Mindfulness is first of all the ability recognize what is happening in the present moment. It is simple recognition—without judgment or criticism, without suppression or attachment. I breathe in, and I am aware that the in-breath is here. I breathe out, and I am aware that the out-breath is here. There is no criticism or struggle. There is no effort either to reject anything or grab on to it.

Breathing in, breathing out.

The breath is flowing in.

The breath is flowing out.

You could also say, “in-breath, out-breath.” Or even just: “in, out.” It’s very simple, yet you can regard this practice as recognition of everything that is happening in the present moment. “I’m breathing in; this is an in-breath. I’m breathing out; this is an out-breath.”

During this time, all thoughts stop. The past, the future, your memories and plans—you drop everything. You are your in-breath, and as you become one with your in-breath, concentration occurs. This will give you a great deal of pleasure.

“Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in.” Let me remind you again that this practice comes to us directly from the Buddha. You are free of any intention to judge, find fault, reject, or cling, and you maintain that freedom in relation to whatever is happening. When you get angry or depressed, it is the same. You simply recognize what is there—anger, depression, and so forth—without any sense of disapproval or rejection. If you recognize emotion as existing in the moment, you will not feel upset. There is no battle to win or lose—this is Buddhist meditation.

When you drink whiskey, learn to drink it with mindfulness. “Drinking whiskey, I know that it is whiskey I am drinking.” This is the approach that I would recommend. I am not telling you to absolutely stop drinking. I propose that you drink your whiskey mindfully, and I am sure that if you drink this way for a few weeks, you will stop drinking alcohol. Drinking your whiskey mindfully, you will recognize what is taking place in you—in your body, in your liver, in your relationships, in the world, and so on. When your mindfulness becomes strong, you will just stop.

You do not have to struggle against a desire. There is no need for a battle within you. Mindfulness is something that embraces and includes things like desire, that recognizes them with great tenderness. Meditation is not about turning yourself into a battlefield where one side fights the other, because the basis of Buddhist meditation is nonduality. The habits of drinking alcohol or getting angry are also you, and therefore you must treat them with great tenderness and nonviolence. The essential point is not to create conflict, a fight, within yourself.

So we begin with simple recognition. Then, when the energy of mindfulness is strong and you have concentration, you can practice looking deeply into the nature of whatever is arising, and from that comes insight. Insight liberates you from all negative tendencies.

“Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in. Breathing out, I know that I am breathing out.” This is very, very simple, yet it can give you a lot of pleasure. You cultivate concentration, and with that concentration, you touch life deeply. You are free at that moment.

Let me say a few words about adding the words “deep, slow” to this practice of breath awareness. “Deep” in this case does not mean we are trying to make our inhalation deeper. It simply means that after a few minutes of practicing “Breathing in, breathing out,” you will notice that your breathing has become deeper and slower. As you breathe in, you notice that your in-breath has become longer. As you breathe out, you notice that your out-breath has become gentler. As a result, your practice becomes pleasurable, and this pleasure nourishes and transforms you.

The practice should be enjoyable and pleasant. The elements called joy and pleasure, mudita and priti in Sanskrit, are a very important part of meditation. If you are suffering during meditation, your practice is not correct. Practice should be enjoyable and pleasant. It should be full of joy.

So whether your practice is walking or sitting meditation, do it in such a way that joy and pleasure are possible. It is not supposed to be hard labor. And in your everyday life, just as you do not do violence to your breathing, do not do violence to your body, nor to your anger or depression. We need to treat them with a great deal of tenderness, because the essential thing in Buddhist meditation is not to create tension, conflict, or rift within yourself. The positive elements within you are you, and the negative elements within you are you also. It is necessary for the positive elements to acknowledge and cradle the negative elements, and if you do that, a transformation will take place. There is no need for the two to do battle.

If you find there is not enough peace in your emotions, your perceptions, or your feelings, you should practice calming them.

Breathing in, I calm my feelings.

Breathing out, I smile at my feelings.

When you are feeling yanked by strong emotions, you can practice like this. Assume a seated posture in which you can be solid; or you can lie down. As you breathe, bring your attention to your navel and to the movement of your abdomen. Your abdomen rises and falls—follow that movement. Do not think about anything. The object of your attention is solely the movement of your abdomen. “I breathe in, I breathe out. I breathe in, I breathe out.”

A strong emotion is like a storm. If you look at a tree in a storm, the top of the tree seems fragile, like it might break at any moment. You are afraid the storm might uproot the tree. But if you turn your attention to the trunk of the tree, you realize that its roots are deeply anchored in the ground, and you see that the tree will be able to hold.

You too are a tree. During a storm of emotion, you should not stay at the level of the head or the heart, which are like the top of the tree. You have to leave the heart, the eye of the storm, and come back to the trunk of the tree. Your trunk is one centimeter below your navel. Focus there, paying attention only to the movement of your abdomen, and continue to breathe. Then you will survive the storm of strong emotion.

It is essential to understand that an emotion is merely something that arises, remains, and then goes away. A storm comes, it stays a while, and then it moves away. At the critical moment, remember that you are much more than your emotions. This is a simple thing that everybody knows, but you may need to be reminded of it: you are much more than your emotions. Many people have no idea how to face their emotions, and they suffer because of it. A lot of young people are like that, and they think the only way to put an end to their suffering is to kill themselves. Why do we have to die because of an emotion? We must practice this ourselves, and we must help young people to practice it.

You should not wait for emotion to appear before you begin practicing. Otherwise you will be carried away by the storm. You should train now, while the emotion is not there. So sit or lie down and practice mindfulness of the breath, using the movement of your abdomen as the object of your attention. I am positive that if you do this exercise for twenty days, ten minutes per day, then you will know how to practice whenever a strong emotion comes up. After ten or twenty minutes, the emotion will go away, and you will be saved from the storm.

If there are things that are causing you to suffer, you have to know how to let go of them. Happiness can be attained by letting go, including letting go of your ideas about happiness. You imagine that certain conditions are necessary to your happiness, but deep looking will reveal to you that those notions are the very things standing in the way of happiness and are making you suffer.

One day the Buddha was sitting in the forest with some monks. They had just finished their lunch and were about to begin a Dharma discussion when a farmer approached them. The farmer said, “Venerable monks, did you see my cows come by? I have a dozen cows, and they all ran away. On top of that, I have five acres of sesame plants, and this year the insects ate them all up. I think I’m going to kill myself. I can’t go on living like this.”

The Buddha felt strong compassion toward the farmer. He said, “My friend, I’m sorry, we didn’t see your cows come this way.” When the farmer had gone, the Buddha turned to his monks and said, “My friends, do you know why you are happy? Because you have no cows to lose.”

I would like to say the same thing to you. My friends, if you have some cows, you have to identify them. You think they are essential to your happiness, but if you practice looking deeply, you will understand that it is these very cows that have brought about your unhappiness. The secret of happiness is being able to let go of your cows. You should call your cows by their true names.

I assure you that when you have let your cows go, you will experience happiness, because the more freedom you have, the more happiness you have. The Buddha taught us that joy and pleasure are based on surrender, on letting go. “I am letting go” is a powerful practice. Are you able to let go of things? If not, your suffering will continue.

You must have the courage to practice letting go. You must develop a new habit—the habit of realizing freedom. You must identify your cows. You must regard them as bonds of slavery. You must learn, as the Buddha and his monks did, to set your cows free. It is the energy of mindfulness that helps you to identify your cows and call them by their true names.

When you have an idea that is making you suffer, you should let go of it, even (or perhaps especially) if it is an idea about your own happiness. Every person and every nation has an idea of happiness. In some countries, people think that a particular ideology must be followed to bring happiness to the country and its people. They want everybody to approve of their idea of happiness, and they believe that those who are not in favor of it should be imprisoned or put in concentration camps. It is possible to maintain such thinking for fifty or sixty years, and in that time to create enormous tragedy, just because of this idea of happiness.

Perhaps you too are the prisoner of your own notion of happiness. There are thousands of paths that lead to happiness, but you have accepted only one. You have not considered other paths because you think that yours is the only one that leads to happiness. You have followed this path with all your might, and so the other paths, the thousands of others, have remained closed to you.

We should be free to experience the happiness that just comes to us without our having to seek it. If you are a free person, happiness can come over you just like that! Look at the moon. It travels in the sky completely free, and this freedom produces beauty and happiness. I am convinced that happiness is not possible unless it is based on freedom. If you are a free woman, if you are a free man, you will enjoy happiness. But if you are a slave, even if only the slave of an idea, happiness will be very difficult for you to achieve. That is why you should cultivate freedom, including freedom from your own concepts and ideas. Let go of your ideas, even if abandoning them is not easy.

Conflict and suffering are often caused by a person not wanting to surrender his concepts and ideas of things. In the relationship between a father and a son, for example, or between partners, this happens all the time. It is important to train yourself to let go of your ideas about things. Freedom is cultivated by this practice of letting go. If you look deeply, you may find that you are holding on to a concept that is causing you to suffer a great deal. Are you intelligent enough, are you free enough, to give up this idea?

I am becoming calm,

I am letting go.

Having let go, victory is mine.

I smile.

I am free.

The Dharma that the Buddha presented is radical. It contains radical measures for healing, for transforming the present situation. People become monks and nuns because they understand that freedom is very precious. The Buddha did not need a bank account or a house. In the time of the Buddha, the possessions of a monk or a nun were limited to the robes they wore and a bowl in which to collect alms. Freedom is very important. You should not sacrifice it for anything, because without freedom, there is no happiness.

Joy and happiness are born of concentration. When you are having a cup of tea, the value of that experience depends on your concentration. You have to drink the tea with 100 percent of your being. The true pleasure is experienced in the concentration. When you walk and you are 100 percent concentrated, the joy you get from the steps you are taking is much greater than the joy you would get without concentration. You have to invest 100 percent of your body and mind in the act of walking. Then you will experience that being alive and taking steps on this planet are miraculous things.

The Zen master Linji (also known as Rinzai) said, “The miracle is walking on the earth, not walking on water or fire. The real miracle is walking on this earth.” Why should you not perform a miracle just by walking? A step taken with mindfulness can lead you to the Kingdom of God. This is possible. You can do it today. Life is too precious for us to lose ourselves in our ideas and concepts, in our anger and our despair. We must wake up to the marvelous reality of life. We must begin to live fully and truly, every moment of our daily lives.

When you are holding a cup of tea in your hand, do it while being 100 percent there. You know how to do this—one deep in-breath, one gentle out-breath, and the body and mind come together. You are truly there, absolutely alive, fully present! This only takes ten or fifteen seconds, and suddenly the tea reveals itself to you in all its splendor and wonder.

When I pick up a book or open a door, I want to invest myself in this act 100 percent. This is what I learned during my monastic training, when my teacher taught me how to offer a stick of incense. A stick of incense is very small and very light, yet the right way to hold it is with two hands. When offering the incense, you have to invest 100 percent of your being in your hands and in two of your fingers—the energy of mindfulness must be concentrated there. This may look like a ritual, but it is a really an act of concentrated awareness. I put my left hand on my right hand, and during this time, I concentrate 100 percent. The incense is an offering to the Buddha, but does the Buddha really need incense? This is actually an offering of peace, of joy, and of concentration.

During my first year of training at the temple, my teacher asked me to do something for him. I loved him so much that I became quite excited, and I rushed out to do it. I was in such a hurry that I did not leave the room as I should have. I did not close the door properly, with 100 percent of my being.

He called me back. “Novice,” he said, “come here.” I knew right away that something was wrong. He said only, “My son, you can do better.” He did not have to teach me this a second time. The next time, I did walking meditation to the door, I opened the door mindfully, and I closed the door behind me perfectly.

Since that day, I have known how to close a door behind me. It must always be done with mindfulness—not for the sake of the Buddha, not for the teacher, but for myself. This is the way you create peace; this is the way you bring about freedom. You do it for your own happiness, and when you are happy, the people you relate with benefit from your presence and are happy too. A happy person is an important thing, because their happiness spreads all around them. You can be a happy person too and become a refuge for all the beings around you.

Concentration is the practice of happiness. There is no happiness without concentration. When you eat an orange, try to practice concentration. Eat it in such a way that pleasure, joy, and happiness are possible the whole time. You could call this orange meditation. You take an orange in the palm of your hand. You look at it and breathe in such a way that it reveals itself as the miracle it is. An orange is nothing less than a miracle. It is just like you—you are also a miracle of life. You are a manifest miracle.

If I am 100 percent there, the orange reveals itself to me 100 percent. As I concentrate on the orange, I get deep insight from it. I can see the sun and the rain that are in it. I can see the flowers of the orange tree. I can see the little sapling sprouting, and then the fruit growing. Then I begin mindfully to peel the fruit. Its presence—its color, its texture, its smell and taste—is a real miracle, and the happiness that comes to me from getting deeply in touch with it can become very, very great. A single orange is enough to give you a great deal of happiness when you are truly there, entirely alive, fully present, getting deeply in touch with one of the miracles of life that surrounds you.

Little by little you must train yourself for life, for happiness. You probably received a college degree that you spent years working for, and you thought that happiness would be possible after you got it. But that was not true, because after getting the degree and finding a job, you continued to suffer. You have to realize that happiness is not something you find at the end of the road. You have to understand that it is here, now. Mindfulness practice is not an evasion or an escape. It means entering vigorously into life—with the strength generated by the energy of mindfulness. Without this freedom and concentration, there is no happiness.

Engaged Buddhism means engagement not only in social action, but in daily life. The object of this practice is joy in everyday life, which is freedom. We should use our time with a great deal of intelligence, because time is not only money; it is much more precious than that. It is life. A day is twenty-four hours long: do you know how to manage it? You are intelligent and have lots of different talents, but do you know how to manage your days? You must invest yourself 100 percent in organizing the days that are given to you to live. You can do it.

With mindfulness practice, transforming your pain will become much easier. Joy and happiness will help you regain your balance and heal your pain.

You know that good blood circulation is necessary for the well-being of your body. The same is true for your psyche: you must live and practice in such a way that your consciousness benefits from good circulation. Bad circulation of psychological elements creates problems. Blocks of suffering, fear, jealousy, and distress are stuck in the depths of your consciousness. They cannot circulate, and they make you feel fear. That’s why you have closed the door to your store consciousness, because you do not want these things to come to the surface. You are afraid of the pain in you, and so whenever there is a gap in your day, you fill it up with books or television so these blocks of suffering do not come up to the surface.

That is what most of us do. It’s a policy of embargo. You do your best to forget what is inside you, and consume whatever is available to help you do that. In this way you create bad psychological circulation, and mental problems will soon appear. While you are sleeping, accumulations of suffering will reveal themselves to you in your dreams. They cry out for help, but you continue to practice suppression and repression. Depression, fear, and confusion may also manifest in the realm of the soma, in the body. You will have headaches and all kinds of other aches and pains, but your doctor will not be able to identify the source of the pain, because it is psychological in nature.

Buddhism teaches that the body and mind are two aspects of the same thing. There is no duality between the physical and the mental aspects. There is a Sanskrit expression, namarupa. Nama is our mental aspect, and rupa means form. We cannot make a distinction between the physical and the mental. Your hand is not just a physical formation; it is a mental formation at the same time. The cells of your body are not only physical; they are also mental. They are both at the same time.

Buddhism has found that reality sometimes manifests as psyche and sometimes as soma. “Psychosomatic” is the Western term; namarupa is the equivalent in Sanskrit. We should train ourselves to see “physical” things as not solely physical. In fact, “physical” and “mental” are no more than expressions.

The Humanist Manifesto, which was written in 1933, says that the mind-body duality should be rejected, including the idea of a soul that survives after death, because it also represents a duality. What do Buddhists say about this? Buddhism agrees that the mind-body duality should be rejected, but it does not say that the disintegration of the body represents a total negation. Buddhism helps us to see that neither the concept of permanence nor the concept of annihilation are applicable to reality.

If we look deeply into the nature of reality, we will see that nothing is created or lost. As the Buddhist text called the Prajnaparamita says, there is neither birth nor death. Birth is a concept, death is too, and neither of these concepts is applicable to reality. We must make the effort to look into this truth deeply to confirm it for ourselves.

In our minds, we think that birth means we start from nothing and become something—that from nobody we become somebody. That is our definition of birth: from nothing comes existence, from nothing comes being. But that is absurd, because it is impossible for anything to come from nothing.

This piece of paper I am holding in my hand is something that exists right now. Can we establish a time and place of birth for this paper? That is very difficult to establish, impossible actually, because before it manifested as a piece of paper, it was already here in the form of a tree, of the sun, of a cloud. Without the sun, without the rain, the trees would not have lived, and there would have been no piece of paper. When I touch this piece of paper, I touch the sun. When I touch this piece of paper, I also touch the clouds. There is a cloud floating in this piece of paper. You do not have to be a poet to see it. If I were able to separate the cloud from the piece of paper, the paper would not exist anymore.

The true nature of this piece of paper is interbeing. Before taking the form of paper, it already existed in the form of sun, cloud, rain, and trees. In the same way, a human is not born from nothing. Birth is only a moment of continuation. It is a concept, not a reality. And if there is no birth, there is no death either.

The tradition of Zen Buddhism invites us to look deeply at reality with the help of koans, such as, “what was your face before the birth of your grandmother?” Where were you at that moment? You are invited to discover that. You embark on a journey in which you look deeply and see yourself back before your birth, even before the birth of your grandmother.

You did not come from nothing. That is impossible, just as it is impossible that the piece of paper came from nothing. It manifests in the present moment as a piece of paper, but in the past it manifested in other forms. You are asked to seek and discover your own face, your original face before the birth of your grandmother. This is a wonderful practice. If you follow this quest, you will have the opportunity to touch the nature of no-birth and of no-death, and fear will disappear. This is the language of Zen.

When the French scientist Antoine Lavoisier said, “Nothing is created and nothing is lost,” he was saying exactly the same thing. The concept of death is that being turns into nonbeing. That is impossible. Can somebody become nobody? No. If we burn the piece of paper, we cannot reduce it to nothing. The paper will turn into heat, which will go out into the cosmos, and turn into smoke, which will join the clouds in the sky. Tomorrow a drop of rain will fall on your forehead, and you will make a new contact with the piece of paper. The ashes produced by the burning will rejoin the earth, and one day they will manifest as daisies. Do you have enough mindfulness to recognize the piece of paper in those daisies?

It is our idea of birth and death that takes away our peace and happiness in everyday life. And it is meditation that will rid us of the fear that is born from the idea of birth and death. This is the virtue of deep looking in meditation. It helps you to see the heart of reality very deeply. To touch the nature of interbeing is to touch the very nature of no-death and no-birth.

The notion of death, of nothingness, is very dangerous. It makes people suffer a lot. In Buddhist teaching nothingness is only a concept, and it is never applicable to reality. The Buddha said, “When conditions are sufficient, the thing manifests, and when they are not sufficient, the thing remains hidden.” There is neither birth nor death. There is only manifestation, appearance. Concepts like birth and death, being and nonbeing, are not applicable to reality. The wave on the water is free from birth and death. It is free from being and nonbeing. The wave is the wave.

The word suchness describes reality as it is. Concepts and ideas are incapable of expressing reality as it is. Nirvana, the ultimate reality, cannot be described, because it is free of all concepts and ideas. Nirvana is the extinction of all concepts. It is total freedom. Most of our suffering arises from our ideas and concepts. If you are able to free yourself from these concepts, anxiety and fear will disappear. Nirvana, the ultimate reality, or God, is of the nature of no-birth and no-death. It is total freedom. We need to touch this reality to leave behind the fear connected with the idea of birth and death.

We are afraid of nonbeing. “I am somebody, I am something,” we feel. “Today I am, and I am afraid that one day I will no longer be.” But it is impossible for being to become nonbeing. The Buddha said it in absolutely simple terms: “This is, because that is.” This refers to the manifestation of phenomena on the basis of the law of interdependent origination. When conditions are sufficient, there is a manifestation. You could call that “being,” but that would be inaccurate. In the same way, you could call the situation before manifestation arises “nonbeing,” but that is equally incorrect. The situation is simply one of manifestation or non-manifestation.

Think for a moment about the space around you. It is filled with signals broadcast by radio and television stations. If you turn on a radio or a TV set, they will manifest in the form of images and sounds. Just because something is not visibly manifest, you cannot say that it is nonexistent, just so much nothing. In April at Plum Village, you do not see sunflowers. The hills are not covered with their blossoms, but you cannot say that there are no sunflowers. The sunflowers are hidden in the earth; they are just lacking one of the conditions for their manifestation, sunshine. It is false to say that the sunflowers do not exist.

So what is death? It is simply the cessation of manifestation, followed by other forms of manifestation. In wintertime, we do not see dragonflies or butterflies. So we think that everything is dead. But suddenly spring comes, and the dragonflies and butterflies manifest again. That which is currently not perceivable is not nonexistent. But we cannot say that it is existent either.

Existence and nonexistence are just concepts. There is only manifestation and non-manifestation, which depend on our perception. If you have perception that is deep enough, a deep insight into life, then you are free from all these concepts such as being and nonbeing, birth and death. This is the highest level of the Buddha’s teaching. You are looking for relief for your pain; but the greatest relief that you can ever obtain comes from touching the nature of no-birth and no-death.

In Buddhism, we go beyond the concepts of creation and destruction, of birth and death. We also go beyond the concepts of self and non-self. We have seen, for example, that a flower cannot “be” by itself alone. The flower cannot be. It can only inter-be. We must go back to what the Buddha said—“This is, because that is”—and train ourselves to look at things in the light of interdependence. We can see the entire universe in a flower. We can see not only the entire universe, but also all our ancestors and our children in every cell of our own body.

Through Buddhist meditation you will experience the happiness of seeing and discovering wonderful things that will liberate you. We live in a time when everyone is too caught up in the preoccupations of everyday life, and we do not have enough time to live in suchness, with mindfulness. We do not take the time to touch things in depth, to discover the true nature of life. You are invited to use your intelligence, your time, and your resources to taste this timeless meditation that was handed down to us by our original teacher, the Buddha.