Chris: Hello and welcome to Just One Question, from Insights at the Edge. I’m Chris Rock.
Mallory: And I’m Mallory Corbin. We’re producers at the Sounds True Podcast Network. We work with Tami on Insights at the Edge to bring you transformational ideas from wisdom teachers around the world.
Chris: And every week on this show, we pull out the most inspiring, most transformational ideas from those hundreds of conversations, and bring them to you in the form of one question and one answer.
Mallory: Thus the name. Just One Question.
Chris: We hope you enjoy.
Chris: This week we’re going to hear a question Tami asked Thich Nhat Hanh more than two decades ago — but I think it’s going to feel pretty relevant right now.
Mallory: I was eight years old.
Chris: You were — probably younger, actually.
Mallory: Gosh.
Chris: Thich Nhat Hanh was a global spiritual leader. He founded Plum Village, he’s considered the father of mindfulness, and he was a major influence on Western Buddhist practice. He passed away in 2022.
In this recording, it paints a kind of picture. Tami sat with him underneath a big willow tree — you can actually hear the wind blowing — and she asks him about the root causes of the world’s social problems.
Mallory: This is Just One Question with Thich Nhat Hanh.
Chris: Stay with us.
Tami: One of the things that has always impressed me most about your teaching is that you seem to have examined very deeply the social problems of our world. And what I’m curious about is: if you look underneath all of the manifestations, all of the suffering in our world — whether it’s starvation, child abuse, ecological disaster — underneath all of that, do you see a root cause? What do you see?
Thich Nhat Hanh: There is the collective consciousness and the individual consciousness. Our individual consciousness is made of our collective consciousness, and our collective consciousness is made of our individual consciousness. We reflect everything, and everything reflects us.
And the practice begins with yourself. Awareness, enlightenment, mindfulness within yourself. And you offer, first of all, a light from within. That light, once lit up, will show you two things: what is wrong in you and what is not wrong in you. What is not wrong — you try to maintain and develop. What is wrong — you try to transform. And by practicing that, you realize that you have the capacity to see what is wrong around you and what is not wrong around you. So you see that you are connected to your society. And what you are doing for yourself, you are doing for your society as well.
When you refrain from using drugs and intoxicants, you do not do it only to protect yourself. You do it for your children, for your friends, for society at the same time — because if you don’t do it, how can you expect other people to do it for you? Therefore, you practice for all of us. And your practice has already had an impact on me and on other people. You have already begun to change the world by lighting the lamp of mindfulness in you — recognizing what is positive in you to be nourished, and what is negative in you to be transformed. You have begun your social action from yourself.
And when I see you doing that, I receive your light. I know that in order to be worthy of you, I have to do the same. I have to light the candle in me. I have to recognize the positive and the negative in me. I have to take care of both aspects. And we form a kind of two-person community. And when a third person comes in, they are struck by our light, our awareness, our practice — and they join our sangha. We have three people, and from that base we advance. And it creates a collective awareness, a collective environment.
And if you happen to be a filmmaker, or I happen to be a writer — we use our talents in order to help create that kind of collective awareness. That is enlightenment. People have to be enlightened to their own situation. And that is why enlightenment is so crucial for our survival, for our happiness, for our society.
We have witnessed several forms of enlightenment — maybe we don’t call them enlightenment, but they are real enlightenment. Like in North America, you became aware that smoking is hazardous to your health, and you put an inscription on every package of cigarettes. That is a form of enlightenment. And ten years ago we did not dream of having non-smoking flights to Europe or Asia — but now we have them. That is enlightenment. We awoke to the real situation, and our enlightenment grew. There were companies that did not want to create non-smoking flights. But because people were awakening, they came to appreciate the change — and so those companies had to follow.
And suppose you become more aware of what you are eating — you don’t want excess fat or cholesterol, you want to protect your body. The degree of enlightenment is important. That is why food manufacturers have to comply with your wishes and join in the work of enlightenment. And if you are a senior artist, a teacher, a writer — you can always bring your talent into helping that enlightenment grow. And that is the hope for our world.
Meditation is not the business of monks and nuns alone. Meditation is the business of every one of us — whether we are politicians, economists, or teachers. We have to get enlightened. We have to wake up to the situation of our world, if we don’t want the destruction of our world, if we want the world to survive. We have to speed up that kind of awakening. Otherwise it will be too late. That is why no one can be indifferent about enlightenment or awakening. The quicker we wake up, the better chance we have for our children and their children.
And we should do everything in order to prevent despair from overwhelming us. During the war, there were very difficult moments. It looked like the war would go on forever, like there was no chance to stop it. I was in the midst of it, and several times young people came to me and asked: “Do you think the war will have a chance to end — tomorrow, or the day after?” It was very hard, because I did not see any chance for it to stop quickly. And yet I had to give an answer. I had to breathe in and breathe out, very deeply and sometimes very long, before I said anything.
I said: “My dear students, my dear friends — the Buddha said that everything is impermanent. It cannot last forever. Every war in the past has ended. And so this war also has to follow the law of impermanence. Let us do whatever we can to speed up its end — and not allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by despair.”
I think the same way today. We have to pay attention to what is not going wrong, and we have to do whatever we can do today to help change the world — and not let ourselves be caught in worry and despair. If there are trees that are dying in your garden, you must be aware so that you can do something to save them. But at the same time, you have to pay attention to the trees that are not dying — the ones that are still robust and vigorous. And you should not allow yourself to be caught in despair when your garden still has many beautiful trees. Embrace the beautiful trees, enjoy them, so that you can be nourished — and not let the sight of a few dying trees overwhelm you and make you hopeless.
That is my advice to my students. We have to ask ourselves: this morning, can I do something? This afternoon, can I do something? And not just sit there and ask whether we have a future or not. Whether we have a future depends on our way of being this morning — on our way of being this afternoon — on whether we can do little things in the morning and little things in the afternoon.
Chris: This has been Just One Question. You can listen to the full episode of Insights at the Edge that this conversation was taken from on your preferred podcast platform or at soundstrue.com. Thank you for joining us, and we’ll see you next week.
