EXPERIENCING HEAVEN ON EARTH
by Bhikkhuni Thích Chân Linh Nghiêm
Bhikkhuni Thích Chân Linh Nghiêm ( 釋真靈嚴 ) was born as Somporn Phanjaruniti on May 15, 1961 in Bangkok, Thailand. She studied at Mahidol University, Bangkok, where she received her B.Sc. in Nursing and Midwifery in 1984. For the next four years, she worked as a nurse and mid-wife in a refugee camp in Thailand. She then pursued graduate studies at the University of Minnesota, USA, where she received her Master of Education degree in Early Childhood Education. From 1990-1992, she served as Co-director of the American Friends Service Committee, an NGO for rural development focussing on ethnic minorities, women, and children in Laos. She was also a UNICEF Consultant to the Laotian Government on research into Early Childhood Development from 1993 to 1996.
Her spiritual search led her to Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh who greatly inspired her with his teachings on peace, joy and mindfulness. In 1998, she was ordained as a nun in Thich Nhat Hanh’s order in Plum Village, France. She received her full ordination from Thich Nhat Hanh in 2000, and in 2004 received Transmission of the Lamp of Wisdom in Plum Village. Since 1998, she had led retreats and traveled with Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh on teaching tours in France, Switzerland, US, Germany, Italy, Laos, UK, Holland and Vietnam. She was in Malaysia to conduct a mindfulness retreat from October 6-8, 2006, for over 60 participants at the Chempaka Buddhist Lodge, Petaling Jaya.
Loh Yit Phing who had also visited Plum Village interviewed Sister Linh Nghiêm for Eastern Horizon. Yit Phing graduated from Liverpool John Moores University, UK, majoring in Mass Communications and Public Relations.
Heaven is on Earth. This is the message of the great Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay). Can you tell us your experience with Thay in Plum Village? Is Plum Village a heaven on Earth for you?
I remembered the last time we were at a retreat with Thay in the United States. September 11 happened at the end of that retreat. When we returned to Plum Village, I rejoiced at every step I took, at the sight of the green leaves on the trees, and the vegetables I ate. The moment was like heaven. It was as if I had just come back to paradise.
It was not because of the land. It was because of our practice. The fact is that in Plum Village, everyone practices the same way. We just be ourselves, be mindful of the present and be free from worries. Letting go thus, I feel light inside and at peace. I cultivate this internal sense of peace to let it grow within me and gradually, this peace will manifest itself, effortlessly. When we see Thay, the way he walks and the way he practices, we feel inspired. His presence provides a kind of support for us.
It’s just like a heaven for us. We don’t have to wait until we die to go to heaven. Heaven is right here on this Earth. It’s real, it exists and you can be in heaven in this present life. You can experience heaven and you can touch it.
According to Thay, the four-fold Sangha (where there are monks, nuns, lay men, and lay women) is the most important practice and action of the 21st century. It should be built by the spirit of togetherness. Please share with us some practices in the art of building a harmonious community, as was the practice during Buddha’s time.
I think Thay rejuvenated some of the practices prevalent during the Buddha’s time. Thay, however, updated these practices to suit present-day people’s mentality and way of life. I believe this coming together of the four categories as a Sangha community is a true practice and very important. When we walk the path of true practice, we feel happy and joyful. These feelings of happiness and joy will bring us together spiritually. When we are aware of this spiritual connection, we will internalize the feelings and become aware that we are all in one family. Hence, when we have negative or positive feelings towards a particular person, and we are aware that we have such thoughts, we can approach the person and talk with him/her openly and amiably.
Such open communication enables the community to reach out and come together. When we open our hearts and minds to the person who are with us at the present moment, and we listen mindfully to that person, we can understand better. We can observe silently the person’s manifest expressions as well as unexpressed gestures, words or thoughts. By listening attentively and actively, we will have a clear idea of what we should and should not say. Our speech will be more pleasing, considerate and soothing.
This is what the Buddha taught to the monastics and lay devotees. It is a very concrete practice. It nourishes our feelings of brotherhood and sisterhood and nurtures our sense of belonging to the same community. We feel confident when we gather together in a meeting or working circle, as we know who and where we are in this community. We do have very young monastics at Plum Village.
Thay encourages all the young people to speak up and share their ideas and aspirations. These ideas and aspirations provide new perspective and freshness to existing practices, in the process, making monastic life more relevant to contemporary living.
“Sangha eyes” and “Breathing room” are practices in Plum Village aimed at bringing the Sangha joyfully together. Can you tell us more about these practices?
When we come together, we open up to each other, and we learn more from each other. For example, in the story of an elephant and blind men, each blind man touches a different part of the elephant. As a result, they will describe the elephant according to their individual experiences. Their separate descriptions do not portray the elephant as a whole entity. To have a real picture of the elephant, we have to integrate all the blind men’s descriptions and present them as a collective whole. Only then will we have a realistic description of an elephant.
Similarly, when we stand in one corner of the hall and look into the middle of the hall, we will only see from our ‘corner’. If we stand at the eastern corner, we see the situation from the east corner. Likewise, when we stand at the western corner, we see the situation from that corner, and when we stand at the southern corner, we see the situation from the southern corner. So too it will be with the northern corner.
Sangha eyes offer the same concept: each one of us is endowed with our own perspective, insight and experience. In the Sangha, the older brothers and sisters as well as the younger ones may have their own way of looking at a situation. Nevertheless, we listen, we learn and we rely on each other. Through open and stimulating discussions, incorporating all these differing but enriching viewpoints and experiences, Sangha members are able to come up with very creative, beneficial and satisfying solutions.
Even our teacher Thay relies on the Sangha eyes. He is very humble, even though he has better insight and can see things clearer. With Sangha eyes, we can reduce our ego, avoid power and actions that are egoistic and unwholesome. For example, if we do not have the opportunity to practice Sangha eyes in meetings or discussions, the outcome is that there will be one person who will dominate the talking, assume power, thereby leading all of us onto the wrong path. Through the practice of Sangha eyes, we also have the opportunity to practice inter-connectedness, inter-being and the idea of non-self.
With regards to Breathing room, when Thay talks about breathing room, it is something like what we have in Thailand. I am from Thailand, and in Thailand, we have the Breathing room or an altar with Buddha statue. On many occasions, it is a place of worship, a place to conduct rituals and solicit protection for your house. It is very calm in the Breathing room. When I was young, about 4 or 5 years old, I enjoyed talking with the statues of two little boys at the altar of my house. I have no recollection of this childhood episode but my grandmother reminded me of it when I grew up. That was a very peaceful time for me.
In this modern society when life moves at a very fast pace, and things change at the speed of lightning, people become materialistic and they forget about the spiritual aspect. The Breathing room serves as a stopper to our fast pace of life, and offers us the space in our own homes to have some quiet moments. It acts as a place of refuge, where you can go within yourself and find the peace inside, and thereafter, create a channel for the peaceful feelings to manifest. There is no talking in the Breathing room, for the room is as its name implies – it is a room for breathing. It gives us the opportunity to go back to our breathing and be re-acquainted with the way we breathe and the calming effect it has upon us. If every member in the family respects the Breathing room, it will bring much joy and harmony to the family.
There is a story of a family who came to Plum Village to learn. Both the parents and the children learnt how to invite the bell. They learnt how to come back to their breathing and they helped other members of the family to do likewise. When the family returned to their hometown, they continued with their practice. So, when their parents quarrelled, the children went to the altar and rang the bell. That produced an instant effect – the parents stopped quarrelling!
Mindfulness is peaceful steps, and peaceful steps are mindfulness; they “inter-are”. Inter-being is a word coined by Thay to reflect non-duality. Can you say something about the mindfulness as Thay’s teaching always emphasizes on mindfulness?
To be mindful is to be present, to be aware. Sometimes we live our life, but we do not live in each moment fully. We get distracted and we become unfocused. Sometimes we cannot stop and continue to be unmindful. As such, we create much suffering for ourselves and for others around us. In the practice of mindfulness, the first thing to do is “to stop”. That is to say, to be able to pull the plug and stop the destructive energy that is pulling us apart and into different directions, consequently leading us to much unhappiness. This ability to stop is the first significant step that we have to cultivate into a habitual practice in our training of mindfulness. But of course this is not an easy task. We are creatures of comfort and we get attached to our old habits. We learnt from our family members, friends and teachers, the media and the society at large. Hence, it is difficult to let go and to stop. But we understand that it is very important for us to be able to stop. With practice, patience and discipline, it can be done.
When we practice with fellow Sangha members, they are like the bell of mindfulness. They remind us to stop. At Plum Village, we have many practices that act as reminder for us to stop. For instance, listening to the clock chime every 15 minutes, listening to the bell, the telephone, and many other things you can create to make you stop. Sometimes it can be a poem, or your daughter’s smile. All these little acts or incidents remind us to stop, to come back to our breathing, and not to be constrained by time, haste and things that irritate us.
At the same time, “stop” also brings us mindfulness. It comes together. When we are mindful, we are really there, at that present moment, and we are really mindful. When we are a hundred percent there, we can recognize things. We can see things clearer, including things in the past or things in the future. Mindfulness gives us an opportunity to be there and to look deeply. When we can stop and be more and more mindful, we can concentrate more. That moment of concentration allows us to look at things deeply or to put it in another way, we say it is vipassaná, to contemplate. When we look deeply with concentration and mindfulness, we will understand things as they really are. Then we will know the way to get out of suffering, and to improve our lives.
We dwell so much on mindfulness, when in reality, mindfulness, concentration and insight are all bound together. The first step to take, however, is to stop. When this happens, it will pave the way for mindfulness to grow and prosper. When we practice rightly, we can see that the Buddha’s teaching of these three aspects are always together – mindfulness, concentration and insight. They are not separate entities. When we have insight, we will have mindfulness. We call this binding “inter-being”. In the practice of mindfulness, we focus on our breathing – breathing in, breathing out. These two processes of breathing in and breathing out is like a bridge connecting the mind with the body. Hence, you can stop unmindfulness and return to the present moment by using your own breathing as a bridge.
Gathas recitations were introduced to us during the Mindfulness retreat. Can you please give us a brief background of this practice?
In our tradition, Thay shows a lot of care for the young novices. In some traditions, only the older monks and nuns have the opportunity to learn from their teacher. At Plum village it is the other way round. Young novices are regarded as “babies” who needed to be close to their father. Hence, like babies, young novices are given the opportunity to be close to their teacher, Thay. This demonstrates Thay’s devotion and respect for the young generation, the novices. Our teacher, Thay has looked into the novices’ precepts and updated them so that they are applicable and more relevant for the young novices. To this end, Thay has produced gathas to help the young novices in their practice. The book, “Stepping into Peace”, contains 39 aspects on how to practice mindfulness in our daily life. Thay’s ingenuity of writing gathas or poems helps the young novices to discover meaning in their practice. Such sensibility and sensitivity on the part of our teacher allows these young novices to feel at ease, thereby giving them space to develop mindfulness and to live together mindfully.
Gathas remind us to be mindful. When we wake up in the morning, we also recite the gathas. One waking-up gatha goes like this:
“(Breathing in), waking up this morning, I smile.
(Breathing out), twenty-four new hours are before me.
(Breathing in), I vow to live fully in each moment.
(Breathing out), I look at all beings with eyes of compassion."
Waking up like this makes us feel reborn everyday.
This waking up gatha is but one example of Thay’s creativity, and we have many other gathas keeping us company all day long. The book has been published and lay people are encouraged to read it as well. When I read the book, I realized that during my schooldays, my teachers also taught these “gathas”. But at that time, we did not learn about mindfulness. It was just part of the teachers’ efforts to instil discipline in the students. Once we learn about mindfulness with the help of the gathas, we feel peace internally and we do not create problems for others and ourselves. Our freedom is protected, as we do not encroach on other people’s space or freedom. Gathas give rhythm to our lives and the inspiration to develop a happy and peaceful mind.
What’s your advice for Malaysia’s Buddhists on the path of Buddhism?
This is my first contact with Buddhism in Malaysia. I am here to learn more about Malaysian Buddhism. Firstly, I am very impressed with the way lay people come together as volunteers to organize meditation retreats for fellow lay devotees, Sunday Dharma Schools for children to learn about Buddhism, as well as dharma talks and activities for families and devotees. In addition, I am also impressed with the efforts these lay people have put in to make the practice more applicable and relevant.
I am very moved by this show of actual application of Buddhist practices by these volunteers. I salute these lay people for, despite their busy work schedules, family responsibilities and time constraints, they are still able to organize activities to further the cause of Buddhism. What these people are doing is indeed admirable, and it is just like the act of a bodhisattva. I encourage these volunteers to persevere and continue their good work.
Secondly, I observed that Buddhist centers and temples are connected with one another and that they have established good working relationship. This networking is very important and beneficial as it will create harmony and strengthen Buddhism in Malaysia.
Thirdly, I am humbled by the openness of this multicultural country that people of different religions, traditions, cultures, not to mention the variations within each religion, tradition and culture, have the opportunity and freedom to practice their respective belief systems, traditions and cultures. More importantly, this openness allows people the freedom to make their own choices, and to come together to practice what they believe in the spirit of fellowship.
It would be wonderful to learn how the four fold Sangha in Malaysia – the monks, nuns, male lay devotees and female lay devotees - come together and work towards the betterment of the society.
