I once had a student named Thich Thanh Van, who’d entered the monastery at the age of 6. At the age of 17, he began to study with me. Later, he was the first director of the School of Youth for Social Service, where he directed thousands of young people working during the war in Vietnam, rebuilding villages that were destroyed, and resettling tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the war zones. He was killed in an accident. I was in Copenhagen when I heard of the death of my student. He was a very gentle monk, very brave.
When he was a novice, 6 or 7 years old, he saw people come to the temple and bring cakes and bananas to offer to the Buddha. He wanted to know how the Buddha eats bananas, so he waited until everyone went home and the shrine was closed, and then he peered through the door, waiting for the Buddha to reach out his hand, take a banana, peel it, and eat it. He waited and waited, but nothing happened. The Buddha did not seem to eat bananas, unless he realized that someone was spying on him.
Thich Thanh Van told me several other stories about when he was a young boy. When he discovered that the statue of the Buddha was not the Buddha, he began to ask where the buddhas are, because it did not seem to him that buddhas were living among humans. He concluded that buddhas must not be very nice, because when people became buddhas, they would leave us to go to a faraway country. I told him that buddhas are us. They are made of flesh and bones, not copper or silver or gold.
The root word budh means to wake up, to know, to understand; someone who wakes up and understands is called a buddha. It is as simple as that. The capacity to wake up, to understand, and to love is called buddhanature. When Buddhists say, “I take refuge in the Buddha,” they are expressing trust in their own capacity of understanding, of becoming awake. The Chinese and the Vietnamese say, “I go back and rely on the Buddha in me.” Adding “in me” makes it very clear that you yourself are the Buddha.
In Buddhism, there are three gems: Buddha, the awakened one; dharma, the way of understanding and loving; and sangha, the community that lives in harmony and awareness. The three are interrelated, and at times it is hard to distinguish one from another. In everyone there is the capacity to wake up, to understand, and to love. So in ourselves we find Buddha, and we also find dharma and sangha. Someone who is awake, who knows, who understands, is called a buddha. Buddha is in every one of us. We can become awake, understanding, and also loving.
The wisdom, the understanding, and love of Shakyamuni Buddha need us to be real again in life. Therefore, we have a very important task: to realize awakening, to realize compassion, to realize understanding.
When we say, “I take refuge in the Buddha,” we should also understand that “The Buddha takes refuge in me,” because without the second part, the first part isn’t complete. The Buddha needs us for awakening, understanding, and love to be real things and not just concepts. They must be real things that have real effects on life. Whenever I say, “I take refuge in the Buddha,” I hear “Buddha takes refuge in me.” The wisdom, the understanding, and love of Shakyamuni Buddha need us to be real again in life. Therefore, we have a very important task: to realize awakening, to realize compassion, to realize understanding.
We are all buddhas, because only through us can understanding and love become tangible and effective. Thich Thanh Van was killed during his effort to help other people. He was a good Buddhist, he was a good buddha, because he was able to help tens of thousands of people, victims of the war. Because of him, awakening, understanding, and love were real things for many people. So we can call him a buddha body—in Sanskrit we say buddhakaya. For Buddhism to be real, there must be a buddhakaya, an embodiment of awakened activity. Otherwise Buddhism is just a word. Thich Thanh Van was a buddhakaya. Shakyamuni was a buddhakaya. When we realize awakening, when we are understanding and loving, each of us is a buddhakaya.
The second gem is the dharma. Dharma is what the Buddha taught. It is the way of understanding and love—how to understand, how to love, how to make understanding and love into real things. Before the Buddha passed away, he said to his students, “Dear friends, my physical body will not be here tomorrow, but my teaching body will always be here to help. You can consider it as your own teacher, a teacher who never leaves you.” That is the birth of dharmakaya. The dharma has a body also, the body of the teaching, the body of the Way. The meaning of dharmakaya is quite simple. Dharmakaya just means the teaching of the Buddha, the way to realize understanding and love.
Anything that can help you wake up has buddhanature. When I am alone and a bird calls me, I return to myself. I breathe, and I smile, and sometimes it calls me once more. I smile and I say to the bird, “I hear already.” Not only sounds but also sights can remind you to return to your true self. In the morning when you open your window and see the light streaming in, you can recognize it as the voice of the dharma, and it becomes part of the dharmakaya. That is why people who are awake see the manifestation of the dharma in everything. A pebble, a bamboo tree, the cry of a baby, anything can be the voice of the dharma calling. We can practice like that.
One day a monk came to Tue Trung, the most illustrious teacher of Buddhism in Vietnam in the 13th century, a time when Buddhism was flourishing in Vietnam. The monk asked him, “What is the pure, immaculate dharmakaya?” Tue Trung pointed to the excrement of a horse. This was an irreverent approach to dharmakaya, because people were using the word “immaculate” to describe it. You cannot use words to describe the dharmakaya. Even though we say that it is immaculate and pure, that doesn’t mean it is separate from things that are impure. Reality, ultimate reality, is free from all adjectives, either pure or impure. So his response was to shake up the mind of the monk, so he could cleanse himself of all these adjectives in order to see into the nature of the dharmakaya.
Dharmakaya is not just expressed in words or in sounds. It can express itself in just being. This is true not only of humans but of other species as well. Look at the trees in our yard. An oak tree is an oak tree. That is all it has to do. Therefore, the oak tree is preaching the dharma. Without doing anything, the oak tree is very helpful to all of us just by being there. Every time we look at the oak tree we have confidence. During the summer we sit under it and we feel cool, relaxed. We know that if the oak tree is not there, and all the other trees are not there, we will not have good air to breathe.
Even if we are not at a meditation center, we can still practice at home, because around us the dharma is present. Each pebble, each leaf, each flower is preaching the dharma.
We know that in our former lives, we were trees. Maybe we have been an oak tree ourselves. This is not just Buddhist; this is scientific. The human species is a very young species—we appeared on the Earth only recently. Before that, we were rock, we were gas, we were minerals, we were single-celled beings. We were plants, we were trees, and now we have become humans. We have to recall our past existences. This is not difficult. You just sit down and breathe and look, and you can see your past existences. We can learn the dharma from the oak tree; therefore, the oak tree is part of our dharmakaya. We can learn from everything that is around, that is in us. Even if we are not at a meditation center, we can still practice at home, because around us the dharma is present. Each pebble, each leaf, each flower is preaching the dharma.
The sangha is the community that lives in harmony and awareness. Sanghakaya is a new Sanskrit term. The sangha needs a body also. When you are with your family and you practice smiling, breathing, recognizing the buddha body in yourself and your children, then your family becomes a sangha. If you have a bell in your home, the bell becomes part of your sanghakaya, because the bell helps you to practice. If you have a cushion, then the cushion also becomes part of the sanghakaya. Many things help us practice. Like the air, for breathing. If you have a park or a riverbank near your home, you are very fortunate because you can enjoy practicing walking meditation. You have to discover your sanghakaya, inviting a friend to come and practice with you, have tea meditation, sit with you, join you for walking meditation. All those efforts are to establish your sanghakaya at home. Practice is easier if you have a sanghakaya.
Siddhartha, the Buddha-to-be, while practicing with other people, began to drink milk, and the five monks who were with him went away. So he made the bodhi tree into his sanghakaya. He made the buffalo boy, the milkmaid, the river, the trees, and the birds around him into his sanghakaya. There are those in Vietnam who live in reeducation camps. They don’t have a sangha. They don’t have a Zen center. But they practice. They have to look upon other things as part of their sanghakaya. I know of people who practiced walking meditation in their prison cells. They told me this after they got out of the camp. So while we are lucky, while we are still capable of finding so many elements to set up our sanghakaya, we should do so. A friend, our own children, our own brother or sister, our house, the trees in our backyard, all of them can be part of our sanghakaya.
Practicing Buddhism and meditation is for us to be serene and happy, understanding, and loving. In that way we work for the peace and happiness of our family and our society. If we look closely, the three gems are actually one. In each of them, the other two are already there. In the Buddha, there is buddhahood, there is the buddha body. In the Buddha there is the dharma body because without the dharma body, he could not have become a buddha. In the Buddha there is the sangha body because he had breakfast with the bodhi tree, with the other trees, the birds, and with the environment. In a meditation center, we have a sangha body, sanghakaya, because the way of understanding and compassion is practiced there. Therefore the dharma body is present, and the teaching is present. But the teaching cannot become real without the life and body of each of us. So the buddhakaya is also present. If Buddha and dharma are not present, it is not a sangha.
Without you, the Buddha is not real, it is just an idea. Without you, the dharma cannot be practiced. It has to be practiced by someone. Without you, the sangha cannot be. That is why when we say, “I take refuge in the Buddha,” we also hear, “The Buddha takes refuge in me.” “I take refuge in the dharma. The dharma takes refuge in me. I take refuge in the sangha. The sangha takes refuge in me.”
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From Being Peace (2024) by Thich Nhat Hanh, courtesy of Parallax Press, parallax.org.