What is it that Plum Village contributes from the ethical perspective?

So the Five Mindfulness Trainings that you mention are really our teacher's vision for a kinda global spirituality and ethic, and the text that we have has been written in such a way that it's, has just a couple of slightly Buddhist terms, but is the kind of text that should be fully accessible to anyone from any religion.

And that, there's this really interesting thing whether Buddhism is a religion or not.

Definitely it's a way of life, a rich cultural wisdom heritage, but it doesn't necessarily require belief in something or s- stories or something outside of us in the same way that other, other spiritual traditions might.

It's really practice-based.

So these Five Mindfulness Trainings, um, are five principles around which we can conduct ourselves in a really grounded way.

[laughs] And so the first principle is around nonviolence and nonkilling, aware of the suffering caused by killing in the world.

Individual awakening is not enough." So can you just talk a bit about that in relationship to community building and how Plum Village specifically, not only just your understanding of collective awakening, but how Plum Village is supporting that process?

[laughs]

Well, I think we have to recognize, like in each culture or country, wherever we find ourselves, like Brother Phap Huu was saying, there's a society consciousness.

There's a, there's a collective consciousness going on that is acting on us all the time, and is telling us all of these things, that we're not good enough, that we need to work harder, work smarter, work more efficiently.

The kind of sickness of optimizing, like we really live in an era of optimizing, and we just need to pause for a moment and really recognize how many parts of our lives, all of us in this room [laughs] we're trying to optimize them, you know? And, and I feel we've, we've like, this, that, I think that may be one of these sicknesses of our kind of generation, this era.

We can't allow things to be as they are.

So with all the mess that's going on in the world, the injustice and the violence and the inequality, we pick up these habits from the kind of capitalist grind of, but if we could just optimize, then everything would be better.

But we're not really offering a different energy.

[laughs]

Sit there." [laughs] So, um, you know, and, and in Buddhism, non-action is action, right? There's a sort of, like, Zen koan-esque thing going on there about, you know, when, when is inaction an action or, I don't know, just can you help m- us understand w- what we might take from this teaching about climate action or what action is and why it is that even just thinking and sitting might, might need to be fit under the umbrella of action or why inaction or sitting or thinking might need to, um, challenge the definition that most people think of when they think of action?

Mm-hmm.

Well, thank you for this question, Sarah, and one thing I really appreciate in your work is the kind of precision you've also brought to this and then, and helping walk people through this at the different levels because I wanna, I guess I wanna start, start out by saying engaged action is still really important, like, to these very, um, concrete gestures we can do in our local communities, in our workplaces, in our places of learning.

There are many, like, intentional additional actions we can do, going onto the streets, speaking out, engaging as a citizen.

These have their role, and I, I just wanna start off by saying that these have their role.

As well as those actions having their role and having their impact, in Buddhism, we have such a deep understanding of what action is, and as you said, it's anything we're thinking, anything we're spink- speaking, and anything our body is doing or not doing.

So we have, and that's leaving an imprint in the world.

How ironic, right? [laughs]

So Sister True Dedication, what is it about Thay that, that, what was the essence of Thay that allowed him to create and have this enormous influence in the world?

Well, it's clear that Thay had an extraordinary bodhicitta, that mind of love, that wish to serve, because as well as his freedom, his awakening, his peace, and his wonder at being alive, he could have chosen to live in a hut on a mountain, right? And enjoy his ease and awakening.

But he had a, such a wish to relieve suffering, and I find that really extraordinary in him, that he never gave up on using every m- day, every minute, every moment to relieve suffering in all of its dimensions, including by modeling a way of being while relieving suffering.

So I think Thay's bodhicitta really sets him apart from many, many other leading spiritual figures, perhaps, in that he was relentless in his creativity and his determination to relieve suffering and to find universal paths out of suffering.

And I think that's also something that sets him apart, which is that he didn't just offer the Buddha Dharma for Buddha Dharma's sake kind of thing.

He wasn't interested in the success of Buddhism per se.

He wanted humanity to be a better species, and he wanted human actions to not bring so much suffering to other humans and to the planet.

[laughs]