True Virtue by Sister Annabel Laity

Author:Sister Annabel Laity
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Parallax Press
Published: 2019-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

Gardening in Lower Hamlet, early 1990s.

I was very happy when Sister Chan Vi came. To be able to live together with even just one other person in a Sangha twenty-four hours a day is already wonderful. When you have a sister who also wants to practise with you, you receive a lot of energy in the practice. The energy to practise was not doubled, but it increased ten or a hundred times. She supported me very much. She had often wanted to be a nun when she was in Vietnam, and she really liked the practice. She wanted to practise sitting meditation, reciting the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings, and chanting the sutras in Vietnamese. She chanted very well. She taught me how to chant the sutras. Sister Chan Vi was also a very good cook, and she showed me how to cook Vietnamese food.

Sister True Emptiness also supported me, and Thay was always patient. I don’t think I was an easy younger sister to have. I think I have transformed quite a bit since then, but I haven’t transformed everything since you can still see some of the weaknesses I had then. Sister True Emptiness was very patient with me and very open. She never showed any kind of discrimination at all. No one had any kind of strong racial discrimination, though sometimes we find it a bit easier to be with people of our own culture. But Sister True Emptiness is just as easy with people of different cultures as she is with people of her own. She used to ask, “Oh, would you like to eat some muesli? Would you like to eat some brown bread?” and things like that.

We also took care of the orchards of plum trees. The 1,250 plum trees planted in the Lower Hamlet are what gave Plum Village its name. That region of France is famous for a variety of plum trees called Pruneaux d’Agen, which are dried to make prunes. The trees had been donated by lay practitioners, many of them children who donated a plum tree from their pocket money. They knew that when the plums were harvested, the proceeds from selling them would be sent to Vietnam to support the poorest families. I and another lay practitioner who came to live in Plum Village in 1987 whose name was Duc and who is now a monk, learnt in a class for local farmers how to prune the trees and remove the suckers that sprang up around the base of the trees, sapping the energy that was needed for the higher branches.

Sister Chan Khong also had work for us to do that we all enjoyed doing: sending parcels of medicines to Vietnam. She always wanted to find ways to help her countrymen who were in distress. At first she tried to send money to the various social workers or to the people who needed it, but it never arrived. So she had the idea of sending parcels of medicines so that the

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