Building Beloved Communities:
A conversation with Anh Le
This conversation (written questions and answers following) began in the Lincoln Sangha on ZOOM in April. A member of our Beloved Community made a comment referencing the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) and its current effort nationally to build community and prepare for action this summer.
The Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings specifically note that a sangha cannot become a political instrument, so there was really no question of the sangha ‘joining’ the PPC, though we may fundamentally share a great deal. Anh Le volunteered to look into the matter, based on the PPC’s shared foundational values with engaged Buddhism. I offered my own platform, this “HARD TRUTH” column in the Nebraska Report of Nebraskans for Peace.
Anh Le is a scholar of engaged Buddhism and of the multigenerational history of nearly 100 years of continuous warfare in her tiny native country, Vietnam. She is full time advisor to international students at UNL and full time mother of Leo, ten; Henry, three; and Grace, seven months. Through April and May this year, Anh has graciously given me her time to speak about our common interests—starting with our recognition of nonnegotiable existential interbeing.
Where I come from that translates We are all in the same boat, Sisters, Brothers and Others. Always have been. Always will be.
Within the greater subject of Interbeing, Anh and I feel called to use our resources and energy to amplify the point of view and stories of the anawim—Hebrew for the voiceless—what the Christ is said to have called the least of these.
On a national level the Poor People’s Campaign has done and continues to do exactly this—to raise the visibility of the people who suffer the worst shortcomings of our society, turning up the volume so they can tell their own stories, express their own truths and school their fellow human beings as to what exactly needs to be done to end hunger, homelessness and other soul-stealing and planet-killing features of the poverty that is the ugly underbelly of our society today. The “HARD TRUTH” column just before the pandemic detailed the first efforts to establish a Nebraska chapter of the Poor People’s Campaign in this state. For the last few years a modest PPC-Nebraska project has been subsumed by an older, well-established and homegrown not-for-profit, Stand In for Nebraska.
Stand In for Nebraska (SIFN) shares a host of common goals and values with the PPC, operating a legislative project for just, inclusive, earth-friendly governance, a food pantry as part of a nurturance and wellness project, and a great deal more–including educational offerings open to all. I spoke with Sarah Sawin Thomas, a member of the Stand in for Nebraska leadership collective, who published a fine essay on human rights co-authored by Kevin Abourezk—likewise a member of the collective—on March 29, 2022 in the Lincoln Journal Star.
As it happens, Anh Le will have a role in a planned nurturance workshop by SIFN later this year, part of a project on somatic archaeology that recognizes the physical damage wrecked by trauma over time and across generations and cultures. For the future, Anh Le, Sarah Thomas of SIFN and I hope to join with local Asian leaders to the end of greater engagement with Lincoln’s Asian immigrant community.
Community building is at the heart of all SIFN does. The bulk of SIFN funding is grants-based, and includes support from the University of Nebraska, the LPS Foundation and Humanities NE. “We work to build community by working alongside—not just for—multi marginalized Nebraska communities and through projects in which deep cross-institutional collaboration is required. Rarely these days are we engaged in work that is SIFN-exclusive. We are always partnering,” Thomas said.
Remarkable among Nebraska progressive nonprofits, SIFN leadership is collective and overwhelmingly made up of people of color. Also remarkable is SIFN’s pay structure. Typically in our state, such leadership (heavily white, often educated) is salaried and directs efforts actually carried out almost entirely by volunteers (often underserved and/or marginalized people, many lacking resources). At SIFN, a member like Thomas who herself has resources is an unpaid volunteer, but SIFN members who work the food pantry (for example) who themselves lack resources are the people who get paid.
This gives me pause. I have privately dismissed Occupy because I felt that movement, as Lin Manuel Miranda might put it, wasted its shot. But perhaps lessons WERE learned about process by a younger generation of progressives.
HARD TRUTH: Means ARE ends.
* * *
Sally Herrin: What is the story of engaged Buddhism and how did you personally find this path?
Anh Le: The term engaged Buddhism was coined by the Vietnamese Thiền (Zen) master Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thầy as we call our teacher, who founded peace-oriented educational and religious institutions during the Vietnam War, led antiwar protests, rebuilt villages, resettled refugees, lobbied internationally for peace talks, and published articles and books on the crisis facing his country and the Buddhist tradition. During the Vietnam War, Thầy led a nonpartisan Buddhist movement that sought a peaceful end to the conflict. His activities were opposed by Saigon and Hanoi alike, and thousands of his companions were shot or imprisoned as they struggled amidst the fighting to rebuild villages and resettle refugees.
In 1966, Thầy accepted a series of speaking engagements in the United States and Europe, where he provided a rare firsthand account of the torments and aspirations of the Vietnamese. He met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Pope Paul VI, members of Congress, U.N. officials, and Thomas Merton.
In 1966, The Order of Interbeing (Tiep Hien) was formed by Thầy to combat the hatred, violence, and divisiveness enveloping his country. He ordained six members into the Order—three men and three women ranging in age from twenty-two to thirty-two. All were board members of the School of Youth (SYSS) for Social Service, which he had helped found the year before. The SYSS was a school to prepare and support young social workers who wanted to commit to nonviolent social actions to help the wounded war victims, improve lives in poor communities, and rebuild villages destroyed by bombs. These young people were inspired to integrate traditional Buddhist teachings and virtues into their social work to improve current conditions.
This spirit of engaged Buddhism has been kept and developed in all Thầy’s teaching and communities around the world. From 1968 to 2005, he was exiled from Vietnam because of his activism against many forms of human rights violations by different ruling parties. This turned out to be the great condition for Thầy to establish engaged Buddhism practice centers all around the world and to found his own lineage of Vietnamese Thiền (Zen) Buddhism, the Plum Village tradition.
How I personally found the path: Thầy’s story and teaching was banned in Vietnam until 2005, so I didn’t encounter his teachings until I moved to the U.S. Growing up in Vietnam after the Vietnam war era and living in the U.S. as a Vietnamese American means that I have been taught and exposed to different narratives about the Vietnam war, but the common thread is that each side makes claims about how they are the heroes and victims and the opposite side the perpetrators of the war atrocities.
Intuitively, I knew that such a one-sided perspective was incomplete and inaccurate, but I could not find an alternative way to make sense of the war legacy and traumas. When I encountered Thầy’s teachings and stories regarding the Vietnam war, I realized that this is the way to heal my personal, ancestral, and collective traumas. Thầy always stayed true to his commitment to interbeing, nondualism, and compassionate spirit by not taking sides and speaking out against war atrocities and human right violations, regardless of which party was responsible.
Thầy is on the side of the poor people who are, as a Vietnamese saying goes, “short neck and small throat,” who comprised the majority of the war victims, and whose voices were often ignored during and after the war. Thầy didn’t shy away from addressing these historical traumas but offered a compassionate, wholesome path to heal them.
I felt seen, validated, and empowered by his teachings. I am committed to continue his legacy to advocate for and heal traumatized, silenced, and marginalized communities, especially the war survivors in the Vietnamese American diaspora.
SH: Are engaged Buddhism and the Mindfulness Movement the same? One seems to be in part a fast growing capitalist industry, while one is emphatically not.
AL: Engaged Buddhism is different from the mainstream Mindfulness Movement in several aspects:
Engaged Buddhism puts a strong emphasis on keeping Buddhism accessible to all people, especially marginalized communities and poor people. This is in keeping with the tradition of Buddhism in Vietnamese culture as the religion of compassion and support for the poor. In Vietnamese culture, the world “temple” (chùa) has become a synonym for “free stuff.”
Thầy’s teachings and events are usually intentionally simple and low cost to make them affordable for most people. He also has a focus on living a simple life with few material possessions and a lot of time to heal and serve your communities, be it your loved ones, the sangha, or a social justice cause. Living mindfully like this, we could resist and reverse the capitalist mentality that “if something works, we need to commoditize it and make it exclusive.”
Another thing that I noticed is that Thầy always emphasized the importance of community building or sangha building. His work embodies the teaching to “go as a river,” instead of as a single drop of water. In terms of practice, he teaches a balance of sitting meditation and mindful daily activities, both individual practices and collective practices. In fact, he said that one of the most important things for a practitioner is to find and build a sangha to receive and offer support for each other because the inner work of healing is heavy and overwhelming at times.
When you experience a strong emotion or challenge, you are encouraged to lean into the collective healing energy of the sangha, instead of trying to solve it by yourself. In this sense, engaged Buddhism is different from the mainstream mindfulness movement’s focus on individualistic mentality.
One of Thầy’s main teachings is on the Four Kinds of Nutriments: edible food, mental consumption, life purposes, and collective consciousness. He encouraged his students to look deeply into the way they are living, consuming, and contributing to their own individual and collective suffering and healing.
He taught that the volition of our lives should not be to make the most money, acquire the most power, or pursue the most sensual pleasure, but we should devote our lives to good causes that can help heal ourselves and our communities. He frequently said that we should work and consume less, so we can have more time and space to live and love deeply.
This teaching offers resistance against the grind culture and over-indulgence so prevalent in modern societies. The mainstream Mindful Movement seems to send the message that we should meditate so we can better handle the stress of overworking, but not to change the capitalist system.
SH: Can you speak to your personal mission of helping Vietnamese (and Vietnamese women especially) find their own voices to tell their own stories--not just as subjects of white writers, scholars, film makers and so on--on their own authority? What are the barriers to that happening? How can any barriers be overcome?
AL: As a qualitative researcher, I have been drawn to the concept that each researcher should be aware of and transparent about their positionality in relation to the research population and also to the idea that marginalized people should be empowered to be the experts regarding their lived experiences.
The voices and experiences of Vietnamese war victims have been ignored or deemphasized for decades, even though many books and documentaries have been produced on the subject of the Vietnam war. PTSD was developed as a diagnosis because of the traumas of American Vietnam war veterans, but no special resources were devoted to the Vietnamese refugees who were war victims. People have made political careers, academic accomplishments, and activism reputations out of the Vietnam war, but again, very little of these benefits were invested back in healing and empowering survivors of the war legacy.
Mental health issues, intergenerational traumas, and poverty are ongoing problems among the Vietnamese immigrant communities. And yet, there seems to be a historical amnesia regarding this population. We are not respected as experts on the war experience, strong survivors who overcame one of the worst wars in world’s history, and wise teachers who could offer practical lessons on wars and peace.
I’d argue that our lived experiences are as important as any scholarly knowledge of the war and our voices should be amplified and respected. That’s why I am committed to learning more about and speaking up for the historical wisdom and lived experiences of Vietnamese people to heal our ancestral wounds, to transform intergenerational traumas, and to start a virtuous cycle for future generations.
The Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings specifically note that a sangha cannot become a political instrument, so there was really no question of the sangha ‘joining’ the PPC, though we may fundamentally share a great deal. Anh Le volunteered to look into the matter, based on the PPC’s shared foundational values with engaged Buddhism. I offered my own platform, this “HARD TRUTH” column in the Nebraska Report of Nebraskans for Peace.
Anh Le is a scholar of engaged Buddhism and of the multigenerational history of nearly 100 years of continuous warfare in her tiny native country, Vietnam. She is full time advisor to international students at UNL and full time mother of Leo, ten; Henry, three; and Grace, seven months. Through April and May this year, Anh has graciously given me her time to speak about our common interests—starting with our recognition of nonnegotiable existential interbeing.
Where I come from that translates We are all in the same boat, Sisters, Brothers and Others. Always have been. Always will be.
Within the greater subject of Interbeing, Anh and I feel called to use our resources and energy to amplify the point of view and stories of the anawim—Hebrew for the voiceless—what the Christ is said to have called the least of these.
On a national level the Poor People’s Campaign has done and continues to do exactly this—to raise the visibility of the people who suffer the worst shortcomings of our society, turning up the volume so they can tell their own stories, express their own truths and school their fellow human beings as to what exactly needs to be done to end hunger, homelessness and other soul-stealing and planet-killing features of the poverty that is the ugly underbelly of our society today. The “HARD TRUTH” column just before the pandemic detailed the first efforts to establish a Nebraska chapter of the Poor People’s Campaign in this state. For the last few years a modest PPC-Nebraska project has been subsumed by an older, well-established and homegrown not-for-profit, Stand In for Nebraska.
Stand In for Nebraska (SIFN) shares a host of common goals and values with the PPC, operating a legislative project for just, inclusive, earth-friendly governance, a food pantry as part of a nurturance and wellness project, and a great deal more–including educational offerings open to all. I spoke with Sarah Sawin Thomas, a member of the Stand in for Nebraska leadership collective, who published a fine essay on human rights co-authored by Kevin Abourezk—likewise a member of the collective—on March 29, 2022 in the Lincoln Journal Star.
As it happens, Anh Le will have a role in a planned nurturance workshop by SIFN later this year, part of a project on somatic archaeology that recognizes the physical damage wrecked by trauma over time and across generations and cultures. For the future, Anh Le, Sarah Thomas of SIFN and I hope to join with local Asian leaders to the end of greater engagement with Lincoln’s Asian immigrant community.
Community building is at the heart of all SIFN does. The bulk of SIFN funding is grants-based, and includes support from the University of Nebraska, the LPS Foundation and Humanities NE. “We work to build community by working alongside—not just for—multi marginalized Nebraska communities and through projects in which deep cross-institutional collaboration is required. Rarely these days are we engaged in work that is SIFN-exclusive. We are always partnering,” Thomas said.
Remarkable among Nebraska progressive nonprofits, SIFN leadership is collective and overwhelmingly made up of people of color. Also remarkable is SIFN’s pay structure. Typically in our state, such leadership (heavily white, often educated) is salaried and directs efforts actually carried out almost entirely by volunteers (often underserved and/or marginalized people, many lacking resources). At SIFN, a member like Thomas who herself has resources is an unpaid volunteer, but SIFN members who work the food pantry (for example) who themselves lack resources are the people who get paid.
This gives me pause. I have privately dismissed Occupy because I felt that movement, as Lin Manuel Miranda might put it, wasted its shot. But perhaps lessons WERE learned about process by a younger generation of progressives.
HARD TRUTH: Means ARE ends.
* * *
Sally Herrin: What is the story of engaged Buddhism and how did you personally find this path?
Anh Le: The term engaged Buddhism was coined by the Vietnamese Thiền (Zen) master Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thầy as we call our teacher, who founded peace-oriented educational and religious institutions during the Vietnam War, led antiwar protests, rebuilt villages, resettled refugees, lobbied internationally for peace talks, and published articles and books on the crisis facing his country and the Buddhist tradition. During the Vietnam War, Thầy led a nonpartisan Buddhist movement that sought a peaceful end to the conflict. His activities were opposed by Saigon and Hanoi alike, and thousands of his companions were shot or imprisoned as they struggled amidst the fighting to rebuild villages and resettle refugees.
In 1966, Thầy accepted a series of speaking engagements in the United States and Europe, where he provided a rare firsthand account of the torments and aspirations of the Vietnamese. He met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Pope Paul VI, members of Congress, U.N. officials, and Thomas Merton.
In 1966, The Order of Interbeing (Tiep Hien) was formed by Thầy to combat the hatred, violence, and divisiveness enveloping his country. He ordained six members into the Order—three men and three women ranging in age from twenty-two to thirty-two. All were board members of the School of Youth (SYSS) for Social Service, which he had helped found the year before. The SYSS was a school to prepare and support young social workers who wanted to commit to nonviolent social actions to help the wounded war victims, improve lives in poor communities, and rebuild villages destroyed by bombs. These young people were inspired to integrate traditional Buddhist teachings and virtues into their social work to improve current conditions.
This spirit of engaged Buddhism has been kept and developed in all Thầy’s teaching and communities around the world. From 1968 to 2005, he was exiled from Vietnam because of his activism against many forms of human rights violations by different ruling parties. This turned out to be the great condition for Thầy to establish engaged Buddhism practice centers all around the world and to found his own lineage of Vietnamese Thiền (Zen) Buddhism, the Plum Village tradition.
How I personally found the path: Thầy’s story and teaching was banned in Vietnam until 2005, so I didn’t encounter his teachings until I moved to the U.S. Growing up in Vietnam after the Vietnam war era and living in the U.S. as a Vietnamese American means that I have been taught and exposed to different narratives about the Vietnam war, but the common thread is that each side makes claims about how they are the heroes and victims and the opposite side the perpetrators of the war atrocities.
Intuitively, I knew that such a one-sided perspective was incomplete and inaccurate, but I could not find an alternative way to make sense of the war legacy and traumas. When I encountered Thầy’s teachings and stories regarding the Vietnam war, I realized that this is the way to heal my personal, ancestral, and collective traumas. Thầy always stayed true to his commitment to interbeing, nondualism, and compassionate spirit by not taking sides and speaking out against war atrocities and human right violations, regardless of which party was responsible.
Thầy is on the side of the poor people who are, as a Vietnamese saying goes, “short neck and small throat,” who comprised the majority of the war victims, and whose voices were often ignored during and after the war. Thầy didn’t shy away from addressing these historical traumas but offered a compassionate, wholesome path to heal them.
I felt seen, validated, and empowered by his teachings. I am committed to continue his legacy to advocate for and heal traumatized, silenced, and marginalized communities, especially the war survivors in the Vietnamese American diaspora.
SH: Are engaged Buddhism and the Mindfulness Movement the same? One seems to be in part a fast growing capitalist industry, while one is emphatically not.
AL: Engaged Buddhism is different from the mainstream Mindfulness Movement in several aspects:
Engaged Buddhism puts a strong emphasis on keeping Buddhism accessible to all people, especially marginalized communities and poor people. This is in keeping with the tradition of Buddhism in Vietnamese culture as the religion of compassion and support for the poor. In Vietnamese culture, the world “temple” (chùa) has become a synonym for “free stuff.”
Thầy’s teachings and events are usually intentionally simple and low cost to make them affordable for most people. He also has a focus on living a simple life with few material possessions and a lot of time to heal and serve your communities, be it your loved ones, the sangha, or a social justice cause. Living mindfully like this, we could resist and reverse the capitalist mentality that “if something works, we need to commoditize it and make it exclusive.”
Another thing that I noticed is that Thầy always emphasized the importance of community building or sangha building. His work embodies the teaching to “go as a river,” instead of as a single drop of water. In terms of practice, he teaches a balance of sitting meditation and mindful daily activities, both individual practices and collective practices. In fact, he said that one of the most important things for a practitioner is to find and build a sangha to receive and offer support for each other because the inner work of healing is heavy and overwhelming at times.
When you experience a strong emotion or challenge, you are encouraged to lean into the collective healing energy of the sangha, instead of trying to solve it by yourself. In this sense, engaged Buddhism is different from the mainstream mindfulness movement’s focus on individualistic mentality.
One of Thầy’s main teachings is on the Four Kinds of Nutriments: edible food, mental consumption, life purposes, and collective consciousness. He encouraged his students to look deeply into the way they are living, consuming, and contributing to their own individual and collective suffering and healing.
He taught that the volition of our lives should not be to make the most money, acquire the most power, or pursue the most sensual pleasure, but we should devote our lives to good causes that can help heal ourselves and our communities. He frequently said that we should work and consume less, so we can have more time and space to live and love deeply.
This teaching offers resistance against the grind culture and over-indulgence so prevalent in modern societies. The mainstream Mindful Movement seems to send the message that we should meditate so we can better handle the stress of overworking, but not to change the capitalist system.
SH: Can you speak to your personal mission of helping Vietnamese (and Vietnamese women especially) find their own voices to tell their own stories--not just as subjects of white writers, scholars, film makers and so on--on their own authority? What are the barriers to that happening? How can any barriers be overcome?
AL: As a qualitative researcher, I have been drawn to the concept that each researcher should be aware of and transparent about their positionality in relation to the research population and also to the idea that marginalized people should be empowered to be the experts regarding their lived experiences.
The voices and experiences of Vietnamese war victims have been ignored or deemphasized for decades, even though many books and documentaries have been produced on the subject of the Vietnam war. PTSD was developed as a diagnosis because of the traumas of American Vietnam war veterans, but no special resources were devoted to the Vietnamese refugees who were war victims. People have made political careers, academic accomplishments, and activism reputations out of the Vietnam war, but again, very little of these benefits were invested back in healing and empowering survivors of the war legacy.
Mental health issues, intergenerational traumas, and poverty are ongoing problems among the Vietnamese immigrant communities. And yet, there seems to be a historical amnesia regarding this population. We are not respected as experts on the war experience, strong survivors who overcame one of the worst wars in world’s history, and wise teachers who could offer practical lessons on wars and peace.
I’d argue that our lived experiences are as important as any scholarly knowledge of the war and our voices should be amplified and respected. That’s why I am committed to learning more about and speaking up for the historical wisdom and lived experiences of Vietnamese people to heal our ancestral wounds, to transform intergenerational traumas, and to start a virtuous cycle for future generations.
