Video: Interview with Thich Nhat Hanh – “Awakening to interbeing”

Please enjoy this beautiful interview between the Late Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and Guardian Journalist Joe Confino. Filmed in Plum Village in 2011, in this interview Thich Nhat Hanh teaches on the insight of interbeing, and “falling back into Love with Mother Earth”. For more videos from the Plum village tradition you can visit the Plum Village Online You Tube page or Online Monastery page in Vimeo

“In Buddhism we speak of awakening, but to awaken is to be awake to something. To be awake to the fact that the Earth is in danger and that living species on Earth are also in danger, that should be a collective awakening in order to have enough strength to change.”In Buddhism we speak of awakening, but to awaken is to be awake to something. To be awake to the fact that the Earth is in danger and that living species on Earth are also in danger, that should be a collective awakening in order to have enough strength to change.”

-Thich Nhat Hanh

If you are only you and I am only me, and we are two different entities how is communication possible? So when you wake up and see that the Earth is not just the environment, the Earth is in you, you are the Earth, you touch the nature of interbeing. At that moment you can have real communication with the Earth; The one who prays and the one who is prayed two are not two. In that kind of relationship we have enough strength and awakening in order to to change our life. “Changing” here is not just changing the things outside of us. First of all we have to have right view. Right view is the kind of view that transcends all notions, including being and non being, creator and creature, mind and spirit. That kind of insight is crucial for transformation and healing, and only when you have that kind of right view, of insight, discrimination is not there and there will be deep communion, deep understanding.

Thich Nhat Hanh