This 44-minute teaching video is excerpted from the full, 1-hour-18-minute Dharma talk "Are We Making Our Beloveds Suffer?" given by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh on August 14, 1997 in the New Hamlet, Plum Village France.

🔔 Video transcript

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"There's a young man named Tu-Uyen. Very handsome. And at the same time, very intelligent. But he's not happy at all. It's not clear whether his friends are a bad influence on him or not, but at home, he doesn't have happiness; and at school, he doesn't have happiness, either. Since he's five or six, he's been this way.

"A bad habit of his is he never listens to anyone. If it's his parents who speak to him, he can't listen to them. If it's his brothers and sisters who speak to him, he can't listen to them, either. The second bad habit of his is the way he speaks to others doesn't seem to be kind. He's very easy to irritate. When he has something to say to someone, it irritates them rather quickly.

"And even though he's good-looking, even though he's smart, he happens to have these two big shortcomings — the habit of speaking unkindly, and the incapability of listening to anyone. And for that reason, growing up, he's an unhappy young man."

***It's important to note that the folktale "takes place in the Le era" (as Thay said in the Dharma talk) when people did not live in a time like we do: There was no human rights law, no charitable organizations protecting women from domestic violence, no psychotherapists within people’s reach.

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✩ Original video's Vietnamese title: "Mình Có Đang Làm Khổ Người Thương ? | TS Thích Nhất Hạnh (14-08-1997, Xóm Mới, Làng Mai)"

✩ Full Dharma talk originally posted by: Lang Mai (Plum Village's Vietnamese YouTube Channel), on October 18, 2022

✩ Talk given: August 14, 1997, New Hamlet, Plum Village France

✩ Length: 44 minutes 20 seconds

✩ Watch the full Dharma talk with English subtitles and transcript here.

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ANNOTATIONS

1. HOW OLD ARE YOU? In Vietnamese culture, it's a must to ask someone's age the first time you meet them because the right term of address should go before that person's name in conversation, depending on how much younger or older than you that person is. And because of this, everyone you chance to meet in your life is your gramp, your grannie, your auntie, your uncle, your older brother, your younger sister,… You have an endlessly big family, indeed.

2. FIVE SUPER-MUNDANE COMPONENTS is also known as Dharmaskandha, or Lokottaraskandha in Sanskrit

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REFERENCES (Resources used to translate this Dharma talk): Please go to the Video Transcript link to see the full list.

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Republished on the Plum Village App with kind permission of Thich Nhat Hanh's Talks channel 🙏