Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Thich Nhat Hahn teaches that understanding and love are inseparable foundations for Buddhist practice and peaceful living. He opens with the Buddha’s core insight: everyone can become awake, and awakening comes through understanding others deeply. Using several vivid stories—a man angry at an empty boat until he sees no one is steering it, a Chinese mother who moves neighborhoods to support her son’s growth, and a young American student eating a tangerine mindfully in prison—he shows how clear seeing dissolves blame and anger and opens compassionate response. Understanding is not intellectual but perceptual: we must look carefully at the person or situation before us. He illustrates this through the extended metaphor of tending lettuce: good care, not punishment, allows growth. The teaching culminates in mindfulness practice itself—breathing, eating, walking—as the direct method for making life and ourselves real in the present moment, the only time we can actually be alive and meet what matters.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 LD.mp3
UUID: 2f33599b-3797-4997-8052-447d2a10c85f
Teacher: Thich Nhat Hahn
Collection: Looking Deeper – Meditationson Mindfulness thich (Thich Nhat Hahn)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~3,022
Maybe you know already, but I I want to to repeat that the Buddha is just a person like us. And what he said is that everyone of us can become a Buddha if we want to. Buddha means the person who is awake, the person who is alive, the person is very understanding and loving. Because when you understand, you can love. There is a simple thing, but many people keep forgetting.
In order to love, you should understand. If you don’t understand one person, you just cannot love him or her. Can you imagine two people who don’t understand each other and loving each other, no, that’s impossible. Therefore, the Buddha said that in order to love, you should understand. So understanding is a very important thing.
Husband and wife, if they do not understand each other, they cannot really love each other. And understanding how can we understand. If we want to understand, we have to look and to see the person. And if you really see, you see well, you understand. For instance, this morning, I see my friend and I tell, hello, good morning to him.
But he did not respond well. He’s not very kind to me. And I got hurt, you see, because I was very friendly, and yet he did not respond to my friendliness. So I get hurt. I get hurt because I don’t understand him.
If I look at him a little bit deep, more deeply, I see that maybe something happened to him last night. Maybe he could not sleep well last night. He was scolded by his mother last night. When I look at him, if I really see him, I may be able to understand. And if I understand, I wouldn’t be angry at him.
I accept him, and I can continue to be friendly with him like before. You know, sometimes we don’t understand and we get angry at people. I’d like to tell you a story that happened in China. It can happen here. One day a man was rowing his boat upstream in the early morning.
And it’s very hard to to make the boat advance upstream. The water is coming down and you are going upstream. And there is a lot of fog. And there are rocks on the way, so it makes it even more difficult. So he looked ahead and he saw another boat going down.
And he told himself to be careful not to collide, to make a collision with that boat. But it seems that the boat did not notice that, so the boat is going directly to his own boat. So this person on the boat yelled at the other boat, be careful, be careful, don’t run into me! Shouted like that. But the other boat did not hear.
So it continued to go very quickly directly on his own boat. Finally, there was a collision, and his boat turned over. He was very angry because he did everything in order to warn the other boat, but the other boat did not like to listen and to understand. And he said that when if he after he recover, he will give the other person a piece of his mind. Very angry.
But when he looked at the boat, he saw that the boat is empty. No one was on it. It was a boat without people on it. Just follow the stream in order to go down. Suddenly, all his anger just disappears.
He’s no longer angry. But if there is one person on the boat, that would be different. You see? Sometimes we don’t see clearly, that is why we get mad, we get angry, we get sad, we get irritated, we get unhappy. And because our perception is not correct, we don’t understand.
Because the perception is not correct, that is why we suffer. You like it? You like the breathing? That’s wonderful. Every time we hear the bell, we go back to ourselves and we breathe in deeply, breathe out deeply, and we think only of the breathing, and we enjoy the breathing.
The Buddha said that we should be attentive in order to understand. We should look at things carefully. We should look at people carefully in order to really understand. And if you understand, you’ll be able to accept and to love. I’ll tell you another story that happened in China.
There is a mother who worked hard in order to to bring up his only child. And the child later became a very famous philosopher in China, Mencius. His father died already, so his mother brought him up. And one day, he he went back from from school or something, and he he talked to his mother in a kind of language that is not beautiful. He talked like a very uneducated child, delinquent child.
So his mother was very sad, because she was expecting him to be a very wise child, polite, sweet child. She was weaving because her job is to weave in order to make a living for both of them. So she felt very hurt, very unhappy, and even angry. But she was careful enough not to shout at her child. She was careful enough not to call him close and beat him or punish him.
She didn’t do like that. She just breathed and she looked. And because of that, she she saw that somehow it is her fault. If the child is not talking in polite terms, in polite way, in a polite way, that is partly of her fault. Because after the death of her husband, she has chosen this neighborhood to settle.
And this in this neighborhood, there are many delinquent children. No. The people do not take care of the children, so the children spend their day in the streets just like that. And her child has learned these bad manners from these children. And because she saw that, she knows that it’s her fault.
That is why she she kept silent. She worked silently during three months in order to earn enough money. And after that, she moved to another neighborhood. And this time she is very careful. She has chosen a very good neighborhood where children are very very educated, very polite, very nice.
And a few months after she changed the place to live, the child began to talk politely again. He became sweet and understanding again. And she did not need to scold him, to blame him, to punish him. Because she was able to look and to understand. And therefore, could love.
Loving a person is like that. You have to look deeply to see. And if you see, you can understand. And if we are to learn from that mother, we see that arguing, blaming, scolding, punishing is not good, because it creates more division between the two people. I never see that arguing leads to anywhere, even if you argue very well.
I never see blaming leading to anywhere. Blaming can only create a gap, widen the gap between us. I don’t see punishment leading to anywhere. And then, if we cannot use these three things, we have to use the three other things, which is looking deeply, understanding, loving and taking care. If you take care, good care of your child, your child will be alright.
It’s like when I grow lettuce. We have lettuce again this morning. If the lettuce does not grow well, I don’t blame the lettuce. I don’t sit there and argue with the lettuce of the lettuce. I couldn’t say, all these lettuce.
Don’t you know that I spend a lot of time for you? And you are not understanding me at all? Arguing like that with letters would be funny. So I never argue with the lettuce. And I don’t blame them.
I don’t punish them. If I punish them, they will die. The only thing is for me to look carefully at the lettuce. And if I look, I know. I know the causes that have led to this situation.
Either I did not water them enough, or I watered them too much. Either I did not give them nutrition needed, that is why they don’t grow well. So if I understand, I will accept, and then I will give more care, and then the lettuce will grow well in five or seven days. And I will have beautiful lettuce. Breathing in, I calm.
Breathing out, I smile. So the people who live with us in the family, they are all lettuce. If you look at them carefully, if we understand them, if we take good care of them, they will grow beautifully. And if they don’t grow beautifully, we should not argue with them. We should not blame them.
We should not punish them. That would lead to nowhere. Only we have to look deeply in order to see, to understand, and then to accept, to take care of them, and then they will grow beautifully like the good lettuce. And this is a third story that happened in Paris, in France this time. I was telling a sangha in Paris because they they gather in order to practice smiling and breathing like we do today.
And there are many there were many children. And I told them the story of the lettuce. And it seems that the children understood very well. So after the Dharma talk, I practiced walking meditation around the meditation hall to enjoy the air because the meditation hall was very close to a beautiful river. And when I turned the corner, I overheard a child, a girl, about eight years old, she was telling her mother, mommy, you should know that I am your lettuce.
That means that means you should love me, otherwise I will wither. I was so glad that she paid attention to my talk, and she understood perfectly well. And I enjoyed her statement very much. She didn’t know that I was listening to her. I didn’t mean to I just overheard.
And I I did not have enough time to enjoy her statement, yet I heard her mother’s reply to her. She said, yes, but you should know also that I am your lettuce. That means, if you, my daughter,, if you don’t love me, if you don’t take care of me, I’ll be very unhappy too. So mother and daughter were telling each other that they should take care of each other. And they should not blame each other, they should not argue with each other, they should only see each other, understand each other, and taking care of each other.
I think that is a very hard, very high art of living. So according to the practice of Buddhist meditation, love is impossible without understanding. So understanding is the same thing with love. If you understand, you certainly love. And if you really love, there must be understanding in that.
And love in Buddhism sometimes is called compassion. And understanding in Buddhism is called wisdom, prajna. Prajñā and karuna. So, who is a Buddha? A Buddha is someone that has a high, very high capacity of loving and of course of understanding.
So understanding and loving is the most precious thing in a Buddha. And because of that understanding and of that loving that a person is called a Buddha. And what is nice is that the Buddha said, everyone can become a Buddha. That means a person with a high level of understanding and love. And therefore, if we practice breathing, smiling, walking, eating, it’s only to develop our understanding and our love.
So when I join my palm to make a lotus for you, to offer it to you, I really mean that within yourself there is a capacity of understanding and of loving. And I very much respect you because you have in yourself that capacity. Sometimes that capacity is called Buddha nature, But that nature is only the nature of understanding and of loving. I had a friend twenty years ago I had a friend whose name is Jim. He came to me to learn some meditation.
He was young, very intelligent. He was American. I offered him three tangerines to eat. And he ate the first two tangerines without being mindful of them. Because while he ate his tangerine, he talked a lot about his projects for the future.
He just peels the tangerine and then throws each section in his mouth and then swallowed like that. Talking very very excitedly about his project of the future. So you know, I saw that only one tangerine is left. And I have wasted already two tangerines. So I did not want to waste my third tangerine.
Therefore I stopped him. Jim, yes? Eat your tangerine, I said. He was an intelligent young man. He understood what I wanted to say.
So he stopped talking. He picked up the third tangerine. He began to peel it slowly. He looked at it very carefully. He smelled the skin of the tangerine.
And he made the tangerine very real. The way he peeled the tangerine told me that the tangerine now has become very real. And he peeled it slowly and he took one section, looked at it for one second, put in his mouth, close his mouth and feel the juice coming out on his tongue. Chew it and swallow it silently. And then he took the second section of the tangerine, looked at it, and did the same to the second section of tangerine.
And he was sitting there eating his tangerine mindfully, quietly. And I was there also. I was there looking very carefully and I saw that Jim was really eating his tangerine. The tangerine The tangerine was real. And the eater of the tangerine, who was Jim, he was very real also.
And life was present at that moment. I had saved one tangerine. Later, Jim refused to go to the war and he was imprisoned. And he suffered very much because of being imprisoned. So he wrote me a letter telling me about his suffering.
I wrote back in a postcard. I said: Jim, you are still having your tangerine. Eat it well. And that postcard turned out to be very helpful. And Jim was able to enjoy the days in his prison.
Because in my letter I said that tomorrow the tangerine will no longer be there. So have your own tangerine. So during his days in prison, he meditated and he found joy and peace even in the prison cell. So that young man was doing very well with his tangerine. I think that each day that is given to us to live is a tangerine.
Each day has twenty four sections That we call hour. And if you are capable of living one hour mindfully, joyfully, peacefully like that, you prove that you are capable of living twenty four hours of your day. But you have to prove to me that you are capable of eating one section of the tangerine. And I will believe that you have the capacity of eating a tangerine. Maybe tomorrow or after tomorrow we will go to the market and buy about two hundred tangerines. And each of us will have one tangerine.
We call it a tangerine festival. Each of us will receive a tangerine with one lotus flower put in here and continue to breathe. Until everyone has his or her tangerine, and then we will invite the bell to sound. We will breathe three times and we hold our tangerine in our on our palm. This is big for a tangerine.
So I take this. And when I have the tangerine up here, I begin to breathe and smile in a way that makes this tangerine become real. If I practice meditation for have practiced meditation for some time already, when I look at the tangerine I can see a flower, a tangerine flower first. With the petals playing in the sunshine with the rain on it. And then I saw the tiny fruit in the heart of tangerine flower and then the petals of the tangerine flower falling down like this.
And I saw the sun and the rain continue to fall on the small tangerine fruit and become bigger bigger bigger. And finally, the color, the green color, become the orange color. The tangerine now is about to be ripe. And someone came and picked it up and put it into a basket. And now we have the tangerine on my hand.
I do not need one hour in order to see all of that. I need only twenty seconds in order to see all of that. And suddenly the tangerine becomes very real. And if the tangerine becomes real, I myself become real. And the contact between myself and the tangerine becomes a real contact.
So when I eat the tangerine, I feel wonderful. Have you tried to eat the tangerine that way? Children? No. Next week you might try that.
You see that the pleasure that you will have will be very, very big. Breathing is a way to make things real, including us. We make ourselves real and we make everything else real. And we make life real for the present moment. I do not practice breathing in order to hope for something in the future.
I practice breathing in order to make life real in the present moment. Because the present moment is the only moment when you can be alive. You cannot have an appointment with life in the past moment. You cannot have an appointment with life in the future moment. You can have the appointment in the present moment with life.
All kinds of appointments should be made in the present moment. If you want to see the flower, if you want to see the moon, if you want to really see mommy, you have to go back to the present moment in order to see these three things.