I would like to give you some instructions as how to eat our breakfast, to walk and to breathe tonight. Of course, you know how to do these things, but it's like on the plane, you have to fasten your seatbelt, then I have to remind you of doing it. Usually, we know in principle that peace is important. We should have peace and our children also should have peace, but in fact, peace is like everything else, it is relative, we have more or less peace in the present moment. The peace that can be enjoyable.

[01:02]

I would like to say first that peace is important, but our capacity of enjoying peace is even more important. If you do not have the capacity of enjoying peace, then what is the use of having peace? The practice of Buddhist meditation, I think, is to get the capacity to enjoy peace. It's like your toothache. Every time you have a toothache, you are enlightened, you know something very important, that not having a toothache is a wonderful thing. But when you do not have a toothache, you don't seem to enjoy it.

[02:08]

That is the problem. Peace is there, right there in the present moment, but we find it boring. And that is why we are looking for something more exciting. And because of that, we got into trouble. And that is called non-peace. When young people look for things like alcohol, or sex, or drugs, because they think of peace as something boring. And that is why they want to seek for something else. Well, when we smoke, or when we drink alcohol, we feel that we need something in order to

[03:23]

feel better. And we are not satisfied with having peace. So there must be a way of recognizing peace in the present moment. There must be a way of enjoying peace. And if you know the art of enjoying peace, you will solve a lot of problems. To recognize the element of peace, to recognize the element of happiness and of joy that is present there, is very important. Otherwise, how could we enjoy being peaceful?

[04:24]

How could we enjoy our happiness? The Sutra of Conscious Breathing is a very important text that has been studied and practiced by Buddhists of many generations. That Sutra gives us ways in order to enjoy peace, to live peacefully. I would like to present to you the first exercise that is proposed by the Buddha in that Sutra.

[05:26]

Breathing in, I know that I'm breathing in. Breathing out, I know that I'm breathing out. Quite simple. The idea is that while you breathe in, you recognize your in-breath as in-breath, and you recognize the out-breath as the out-breath. And since there are so many words in these sentences, we can just retain two words, in and out. When you breathe in, you just say in silently. And when you breathe out, you just say out silently. And the words in and out are there to help your concentration. And we should not be stuck in the words. When I see someone, and if I can call his name or her name, that someone seems to appear

[06:32]

more clearly to me. When I eat my lunch, and I pick up a piece of tofu, I might like to call tofu by its name. And by doing so, I make the piece of tofu more real. That is part of the practice of mindfulness, to call things by their names. You don't have to call them loudly. You can call their names just in your mental. But by doing so, you make the thing appear more real to you. So when you practice breathing in, you say in, in order for your in-breath to appear to you in a more real way. And when you breathe out, you say out, the words are to do this.

[07:39]

The practice is very simple, but to me, it is very important and very effective. First of all, it can stop the thinking. When you breathe like that, you focus all your attention to the breathing, and you become your breathing. You become your breathing. You are your breathing. And when you are your breathing, you will find out that you are more than your thinking. Usually, people think a little bit too much, and most of their thinking is not very useful. And in fact, they can be harmful. And when we think too much, we worry too much, we cannot sleep.

[08:44]

And in order to stop the thinking, the best way to me is to practice conscious breathing. You just breathe in, and you say in. You just breathe out, and you say out. And if you practice like that for five minutes, you give yourself a five-minute rest. Because the in and the out is not thinking. In and out are words, they are mantras, in order to help you to focus your attention on your breathing, and you become your breathing. So the first function of conscious breathing is to help you to stop thinking. Because thinking very often is less than being. I recall one time I read a newspaper published in Providence.

[09:47]

I saw a cartoon in which the cat is holding a finger in front of a horse, saying very solemnly, I think, therefore I am. And then the horse asks back, you are what? You are what? So the idea of the horse is that if you are thinking, you are only the thinking. And the thinking may be less than the being. When someone brings you a flower, and if you are thinking, you miss the flower. This is the story that is told many, many times in the Zen circles. One day the Buddha was standing in front of a community of 1,250 monks and nuns, holding a flower like this, without saying anything,

[10:49]

for quite some time. And the whole congregation was completely silent. Everyone was trying to think, to find out what is behind that kind of gesture. Everyone seemed to be thinking very hard, and the Buddha kept being silent. And after some time, a gentleman from down there, he smiled. Seeing that, the Buddha was very happy, he smiled back, and he said something like this, I have a treasure of insight, and I have just transmitted it to Mahakasyapa. Mahakasyapa is the name of the person who just smiled to the flower. I guess that all students of Zen know this story, and still many people are still trying to find out

[11:56]

what is behind that kind of story, a subject of meditation. When I read it, I saw it like this. When someone shows you a flower, he wants you to see the flower. He wants you to see the flower. And if you keep thinking about the meaning of something, you miss the flower. And everyone was thinking except one person. One person. And that person is Mahakasyapa. And that is why Mahakasyapa has been venerated as the patriarch of flower arrangement, of the art of flower arrangement, because he can see the flowers. If you cannot see flowers, how can you arrange them? When I read the story of the Last Supper in the Bible,

[13:03]

I saw the same thing. When Jesus broke the bread and shared it with his students, he said something like this. This is my body, broken for you. Eat it. And you have life. Well, in our daily life, we eat, we drink, we meet friends, but we may not be very mindful. We keep thinking about things, and therefore we miss everything. If you eat a piece of bread, and if you keep thinking of other things, the piece of bread is not there. It is not real. It is a ghost and not a reality. Therefore, stop your thinking. It is the basic condition to encounter the piece of bread. And I believe that is what Jesus tried to do,

[14:08]

to wake up his people, and to tell them to be in real touch with the piece of bread. And this is a very drastic way of waking up people from their forgetfulness, in order for them to be mindful while eating. To me, the art of mindful living helps you to be in touch with life, helps you to be in touch with your flower, in order for you to enjoy the presence of the flower. Helps you to be in touch with your non-toothed egg,

[15:13]

in order for you to enjoy your non-toothed egg. Because they are elements of peace. They are elements of joy. They are elements of happiness. And if we practice the art of mindful living, we will discover that elements of peace, of happiness, of joy, are always there within yourself and around yourself. Suppose we pay attention to our eyes. We very soon discover the fact that having eyes is a wonderful thing. Only when we have lost our sight, that we know that having eyes is like living in paradise. You only have to open your eyes and you can see the blue sky, you can see the white cloud, the beautiful river, the eyes of your baby, the flower of Mahakasyapa, and so on.

[16:17]

And to go out, sit on the grass, and contemplate the tiny flowers blooming in the grass, that is the practice of peace to me. Because if you are not capable of enjoying your capacity to see the wonderful things around you, then you are not able to enjoy peace. Even peace is there. And there are so many things like this within us, in our body, in our feelings, in our consciousness. Sometimes a feeling of sadness overwhelms us, and we have the impression that we are only our sadness. We want to end our life. But in fact, we know that we are more than our sadness. We are more than our sorrow. Only we are not in touch with these elements

[17:27]

that have an opposite nature to our sorrow and our sadness. We have the seeds of joy, of peace, of happiness in us, in our body, and in our soul. But because we don't practice the art of getting in touch, the art of mindful living, we get alienated from these things. And we come to believe that we don't have these things. We are not built on these things. And we believe that we are made of suffering and sorrow. Most of us like to ask the question of what is wrong. And we forget to ask the opposite kind of question, what is right, what is not wrong.

[18:30]

There are so many things that are not wrong, that are not going wrong in our body, like my non-toothed egg, and also in my mind, in my heart. So the fact that we can have the time and the opportunity to ask the question of what is not wrong is already a revolution. When we focus our attention only to what is wrong, we can make the situation worse. When something does not go right, we think that we have to get in touch with what is wrong in us. But we don't discuss much about getting in touch

[19:32]

with what is not wrong in us. And therefore, what I would like to propose for you to meditate on is our capacity of enjoying peace and happiness. Enjoy. Enjoy. Our capacity of being in touch with what is not wrong, what is refreshing, what is healing, what is wonderful, that can be found in the very present moment. And in Buddhism, we can call it the art of mindful living. Because if we live mindfully our daily life, we will get in touch with these wonderful aspects of life that are so healing, that are so refreshing, that are so comforting. We and our children should practice that kind of art.

[20:39]

And it may be that by practicing it alone, we don't have to deal with what is wrong. The other day, I was having breakfast with the Vietnam War veterans in a retreat. And it was a difficult retreat, because there are people who had suffered 13 years, 14 years or more without being able to express their suffering to someone else. And they are completely closed. There was a gentleman who reported to me that he lost 417 men in one battle alone in one day. And he had to live with that for 14 years.

[21:43]

There was a gentleman who reported to me that by the spirit of revenge, he took the lives of five children in a village. And from that day on, every time he found himself in a room with some children, he couldn't stand it, he had to get out of the room. For people who bear such kind of sorrow, sadness, and who are imprisoned in that kind of world, to help them to get out in order to be in touch with the more refreshing, more healing aspects of life is not easy. But we did our best. I was sitting there and having breakfast with them. And the night before, I proposed that we went to the kitchen

[22:50]

and briefing, and we got silently our breakfast, and go into the meditation hall, put our tray in front of us and sit down, and just breathe and look at our breakfast. I told them something like this. When I was a child, 4 or 5 years old, I usually got a cookie from my mother when she went home from the kitchen. And every time like that, I ate my cookie in a way that it would last. I brought the cookie into the front yard, I looked at the sky, the clouds, I looked at the bamboo ticket, and I just took a very small bite of the cookie.

[23:50]

I was very aware that if I don't eat it slowly, it will disappear very quickly. And then after that, I touched the cat with my feet, I touched the bamboo leaves, and then I took another bite. And it may take half an hour for me to finish my cookie. I was really in paradise. I was in real touch with the wonderful things in life. I did not have much to worry about, I did not regret the past, I did not worry about the future, I was not a victim of jealousy or anger, so I was a free person. So I could enjoy my cookie like that. I told the veterans this.

[24:54]

I believe that your cookie, the cookie of your childhood is still there somewhere, buried under a lot of junk, a lot of worries and suffering. But if we care, we really care, we can recuperate that cookie of our childhood. So please, tomorrow, please come and eat my breakfast with me, eat breakfast with me the way I ate my cookie when I was four or five years old. We have to do that. I also told them that the boat people who escaped Vietnam in order to go to Thailand, or Malaysia, or the Philippines, very often they are caught in a tempest, and very often they are hungry,

[25:58]

they are thirsty, and they don't have anything to eat or to drink. And they can wander months like that on the ocean. And many times they have to urinate in order to have something to drink. And every time I think of that, I feel very happy holding a glass of water in my hand and I drink. Drinking water is such a joy. So I ask people to drink their tea, their milk, and to eat their donut in that spirit. Because many of us in Southeast Asia are hungry and do not have anything to eat. There was a zone in China where people underwent natural catastrophe.

[27:01]

And that is why when they meet each other, they greet each other by this sentence, Have you eaten yet? For many of us, having something to eat is happiness. It is real happiness. So we have to be aware of that and eat our breakfast in that spirit. And I was sitting there eating our breakfast with the Vietnam veterans. I was very aware of what I was doing. I saw that 20 years ago, something like that could not be imagined. A Buddhist monk from Vietnam sitting with American GIs and eating breakfast in mindfulness, trying to enjoy every sip of water, of tea, of milk, like this.

[28:05]

But it worked for the veterans. On the third day, they began to open themselves. They began to cry, they began to tell their stories. And finally, we had a meal of reconciliation where we ate Vietnamese food and American food, where we practiced hugging meditation. Hugging in mindfulness, following your breathing, in order to make the person you hug real. And you, the one who is hugging, become real also. It is like the flower of Mahakasyapa. If you do not think, if you just breathe and be one with the flower, you encounter it deeply. So we were practicing encountering our breakfast, our tea,

[29:09]

encountering our friend in such a way that makes life possible again. That morning I was talking about how not to be obsessed by the past. You cannot go back to the past in order to repair things done there. Because the only moment that is available to you is the present moment. And you can get into that moment deeply, and from there you can do everything. You can even fix the things that have been done in the past in a wrong way. I said something like this, I said that

[30:11]

in the present moment, children are dying, a little bit everywhere. Dying because of our lack of mindfulness, dying because of hunger, dying because of the lack of medicine. There are children who just need a very small tablet of medicine in order to see. There are children who just need a little bit of our mindfulness, our attention in order to be seen. And if you can get in touch with the present moment, you'll get in touch with these children, and you can save many of them. And don't be obsessed by the past, because you have the power to be and to do a lot of things in the present moment. And if you can take good care of the present moment, not only you can repair the things in the past, but at the same time you take good care of the future.

[31:17]

You cannot take good care of the future if you don't take good care of the present moment. And if you think too much, if you think about the past, if you think about the future, you lose the present moment. And therefore the first thing you do in order to go back to the present moment is to practice conscious breathing in order to be able to practice conscious breathing in order to be able is to practice conscious breathing in order to be able is to practice conscious breathing in order to be able is to practice conscious breathing in order to be able

[31:48]

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