Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this session, Thich Nhat Hahn uses a story about a young refugee girl named Clearwater to illuminate meditation’s quiet power. When the girl observes that apple juice particles settle and become clear after sitting undisturbed—and realizes her grandfather monk’s sitting practice mirrors this natural process—she grasps that meditation brings clarity, peace, and presence. Thich Nhat Hahn then guides listeners through the basic practice: sitting for even one, two, or three minutes with full attention to breath and smile transforms us into clearer, more pleasant people. He moves into engaged Buddhism, recounting work during the Vietnam War—young volunteers breathing and smiling while collecting bomb-destroyed bodies—and visits to refugee camps, showing how contacting real suffering heals our own. The teaching closes with a sharp political reflection on the Vietnam War: America’s unilateral interventions and misunderstanding of interbeing created more communists than they stopped, while genuine peace requires dialogue, cooperation, and recognition that every side is our side. Suitable for practitioners seeking both personal practice and socially engaged dharma.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 LD.mp3
UUID: bc3c10e6-d606-40ba-aae9-748a79693280
Teacher: Thich Nhat Hahn
Collection: Looking Deeper – Meditationson Mindfulness thich (Thich Nhat Hahn)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~3,317
There was a little girl of four, five years old. I met her about fifteen years ago in France. She came to France with her father very young. Her father had been a student of mine in Vietnam. And they were boat people.
That means they escaped the country by small boats. And they arrived at a refugee camp in Malaysia and stayed there for six months. And they were able to come to France. They were accepted by France to be refugees in France. So when they arrived in France, the father came to see me at my hermitage and asked me to take care of his daughter, for him to go to Paris and look for a job.
So I took care of the daughter. Her name is Clearwater, Thanh Thủy. I taught her to read Vietnamese because she didn’t know how to spell, how to read. A, B, C, D. In Vietnamese we say A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I.
And then I taught her to go for walking meditation with me. And we agreed with each other that when the time comes for my sitting in the evening, she should go right away to sleep. And when I begin to put my robe on and light a stick of incense, then she knows that time for sitting meditation has come. So she doesn’t need me to tell her to go to bed. She just quietly goes and climbs on the bed, very close to the place where I practice sitting meditation.
And the agreement is that once she got into her bed, she wouldn’t talk. She can change her position of lying down but she shouldn’t talk. And that is easy for her to observe that kind of agreement. And if a child does not talk, keeps quiet for some time, like five minutes, she will fall asleep. And when I finish sitting, the only thing I have to do is to take another blanket and put it on her, cover her.
And then I went to do some more writing and go to sleep myself. She did not speak French at all because it was just three weeks after she came to France. So I sent her to a school in the village, because my hermitage is up on a hill surrounded by the woods. And one day she went back to the hermitage with five girlfriends, friends.
I didn’t know how she could make friends so easily. She only made gestures like that and she made friends. So when six of them came up to my hermitage, I brought out a bottle of apple juice in order to serve to all of them. That kind of juice was not sold in the market. It’s homemade.
Therefore there are many particles of apple in the bottle. So I poured for each of them one glass full of juice. But the last is for Clearwater. But her glass is not very clear because there are so many particles on it. So she refused to drink.
The other five drank their juice happily but Thanh Thủy, her name, Clearwater, refused to drink. And after that, they went to the hill nearby and played with each other. And I was writing a book. And about half an hour later, I heard her calling me in the kitchen. She was trying to get some water in a glass in order to drink, but because she was too small—small, yes, thank you—she could not reach the water tap. So I came to her and I said, Why don’t you drink that glass of apple juice on the table? And she looked at the glass of apple juice and she saw that it’s very, very clear, very delicious, looked delicious.
So without thinking, she picked it up and she drank, drank, drank like that. And then she said, So good! And now she began to talk to me. She called me grandfather monk—Grandfather Monk, because the teacher of your father, you have to call him Grandfather Monk.
Thank you, Grandfather Monk. Is there another glass of juice? I said no, the same glass of juice.
But why so limpid, so clear and so tasty? I said that it is clear like that because we have left it half an hour on the table without touching it. You know when something stays quiet for some time like that, it becomes clear. Particles settle. The particles settle down. And she said, I understand now. The glass of apple juice has imitated my grandpa monk in order to practice sitting meditation. For four years and a half, I was so happy that she understood what is meditation. But I was not so proud.
I told her: No, it’s not exactly. Your grandfather monk has imitated the glass of apple juice. And she understood the meaning of sitting meditation. As you sit like that, you become limpid, you become clear, you become quiet, you become pleasant, you become delicious. And if we know how to sit, if we enjoy our sitting, it becomes very pleasant.
Sometimes an adult is pleasant and children like to come to sit near her or him, not just because she has a lot of chewing gum or cookies, but just because of the fact that the person is so pleasant, is so clear, so agreeable to sit by his side. Therefore, when we practice sitting correctly, we enjoy our breathing, we enjoy our smiling, we enjoy our being there, we become completely whole, that means united. We recover ourselves and we become new, we become present. And therefore, sitting like that has a very good effect on every one of us. Even if you cannot sit for one hour or half an hour, fifteen minutes—if you only sit for one, two or three minutes, that is already very good.
Sitting, enjoying your sitting, smiling, breathing. Wonderful. So next time when we sit here, you might like to join us. You might like to sit just for one minute. And if you think that’s enough for you to be clear and pleasant, you can make a lotus bow like that and slowly walk down, walk out, go out while holding to your breathing, making slow steps like you did during tea meditation.
If you want two minutes, three minutes, you are welcome to stay. But one minute is enough, I think. And if you want to stay twenty minutes, that’s fine. There were two boys in Rochester. I invited them to come and sit with us in the Zendo.
Their mother said: No, they cannot sit. I said: They can! She said: No, they cannot. I want to check. I told her: How long do you think they would like to sit?
She said: Four seconds. I looked at them and said: Is that right? I don’t believe so. Let’s try. And then that afternoon they came with us in the Zendo and they sat with us—guess how many seconds they sat?
Fourteen minutes. Fourteen minutes they sat with us and after that they bowed and went out. So we never know. So why don’t we try this afternoon to see how many minutes you sit? And I have the watch, the clock over here.
And when you think that you have sat enough, you make a bow like this. You slowly stand up. And before going out, look to see how many minutes you have made. And you tell me later, alright? At the end of the retreat in the San Francisco Zen Center, everyone presented a poem, and there was a poem like this beginning with the two lines: I have lost my smile.
But not to worry, the dandelion still has it. It was interesting because if you have lost your smile and yet you are capable of seeing that a dandelion is still keeping it for you, the situation is not so bad. You still have enough mindfulness, breathing, smiling, in order to see that the smile is there. It needs you to breathe one or two times in order to get your smile back. And the dandelion is one element of your Sangha.
It’s there, very faithful, keeping the smile for you. And everything around us is practically keeping our smile for us. Don’t feel so alone, so isolated. You have to open yourself and you see that the source of support is all around you, even in yourself. And like that person seeing that the smile is being kept by the dandelion, breathe and get the smile back.
And practicing with the support of the Sangha—the Sangha, a community that lives in harmony and awareness. Or you may go into the other direction. The direction not seeking for comfort, but seeking for the contact with real suffering. When you go into this direction and get in touch with the people who are really suffering, then your suffering may be healed.
Because in touch with that kind of suffering, your suffering becomes meaningless. And that is why the precept on awareness of the suffering in the world is important. The kind of Buddhism that we have been practicing in Vietnam during the last forty years is very much engaged Buddhism. It was in the situation of war. And you cannot just practice in the meditation hall.
You have to practice everywhere, especially at the spot where the worst suffering is going on. Imagine that after the Tet offensive, dead bodies are everywhere. And the army was not there to help. The public service is not there to help, and the dead bodies began to smell bad, and it was very dangerous. And those of us who are in the School of Youth for Social Service, we decided to do something without the support of any government, any official people to help.
We decided to organize teams of young people to go and pick up the dead bodies and to bury them in a collective way. And for the young student of twenty, twenty-two, or maybe eighteen, it’s a very hard kind of work. You have to do it alone without anybody telling you. And before going, you sit in meditation for half an hour. You are prepared.
You say that this is a difficult situation. But if we do not maintain our calm, our loving kindness, then we’ll give up very, very soon. So the young people were advised to practice breathing and smiling while doing the work. It’s extremely hard when you collect dead bodies like that, destroyed by the bombs and the bullets, and put them on the trucks and carry them—breathing and smiling, that condition is very, very difficult. But there is no alternative.
And in moments like these, your suffering does not mean much. And if you are in touch with that kind of suffering, then you are healed, you see that in other times, you see that your life is not very meaningful, very useful, and you suffer of many things that are not so serious. But when you confront such a situation, you see that you can be a source of compassion. You can be of great help to the suffering people. And then strangely, in that utmost suffering, you feel a kind of relief and joy within yourself because you know that you are an instrument of compassion now.
Understanding the suffering and having the compassion turn you into a joyful person, even if you live a life that is very hard. So not only going in this direction to seek the comfort and the support of the Sangha is the only way, but going the other way, being in touch, is important. And last winter, I myself and Sister Chân Không and other friends, we went to visit the camps of refugees in Hong Kong, and we witnessed a lot of suffering. There are boat people who are one year old, two years old, half a year old, and who were to be sent back to their country because they are classified as illegal immigrants.
And they have lost both father and mother during the trip. And there are a lot of things like that. And when you are in touch, you see that the suffering that your friends in Europe and America are undergoing is not very big. And every time we came back from such a contact, we see that the city of Paris is not very real. The way people live there and the reality of the suffering in the world is so different.
And I ask the question, how could people live like this when things are like that? But if you stay in Paris for ten years without being in touch, you find it normal. But meditation is a point of contact. Sometimes you do not have to go there. You just sit quietly on your cushion, and yet you can see everything.
You can actualize everything, and you can be aware of what is going on in the world. Out of that kind of awareness, your compassion, your understanding can be obtained and you can stay right where you are and have the right action. Yesterday, I told you about Vietnam. And I said that if only America had that kind of vision, the vision of non-duality concerning the two Vietnams, we would not have had that destruction of both Vietnam and of America. Because the hurt—the war is still hurting both Americans and Vietnamese.
But if we are lucid enough, we’ll be able to learn from the war in Vietnam. I intend to go back to America one day and to have a retreat with Vietnam veterans in America. We will sit together, breathe together, walk together, and try to learn from the experience of Vietnam. And I believe that the war veterans will have something to tell their nation as to how to deal with other problems that are likely to happen, problems that will not look different from Vietnam.
Out of our sufferings, we should learn something and we should do it in meditation. During the war, America was thinking of containing communism, of eliminating communism. But what I can tell you is that most of the communists in South Vietnam have been created by America. And most of the people who were killed in Vietnam were not communist. The fact is like that.
We did not have many communists in Vietnam, but the way that the war was conducted in Vietnam had created a lot of opposition and communists. Many people in the beginning did not want to be communist. But because of the repression, of the lack of freedom of expression, they did not have a place to go in order to oppose that kind of policy. And therefore many people were going to the other side, which was resisting the kind of policy conducted by this side. And many people who did not like communism promised themselves that once the Americans are gone, they will turn in order to be themselves. There were too many communists to kill.
And America has created much more communists, too many communists, to kill. And if you continue that kind of policy, you will do the same in Central America and South America. The vision that we should have is the vision of interbeing. That means we belong to each other. And we cannot cut reality into several pieces.
And the well-being of this is the very well-being of that. And therefore, we have to do things together. And this is the time when everything has to be done together with the cooperation of everyone. And there is no evil side. Every side is our side.
This is important. Every side is our side. And America is in a good position for saying that and doing that. There must be a dialogue. And the peace people have to show the people around the reality of interbeing.
America is proud to be rich and mighty. You have the tendency to think that with money you can do a lot of things or everything. But the money has created a lot of suffering, a lot of destruction. Wherever there is the money, corruption is, destruction is. One day I was asked by the press here what America should do in El Salvador.
I practiced three breaths. And I made a joke. This time you do it differently. Instead of giving your dollars to the anti-communist, you give them to the communist. Because if you give the communist your dollars, then they will be destroyed.
Because your money corrupted people and you don’t have to fight, they just destroy themselves. I said that as a joke. But maybe there is truth in that. We never know. Because of the money and the guns, the Vietnamese in Vietnam who are not communist became more and more dependent on the American side.
And when the Americans decided to withdraw, then there’s no spirit of fighting, of being themselves. When you have a war, there are two warring parties. There is a clash between two ideologies. There are Vietnamese on this side and there are Vietnamese on that side. There are Americans on this side, and there are Russians and Chinese on that side.
And at that time, our peace movement, the peace movement in Vietnam, was quite different from the peace movement in America because we were at the very spot. In the beginning, some of the religious and humanitarian leaders here in this country understood us that there should be a stop, an end to the war by political means and not military. And some effort was going on and the peace movement was created. But after one year, two years, many years, the peace movement has not succeeded in stopping the war. So a lot of anger, a lot of hatred has arisen in the peace movement.
And then the peace movement here seemed to align with one side of the war and wished for a defeat of America and the Vietnamese who are not communist in Vietnam. Working in Vietnam, we know that peace must be reconciliation. Reconciliation between the Vietnamese and reconciliation between the friends of the Vietnamese who are Russians and who are Americans. And we are on the ground, we are on the field, we were on the field and we touched reality.
And we had our proposal as to how peace could be achieved in a way that people will not suffer too much. And at that moment we proposed that there should be an immediate stop of the fighting. America should make the first step by declaring unilateral ceasefire and inviting the other side to join in. Because the people are very much for peace and if there is a good move on that, that move will be supported by many people, not only in Vietnam but outside.
But it was something like nineteen sixty-nine or seventy, the peace movement in America did not support that. Because it was too angry already. It said that no proposal, just withdraw from Vietnam. And at peace conferences, the delegations of the peace movement in Vietnam were not allowed to attend because it had a different voice from the pro-communist voice.