Anxious? Rushed? Reaching for Your Phone? Four Buddhist Phrases To Bring You Back | Brother Phap Dung and Kaira Jewel Lingo

Dan Harris (0:04)

Hey, everybody, welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. As many of you know, I am obsessed with Buddhism, aka the Dharma, and one of my favorite ways to practice and learn the Dharma is through pithy little catchphrases, these little mantras, these, as I like to call them, Buddhist earworms that weasel their way into your mind stream and then surface at exactly the moments when you need them. We've done many episodes on this show where we talked to my longtime meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, about the many Buddhist earworms that he has personally coined. However, he's not the only meditation maestro who uses pithy little phrases.

Another person who has done so is the legendary Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh. Thich Nhat Hanh died a few years ago, but he was, as I said, a Zen master from Vietnam, the author of many, many books, and the man who started the well-known Plum Village lineage of Buddhist meditators.

And today we've got two of Thich Nhat Hanh's senior students here to talk about some of their favorite top ten phrases from Thich Nhat Hanh. My guests are Brother Phap Dung and Kaira Jewel Lingo, both of whom have been on this show several times, and they're both amazing. Kaira Jewel Lingo, Brother Phap Dung, welcome to both of you, welcome back.

Brother Phap Dung (1:34)

Thank you, Ben. Happy to be back.

Kaira Jewel Lingo (1:37)

Yes, always good to be with you.

Dan Harris (1:39)

Well, Kaira Jewel, let me just start with you.

So Thich Nhat Hanh, as I understand it, coined a lot of these little phrases that are great ways of teaching the dharma. And he often did so using calligraphy. So can you just give us some background on these phrases and how he came up with them and how he taught with them?

Kaira Jewel Lingo (2:01)

So, you know, this is a classic kind of activity for a Zen master and for a Zen practitioner to have a brush and to have ink and to have some rice paper and to create an art form on that paper that supports people in their practice, that captures some essence of the dharma so that it's in your eyesight and you remember to practice. It's really a reminder of who we are, of what we are, of why we practice, of how we can be awake in every moment.

These calligraphies of Thầy really came from his own heart and his own seeing of what things people needed to be reminded of. But also he would say something in a talk that people would really like, and then they would say, can you make a calligraphy of that for us? Or can you help us remember that teaching by putting? So he generated some of the phrases. Other people said, we need this as a calligraphy. So it was a very organic and very community driven process. And then there were all the translations in all the different languages. So he was doing calligraphy in Chinese, in Sino-Vietnamese, in Vietnamese, in English, in French, in Dutch, in German, in Spanish, in Portuguese. So wherever people were that were students of his or that practiced in his tradition, he would make translations as well.

Dan Harris (3:50)

Brother Phap Yung, I wanna say a few words and see if you agree with me.

One of the questions I get frequently from people who listen to me or subscribe to my stuff is, why do I need to hear the same thing over and over again? And I often remind people that one of the original translations of the word sati, which we now translate as mindfulness, is remembering. There's just something about the human mind, the human brain where we can hear something very inspirational on social media, in a podcast, in a book, and then we just forget it. And so remembering seems to me to be the name of the game. Would you agree with that?

Brother Phap Dung (4:36)

Yeah, you know, that's true about remembering, recollecting for meditation. And it's also in Zen Buddhism, there's also an emphasis to protect our beginner's mind. So refreshing, refreshing, reviving. It's like a human nature to become like complacent. And like, you know, one time Thich came to the Deer Park and we walked around. It's the first day he arrived here from France. He went into the meditation hall, the night and then he saw these calligraphies that has been up there for like, you know, five years, six years. He said, take those down and replace them with new ones.

And then the dining hall, it does the same and then I'm walking out and he's like, go do it now.