Harmony

Close your eyes. Bring your awareness to your body. Pay attention particularly to your breath. Notice when you’re breathing in. Notice when you’re breathing out. Notice where you feel the breathing in the body. When we talk about breath here, it’s not the air coming in and out of the lungs. It’s the movement of energy in the body. You can feel that almost anywhere. But ask yourself: Where is it most prominent right now? Focus your attention there. And stay there for a while.

As you stay, you begin to notice whether it’s comfortable or not. If long breathing feel goods, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change. You can make it shorter, faster, slower, heavier, lighter, deeper, more shallow. Try to bring the body and the mind into harmony right here.

This principle of harmony is very important. The body has the mind looking after it, and the mind has a place to stay in the body. They’re helping each other along. Otherwise, if the mind is out traveling around someplace else, things can come into the body. The beginnings of little diseases here and there. Imbalance in the properties. You won’t notice it, because you’re off someplace else. Meanwhile, you don’t have a safe place to stay. You’re away from your home.

So come back home; look after your house. It’s like the owner living in the house. If a water pipe breaks, okay, you were there immediately. It doesn’t turn into a big disaster. If mice come in, you can get them out of the house, right away. You don’t want them to settle in. Then you have a good place to find shelter. In this way, the house helps the owner; the owner helps the house.

In the same way, the mind helps the body; the body helps the mind. This principle is important: the principle of harmony, getting along. Today we’re going to be preparing for the kathin tomorrow. It’s the kind of work that requires a lot of people working together. A traditional image is of thread. If you have just one thread, it can’t pick up much. But if you weave many, many threads together, you can make a cloth and then you can use the cloth to pick things up. The thread gets a lot stronger because all the threads are working together. In the same way, the work that has to be done getting ready for the kathin: If we all learn how to work together in harmony, then the work goes smoothly and gets done.

You can see the problems of disharmony all around us. The world is falling apart. People can’t agree, and so they end up killing one another. Everything just goes to waste. That’s what comes when people hold on to their ideas of what’s right and wrong really firmly, to the point that they’re willing to kill other people for them.

You have to realize that your ideas of right and wrong have their time and have their place. Other people’s ideas of right and wrong have their time and their place. If you can keep this thought in mind, then we can live with one another. Just make sure that your ideas and your attitudes are really helpful, really do keep in mind the Buddha’s standard for discernment, wisdom—i.e., acting for the sake of long-term welfare and happiness. When you think in those terms, then it’s a lot easier to live in harmony.

When you live in harmony, there’s strength. Things get accomplished. Good things get accomplished. So just as you have to teach your body and mind to live together and look after each other, in the world outside we have to look after one another and live together. So we can find a way of doing it in harmony. Then in harmony there’s happiness. And when there’s happiness in the world outside, it’s a lot easier for the mind to settle down inside. So the inside principle and the outside principle help each other along.