeply - like the mother of Mencius - to see why he or she said or did something like that. You have to do that by breathing. You might do better than the mother of Mencius, because you have Buddhist meditation techniques. Then, when you understand, you accept and you try to help.

After my talk in Paris, I went out for walking meditation. When I turned a corner I overheard a nine-year old child saying to her mother, 'Mummy, please remember that I am a young lettuce'. That is delightful. Children are very intelligent. I then heard her mother reply, 'But, my dear, you also have to know that I am a young lettuce too. If you do not love me, if you do not listen to me, I will also wither like a bad lettuce'. It was a perfect dialogue between a mother and daughter.

This is a good meditation practice, because if we do not have peace and happiness within ourselves, we cannot share peace and happiness with other people. 'Peace-being' is the basis of 'peace-doing'. We need to make peace with ourselves; with our body, our breathing, our feelings and our perceptions - because our perceptions too are often wrong. Therefore, to meditate is to look into our perceptions in order to correct the way we perceive things. Just like looking at lettuce. In that way, we make peace with our five aggregates, our five skandhas. When we make peace with our five skandhas, peace will be realised around us. In that way we have a base for peacemaking.

I have the impression that the peace movement of our time is not very peaceful, because there is a lot of anger, a lot of division and a lot of frustration within it. I think that strategy alone is not enough. To bring about a new dimension of peace-making is very important. That dimension is 'peace-being'. We have to make peace both within ourselves and within our peace organisations. There should be a practice of peace in our peace organisations. If we succeed at that, I think we will have a future.

The current peace movement - although able to write very good letters of protest - is not yet capable of writing love letters. When we write letters to our governments, they do not want to read them, because they are unpleasant. We have to understand our governments. Why are they like that? We should look at the government the way we look at a lettuce, and we will see that we deserve our government. The structure of our society deserves such a government. Therefore, there is no point in blame. Blaming the government is like blaming a lettuce. We have to look deeply into the matter and understand why every government that comes into power acts in the same way.

Sometimes, we may have the illusion that if we walked into government, we would do better, we would have peace in a few months. But I doubt that. If the peace leaders got into the government, maybe they would act in the same way as the government members do.

Therefore, I would like to finish with a Buddhist statement - this is because that is. This is like that, because this is like this. Therefore, if we link the two, we will realise that we have to change the whole situation. Our way of living our daily lives has a lot to do with changing the government. We have to write our letters in a way that the people in power will accept them and want to read them. Our letters should contain understanding and make concrete proposals. Then we will be talking with the government and talking with the people in the country at the same time. We will have more chance of being listened to - both by the government and by our countrymen and countrywomen. Protesting is not enough. From meditation, from looking deeply into things, comes loving kindness, acceptance and understanding. I think these are very important for peace-making. Smiling too, is very important for peace-making.

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