The Other Shore by Thich Nhat Hanh

Author:Thich Nhat Hanh [Hanh, Thich Nhat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Parallax Press
Published: 2017-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

What Is to Be Done?

We have to accept reality as it is. Once we are freed from the fear and the terror of our civilization being destroyed, we will know exactly what to do. We will be able to come together and apply the solutions available to us in order to save our planet. According to the United Nations report released on November 29, 2006, just reducing our consumption of meat by fifty percent could already be enough to save our civilization, and that is something we can all easily do.

Our fear has the potential to destroy us. But if we are able to look from the point of view of Mother Earth, with the insight of no-increasing and no-decreasing, we have a chance to transcend our fear and wake up. By seeing from the cosmic perspective, from the perspective of the Heart Sutra, and by fully accepting that our civilization can be destroyed, we may yet have a chance to save it.

According to the Buddha, you have to save yourself first, and then you will be able to save the planet. It’s like in the airplane, we have to put on our own oxygen mask first, before helping someone else. Once we have overcome our fear, we can help others to do the same. Practicing mindfulness and helping the whole human race to wake up is the only hope we have to save our civilization. If we can truly understand the insight that brings us to the other shore, we will be able to help bring about a collective awakening. If collectively we are liberated from our fear, we will know exactly how to live in order for us, for our children, and for our civilization to have a future.

We fear our own death because we think that after we die we will not be a human being anymore; we will go back to being a speck of dust. We think we will be somehow diminished. And we fear the death of our civilization because we think that after it is destroyed, it will also be just ashes and dust; it will be less than it was before, and much that was sacred, good, and beautiful will have been lost.

But that is not true. A speck of dust contains the whole universe. If we were as big as the sun, we might look down on the Earth and see it as insignificant. As human beings, we look at dust in the same way. But ideas of big and small are just concepts in our mind. Everything contains everything else; that is the principle of interbeing and interpenetration. This sheet of paper contains the sunshine, the logger, the forest, everything, so the idea that a sheet of paper is small or insignificant is just an idea. We cannot destroy even one sheet of paper. We are incapable of destroying anything. The people who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., hoped to reduce them to nothingness. Yet they continue to be with us, perhaps even more than before, because they continue in other forms.

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