Found Objects: Thich Nhat Hahn talks

Yet it was with great delight that the Buddhist resource guide kept by Dick Dillon at the About.com site on the Internet, led us to the web site for Thich Nhat Hanh's home base in France, Plum Village, which in turn led us to a wonderful found object, squirreled away in a nook of the site.

That is to say, if you send a request to a certain Plum Village e-mail address, they will put you on a mailing list to receive occasional transcripts of Thich Nhat Hanh's talks given during the year at Plum Village. Anyone who has taken guidance, direction and spiritual inspiration from this master's many books such as "Being Peace," "Peace Is Every Step" and "For a Future to Be Possible," may share in the pleasing thought that there in your e-mail box. along with the spam, the scams and the Naked Pam video offers, you can add his voice and sure hand. To sign up for the e-mail transcripts, click right about here. They ask that you mail off a small donation (as small as $2 for U.S. residents) if you find the transcripts useful.

The talks are also archived at the Plum Village site. Below is an excerpt from a talk given by Thich Nhat Hanh on August 6, 1998:

TODAY I WOULD LIKE TO SPEAK A LITTLE BIT about Heaven, or Paradise, and Hell.

I have been in Paradise, and I have been in Hell also, so I have some experience to share with you. I think if you remember well, you know that you have also been in Paradise, and you have also been in Hell. Hell is hot, and it is difficult.

The Buddha, in one of his former lives, was in Hell. Before he became a Buddha he had suffered a lot in many lives. He made a lot of mistakes, like all of us. He made himself suffer, and he made people around him suffer. Sometimes he made very big mistakes, and that is why in one of his previous lives he was in Hell.

There is a collection of stories about the lives of the Buddha, and there are many hundreds of stories like that. These stories are collected under the title Jataka Tales. Among these hundreds of stories, I remember one very vividly. I was seven years old, very young, and I read that story about the Buddha, and I was very shocked.But I did not fully understand that story.

The Buddha was in Hell because he had done something wrong, extremely wrong, that caused a lot of suffering to himself and to others. That is why he found himself in Hell. In that life of his, he hit the bottom of suffering, because that Hell was the worst of all Hells.

WITH HIM THERE WAS ANOTHER MAN and together they had to work very hard, under the direction of a soldier who was in charge of Hell. It was dark, it was cold, and at the same time it was very hot. The guard did not seem to have a heart. It did not seem that he knew anything about suffering. He did not know anything about the feelings of other people, so he just beat up the two men in Hell. He was in charge of the two men, and his task was to make them suffer as much as possible.

I think that guard also suffered a lot. It looked like he didn’t have any compassion within him.It looked like he didn’t have any love in his heart. It looked like he did not have a heart. He behaved like a robber. When looking at him, when listening to him, it did not seem that one could contact a human being, because he was so brutal. He was not sensitive to people’s suffering and pain. That is why he was beating the two men in Hell, and making them suffer a lot. And the Buddha was one of these two men in one of his previous lives.

The guard had an instrument with three iron points, and every time he wanted the two men to go ahead, he used this to push them on the back, and, of course, blood came out of their backs. He did not allow them to relax; he was always pushing and pushing and pushing. He himself also looked like he was being pushed by something behind him. Have you ever felt that kind of pushing behind your back? Even if there was no one behind you, you have felt that you were being pushed and pushed to do things you don’t like to do, and to say the things you don’t like to say, and in doing that you created a lot of suffering for yourself and the people around you.

Maybe there is something behind us that is pushing and pushing. Sometimes we say horrible things, and do horrible things, that we did not want to say or do, yet we were pushed by something from behind. So we said it, and we did it, even if we didn’t want to do it. That was what happened to the guard in Hell: he tried to push, because he was being pushed. He caused a lot of damage to the two men. The two men were very cold, very hungry, and he was always pushing and beating them and causing them a lot of problems.