| Inspiration from the International Plum Village Community
May 2024 |
|  | | "Our life will be filled with happiness if we can help others around us. But if we spend our whole life building up our name and our fortune, we cannot find happiness. We might have a lot of money, a big house, and a luxurious car, but that's not real happiness. We can only taste real happiness when we can help others." |
| | | | |  | Brother Phap Dung of Deer Park Monastery gave a Dharma talk at Dartmouth College on peace and reconciliation:
"The topic of peace is is always in our heart; our teacher, that's his whole life: he grew up during wartime with the French occupation, and then the Japanese and then the Americans bringing a lot of violence to our country in Vietnam. So his whole life was dedicated to try to find another option besides resorting to violence. There was a period when he was young, he was tempted to actually leave monastic life and and join the resistance movement to fight against the foreign French and American forces that were bringing in a lot of violence… [But] Thay wanted to find another way of peace so this is why he dedicated his life as a monastic to help people come to a place of nonviolence." |
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| | Can You Live a Happy Life? |
|  | In this article on Buddhist ethics, based on a talk given by Thay in 2008/9, we look deeper into the use of Normative Ethics alongside our practice to help us determine what is "right" and how this can lead to a happy life:
"Your way (of seeing) determines whether something is suffering or not. For example, when we clean the toilet. We can ask: is cleaning the toilet a pain or a pleasure? It depends on the person, right? There are people who don't have a toilet to clean. There are people who have toilets, but don't have soap or toilet cleaner to clean them. There are people who have a toilet, but don't have the time to clean it. And so these people may be very happy to clean the toilet. 'How lucky to have a toilet to clean, to have a clean toilet to use,' so while cleaning the toilet, happiness is possible. But if you think, 'Someone like me, cleaning toilets?' then you would be miserable. So whether suffering or joy, or happiness, depends on us." |
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| Q & A: The Art of Happiness |
|  | During the Order of Interbeing retreat "The Art of Happiness" at Blue Cliff Monastery, a panel of the fourfold Sangha— a nun, monk, lay woman, and lay man— offered a Question and Answer session in which they addressed questions such as: |
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| | Guided Meditation: Touching the Buddha Within |
|  | This 23-minute guided meditation with Sister Dao Nghiem helps us get in touch with our Buddha nature, arriving one step closer to realizing understanding and compassion. By letting our Buddha nature act for us, we act from compassion and understanding. |
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| Five Mindfulness Trainings Now in Twelve Languages |
|  | The Five Mindfulness Trainings have their root in the Five Precepts offered by the Buddha. They have been expanded and updated so that they represent a way to bring mindfulness into every area of life. Rather than hard and fast rules, they offer us a path to cultivate and develop actions of body, speech and mind that can create a more healthy and compassionate world. With the latest addition of Hindi, they are now available in English, Vietnamese, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Greek (Ελληνικά), Bulgarian (български), Chinese (中文), and Turkish (Türkçe). |
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If you can't wait for the next events email, we invite you to take a look at these resources: |
| | | | We would like to share with you our heartfelt gratitude for your continued practice and for your support for our beloved monastics and the International Plum Village Community. As we say in the Plum Village tradition, "You are, therefore I am." We wish you and your loved ones safety, health, and ease. |
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