Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 31-minute talk, Thich Nhat Hahn explores the Heart Sūtra’s teaching on emptiness and interbeing through storytelling and practical instruction. He opens with a story about the Buddha and Mara that reveals how all dualities—good and evil, Buddha and demon—arise in dependence on each other and lack independent essence. This leads to a meditation on prajnaparamita, the wisdom that transcends all concepts and pairs. He then shifts to concrete practice: how mindfulness transforms ordinary activities like eating a tangerine, walking, and breathing into real presence and genuine peace-work. He emphasizes that enlightenment is not a distant goal but the quality of each present moment, and that inner peace directly contributes to peace in the world. He closes with an explanation of the sūtra’s final mantra—gate gate paragate—showing how concentrated practice rooted in emptiness gives ordinary words transformative power.
File metadata (for organising)
File: Side D.mp3
UUID: 81f35bd3-5d1e-4caa-9c8f-9c889bf730f7
Teacher: Thich Nhat Hahn
Collection: Commentaries on the Heart Sūtra (Thich Nhat Hahn)
Date: 1987 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~2,760
Set up a play with the hero and the pirate. You need the pirate very much in order to make the hero apparent. Right? And the hero meets very much the pirate and vice versa. Therefore, there is a game, there is a kind of passive agreement between the Buddha and Mara.
One day meditating like that, I told this story. I said that the Buddha sitting in his cave and his beloved disciple Ānanda was waiting outside, and then Ānanda saw Mara coming. Ānanda couldn’t believe it. How could Mara has the have the courage to come to the Buddha? Because Mara is the enemy of the Buddha, and he was defeated by the Buddha under the Bodhi tree.
Mara said, he didn’t say good morning either. He discriminated against Mara. That is why he doesn’t want to say good morning to Mara. Buddha said, what are you here for? I want to see the Buddha, Mara said.
Home. No. You cannot see the Buddha. You are his enemy. The Buddha would like to see you.
Are you are not you ashamed? Don’t you remember that you were defeated by him under the Bodhi tree? Wait. Wait. The Buddha will not see you.
You are evil. You you are the enemy of the Buddha. And that Buddha laughed and laughed and Mara laughed and laughed, and he said, would you say that the Buddha has said that he has enemies that make Ānanda think hard because never before the Buddha said that he had enemies. So he was defeated, and he had to go into the cave in order to announce Mahara’s visit, hoping that the Buddha will tell him to go out and say that he’s not there. Sorry, but tell him that I’m in conference.
But to his surprise, the Buddha was very excited of the visit. Is that true that Mara is there? And then he ran out in person in order to greet Mara. Ānanda was very sad. He could not understand.
So he followed the Buddha and he saw the Buddha bowing to Mara, taking his arm and asked very heartily, how are you? How have you been? And he took him into the cave and asked him to sit in a chair. And he told Ānanda to go and make both tea for both of them. Making the tea for the Buddha, well, he can make one hundred times a day.
But making tea for Mara, he is not very glad about it. So he but since the teacher has told him to do so, he had to go and boil the water, but he tried to keep an ear on the conversation. And the Buddha asked the question again, how have you been? Is everything okay? Mara said, no, everything is not okay.
I don’t want to be Mara anymore. You know that being a Mara, you have to speak, to talk in riddles. To be a Mara, you have to do evil things. And I’m tired of doing evil things and to look as evil. And what is worse is that my disciples now have begun to talk to talk in terms of social justice, peace, equality, liberation, all these things, I have had it enough.
I want to come and handle all the all these disciples of mine to you, and I want to be something else. It doesn’t matter. Ānanda was making tea, and he was scared. He was scared. He was afraid that Buddha will accept to change the role.
Mara now will play the role of Buddha, and Buddha will play the role of Mara. That way, he will be very sad. The Buddha said, after listening carefully to what Mara said, the Buddha asked him this short question, Do you think it’s fun to be a Buddha? If you know how the Buddhist do every day, you will not be proud to be a Buddha. They build a very big house and they put a statue of mine on a big table to attract and bananas and orange.
They ask they put into my mouth the things I have never said before. They have made made a commerce out of me and my teaching. Now if you know if you really know what is happening to me, you wouldn’t be enjoying being a Buddha, he said. And thereupon, the Buddha recite a long gatha, telling that everyone should do his job well and not to try to do the other thing. Since the ghata is too long, I cannot remember.
But if you want to read the gatha and read the story, try to find a book written by Dan Berrigan, the book of Psalms. The story of the encounter between Buddha and Mara was in the story as an epilogue to the book. And you see the gatha, the long gatha in it that deal with liberation, good and evil, justice and injustice. So it is clear that in the light of interbeing, Buddha is made of non-Buddha elements. Evil is made of non-evil elements, and that is why the prajnaparamita transcends all concepts.
Not only it transcends the concept of birth and death, defilement and purity, but it transcends all concepts, above, below, inside, outside, right, left, both, death. Good, evil, Buddha, Mara. We have talked about the rose and the garbage. We have talked about the prostitute. Only the prajnaparamita can help our prostitute to have an escape.
If the prostitute look at herself carefully, she know her nature of interbeing. She knows that she is there for others to be. The way the other are depends on her way of being, and therefore her salvation, her emancipation can only come with the practice of prajnaparamita. Otherwise, she cannot overcome that kind of feeling and complex. And the prajnaparamita give us a very solid ground for making peace, making peace with us, with ourselves, transcending the fear of birth and death, of this and that.
Because in the light of emptiness, everything is everything else and we inter are. We are responsible for everything that happen in life. So when you produce in yourself peace and happiness, you begin to realize peace for the whole world because the smile that you produce in yourself, the conscious breathing that you establish in yourself, you begin to work for peace in the world. To smile is not to smile only to yourself. The world will change because of your smile.
When you practice sitting, every moment of your sitting like this and if you enjoy it, if you establish serenity, happiness inside in yourself, you provide the world with a solid base for peace. If you do not get peace for yourself, how can you share peace with others? If you cannot begin the peace work with yourself, where can you begin the peace work? And therefore, to breathe, to smile, to sit, to look at things is the basic thing you do for peace. A tree out there does not seem to do very much, but the fact that a tree is a tree is very important.
If a tree is less than a tree, then all of us will get into trouble. Imagine that a tree is less than a tree. Because the tree can be really a tree, it can still be here alive. But you know that in the last five years, during the last five years, trees begin to die because of the acid rain, because humans have become less than humans. We are not responsible enough.
We are destroying life around us. We are destroying each other. And therefore, to become a real human being, to be a real human being is the basic thing for peace, for the survival of other species as well. Therefore, practice breathing, practice being awake, practice smiling, be yourself is the basic thing you can do for peace. Yesterday, we had a tangerine party in our retreat.
Everyone was offered one tangerine, children and adult alike. We put the tangerine on our palm the palm of our hand. We look at it breathing. We look at it breathing in a way that the tangerine becomes real because most of the time, when we eat the tangerine, we are not really looking at the tangerine, we are thinking of many things except the thing we are with. Therefore, looking at the tangerine to see the flower, to see the warmth of the tangerine, to see the sunshine, to see the rain, to see that the tangerine in your palm is a wonderful presence of life.
You really see the tangerine. And as the tangerine becomes real, you become real also. Life in that moment becomes also real. And that is the way of life that is called mindful. Without mindfulness, life cannot be real life.
And when you begin to peel the tangerine, you smell it, you take one section of the tangerine and you put in your mouth, and you feel it is a real tangerine. And each section of tangerine we eat in perfect mindfulness until we finish the tangerine. And eating a tangerine like that is very important because both the tangerine and the eater of the tangerine become real. And this is the basic work for peace. In the retreat during the retreat, you also practice walking.
We learn to walk really for walking, and each step we make on the floor or on the ground is a real step. Each step like that brings us to the present moment. Each step like that restores our entire person, and therefore, step like that can make us very happy, very alive. Because life can only be found in the present moment. If you are not in touch with the present moment, life is lost.
In our daily life, very seldom we deal with the present moment. We always think of the past, or we always think of the future, and therefore life is not real. And if we do not live mindfully, we lose the present moment and become less than a human being. We do not become responsible, and therefore we create death, destruction around us and in us. When we pick up the newspaper like the New York Times, Maybe we are mindful, we can see a lot of things in the newspaper.
And if we are aware of the things that are happening in each moment, each minute of our life, will be responsible. We know what way to go in order for peace to be possible. I think it’s very important to live such a way that demonstrate that will demonstrate that peace will be possible. By looking at the way of living of a person, we can see that there is a future or not for our children. And therefore, the basic thing we do for us for peace is to live mindfully our daily life.
In Buddhist meditation, we do not struggle for the kind of enlightenment that will happen ten years from now or five years from now. We practice so that each moment of our life becomes real life and therefore, sitting is for sitting. If you sit for twenty minutes, these twenty minutes should bring you joy, life. You sit for sitting. You don’t sit for something else.
If we practice walking meditation, we walk just for walking. Which step makes life real. Walking is not to arrive. If you only think about arrival and then the final destination must be the graveyard. That is why you have to be alive during each step, and each step brings you, brings life back to you.
The same thing is practiced when you eat your breakfast, when you hold your child in your arms, you’re really alive. The other day I said, well, the hot dog is invented rather by the west. But we would like to contribute the breathing. When you hold your child in your arms, practice three breathings and your happiness will be multiplied by ten times at least. And when you look at someone, really look at him or at her with mindfulness, practice breathing.
For instance, when you go back to your home after at the end of a day and having a meal together, sit around the table. And before eating, just practice breathing two times to recover yourself. It may be that during your entire day, you have been dispersed too much. Mind here, feeling there, body here, perception there. You are not entirely yourself.
So sitting around the table, breathe deeply to restore yourself, and you are really alive. And then take a look at each person around the table to really see them. It only needs one second to look and to see, to really see that the person is there. Because in our daily life we rarely see things. Turn off the television because it prevents us from seeing each other and smile to the person we look at.
And if you look at someone and if you cannot smile, the situation is dangerous. And you know that being together in that way, you can feel very happy. And as you are happy, you have the conditions to work for the happiness of others. Otherwise, there’s no hope. So each breath you make, each step you make, each mindful step you realize is a positive contribution to peace.
And therefore, be happy is a very necessary step of peace in the world. And you know, in the light of interbeing, peace, happiness in the daily life means peace and happiness in the world. Have a few questions to ask. I would be happy to answer. Yes.
I’m sorry because of the time. I could not speak about the last sentences of the sūtra. Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhisvaha, saha. It means gone, gone, gone over toward the other shore. Everyone run to the other shore.
Bodhi means awakening, and Svāhā is like a cry of joy excitement. The mantra means something that you utter in your concentration. When you have a very strong concentration of body, speech and mind, and if you utter something, that is a mantra. If you only say it, your intellect is not a mantra, you have to say it with your body, all your being in order for it to have a power, a mantra that is a statement with a very big power. It’s like a young man in love with a young lady and he during three years, he has to examine whether his love is really serious and that is why the young lady has been waiting for his statement, but the statement has not come yet.
So one day, by the bank of the river, the atmosphere is serene. He became somehow quiet and then in a state of being that is quite concentrated, he utter the words. And he knew that he could not say these words in the subway. It’s too noisy. I’m a coffee shop.
He meets a place where he can be really expressing with his entire being. That is why on the bank of the river that morning, he declared that he loved her. And because he spoke in the state of being, the words have a very strong power. It can make the young lady shiver. And that is the mantra.
That is the mantra. But his power of concentration is not as large like the concentration of Avalokiteśvara. That is why his mantra, if you compare to this mantra, is less powerful. Avalokiteśvara, after having discovered the mystery of interbeing, of emptiness. His power of concentration is at the highest.
That is why the mantra he pronounced can have the power of changing the world of everything. And if you want to receive the power of the mantra, you have to guard yourself into that kind of concentration also. If you practice the meditation on emptiness, on interbeing, if you penetrate the nature of interbeing with all your heart, your body, your mind, your breathing, and then you realize a state of being that is quite concentrated. And in that state of being, you pronounce the mantra gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi, Svāhā. And then there is a kind of communion that will be made between you and Avalokiteśvara, and that will be able to transform yourself in the direction of enlightenment.
And therefore, a mantra is words that people, uttered in a state of highly concentrated being.