Thich Nhat Hanh and Hope (1926-2022)
Thay (pronounced TIE) is the Vietnamese word by which one addresses an honored Teacher. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world call the poet monk Thay and mark his passage with love, grief and gratitude–Thich Nhat Hanh whom Martin Luther King, Jr., nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967–though no prize was awarded that year.
Stop for a moment and sit with that. The world was in such a perilous place that no Nobel Peace Prize was awarded. Communism and capitalism were waging proxy wars on more of Earth’s continents than not, mostly where poor brown people lived, nowhere with greater devastation than Vietnam.
Rolling Thunder, US President Lyndon Johnson’s carpet-bombing campaign, dropped more explosive tonnage on Vietnam (about ⅘ the size of California) than the US deployed across all Europe during World War II. 1968 would see King’s assassination and that of Robert Kennedy.
I have written elsewhere of my own experience of Dr. King’s death. Our Unitarian church in Atlanta was active in the civil rights movement. I was just shy of 17, and Dr. King was a family hero. My dad was on the Mall in DC to hear the transcendent sermon I Have a Dream.
Dr. King’s murder felt personal, as if I had been shot through the heart, and the racist crowing of students at my high school pushed me over the edge. Like the privileged white girl that I was, I turned my anger and grief inward, made a series of bad moves that distressed my family, and dug myself into holes that took me years to overcome.
Meanwhile, half a world away, Thay resolved to spend the rest of his own life continuing the work his friend Dr. King began. Thich Nhat Hanh is the name he took with his orders when he became a monk, Thich being the surname taken by most adult Vietnamese Buddhists, and Nhat Hanh meaning “One Action.” At a guess I would say One refers to Interbeing–the center of all Thay’s teaching–and Action points to the Practice of Compassion, which pretty much sums up his life and career in a lapidary phrase by this master poet.
Bi-lingual from childhood, he spent his first five years in his grandmother’s big house in the old French city of Hue, with aunts and uncles and cousins and siblings, playing in tall dim rooms and stone courtyards amid the lotus ponds. His father worked for the French government in a bureau of land reform, and in the early 1930s the family moved North to the mountains. Thay’s older brother read Buddhist magazines and proved a powerful influence on the younger boy. In their teens they and a handful of their schoolmates studying at the local temple resolved to become monks, with something like the ardor with which other young people might decide to be artists or doctors or go to war.
Poets are historically venerated in Vietnam, and Thay first came to prominence as a poet, but he quickly turned his focus to organizing. He believed that the Buddhist path could be a saving third option–above all, nonviolent unlike the forces loyal to capitalism and communism–for the heart, soul and economy of Vietnam. After his friend the abbot was famously photographed setting himself on fire, Thay explained to the world that this self-immolation was not a cry of personal despair but meant to rivet the attention of the people of the US who were footing the bill. It was Thay who convinced Dr. King to speak against the war.
Thay fell into a terrible depression and nearly died. He found relief in a program–based on ancient Buddhist teaching–of mindful breathing and deliberate slow walking. He came to believe that Buddhism could be redeemed from joss sticks and mumbled unintelligible (because Sanskrit, no longer a spoken language) prayer, and Active Buddhism was born. This part of his life saw him come to real power as a public figure, publishing his own and others’ writing, and leading education and social welfare projects created and sustained by hundreds then thousands of young people, his followers who were taught how to manage their own reactions to the violence and tragedy everywhere. Eventually Thay grew too effective for the liking of both sides, and he was exiled from Vietnam (North AND South) for decades.
The sacred texts he longed to study were largely housed in university libraries of the West, so he learned English in his forties and moved to France to study and later teach at the Sorbonne, Princeton and other iconic academies–teaching French literature as well as philosophy, comparative and applied religion, meditation, peace and reconciliation, and a great deal more. (Thay directed his Sorbonne students in his adaptation of Tartuffe!)
He traveled the world for a half century, speaking and leading mindfulness workshops and retreats in Asia, Australia, Europe and the Americas. He was an early voice of concern for climate change and helped conceive and bring about the Paris Climate talks. Over his time in the West, he eventually built many nonprofit rural retreats (all funds generated go to orphanages and the like) along the lines of Plum Village, where he made his own home, in rural France. His calligraphy has inspired a recognizable typeface. He is called the Father of Mindfulness, emphasizing the primacy of personal non-reactivity, and the ripples of that teaching reach into every backwater of the world as a culture of kindness, ease and understanding in families and other beloved communities.
I think of people like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thay (and Buddha, come to that) as Redeemers, in the tradition of the Old Testament Prophets, more so than as Messiahs. Dostoevski pointed out the problem–in Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor tortures Jesus (who has returned to Earth) and condemns Him, insisting Christ has no right to add to or revise Christian dogma. “Revelation is complete.”
Again, sit and think on this. How can Revelation EVER be complete? Human beings have such short attention spans. Luckily the world is full of redeemers–unlike suckers, one’s not born every minute, but the main difference between them is volume, so to speak–how many creatures they touch. Some live as the beating heart of a family, some of a school or neighborhood, a few like MLK and Thay–this small dapper man with his eyes full of kindness and his dazzling smile–change the lives of millions, of a society or a world.
To redeem is to deem–or to judge–again, the very definition of mindfulness. To redeem is to make a new priority. One does notice that a plurality of redeemers great and small seem to settle on related priorities–the Oneness of all Being, compassion and truth. This gives me Hope.
And Hope is what I want to share with you, Gentle Reader, in spite of the throes at this moment of our suffering world. The truth is that the world of 1968 felt just about as perilous as does 2022. But things change, and with the actions that come from Compassion, change can be for the good.
In 1968, Thay was a man with a price on his head in Vietnam and a plan to change the future, to actively LOVE a new society into becoming. Two decades into this new century, following peace and reconciliation in Vietnam (of which he was, in exile, an architect) Thay was able to return to Hue and breathe his last breaths at home, a national hero, a world historical individual, a star in Creation’s crown.
Stop for a moment and sit with that. The world was in such a perilous place that no Nobel Peace Prize was awarded. Communism and capitalism were waging proxy wars on more of Earth’s continents than not, mostly where poor brown people lived, nowhere with greater devastation than Vietnam.
Rolling Thunder, US President Lyndon Johnson’s carpet-bombing campaign, dropped more explosive tonnage on Vietnam (about ⅘ the size of California) than the US deployed across all Europe during World War II. 1968 would see King’s assassination and that of Robert Kennedy.
I have written elsewhere of my own experience of Dr. King’s death. Our Unitarian church in Atlanta was active in the civil rights movement. I was just shy of 17, and Dr. King was a family hero. My dad was on the Mall in DC to hear the transcendent sermon I Have a Dream.
Dr. King’s murder felt personal, as if I had been shot through the heart, and the racist crowing of students at my high school pushed me over the edge. Like the privileged white girl that I was, I turned my anger and grief inward, made a series of bad moves that distressed my family, and dug myself into holes that took me years to overcome.
Meanwhile, half a world away, Thay resolved to spend the rest of his own life continuing the work his friend Dr. King began. Thich Nhat Hanh is the name he took with his orders when he became a monk, Thich being the surname taken by most adult Vietnamese Buddhists, and Nhat Hanh meaning “One Action.” At a guess I would say One refers to Interbeing–the center of all Thay’s teaching–and Action points to the Practice of Compassion, which pretty much sums up his life and career in a lapidary phrase by this master poet.
Bi-lingual from childhood, he spent his first five years in his grandmother’s big house in the old French city of Hue, with aunts and uncles and cousins and siblings, playing in tall dim rooms and stone courtyards amid the lotus ponds. His father worked for the French government in a bureau of land reform, and in the early 1930s the family moved North to the mountains. Thay’s older brother read Buddhist magazines and proved a powerful influence on the younger boy. In their teens they and a handful of their schoolmates studying at the local temple resolved to become monks, with something like the ardor with which other young people might decide to be artists or doctors or go to war.
Poets are historically venerated in Vietnam, and Thay first came to prominence as a poet, but he quickly turned his focus to organizing. He believed that the Buddhist path could be a saving third option–above all, nonviolent unlike the forces loyal to capitalism and communism–for the heart, soul and economy of Vietnam. After his friend the abbot was famously photographed setting himself on fire, Thay explained to the world that this self-immolation was not a cry of personal despair but meant to rivet the attention of the people of the US who were footing the bill. It was Thay who convinced Dr. King to speak against the war.
Thay fell into a terrible depression and nearly died. He found relief in a program–based on ancient Buddhist teaching–of mindful breathing and deliberate slow walking. He came to believe that Buddhism could be redeemed from joss sticks and mumbled unintelligible (because Sanskrit, no longer a spoken language) prayer, and Active Buddhism was born. This part of his life saw him come to real power as a public figure, publishing his own and others’ writing, and leading education and social welfare projects created and sustained by hundreds then thousands of young people, his followers who were taught how to manage their own reactions to the violence and tragedy everywhere. Eventually Thay grew too effective for the liking of both sides, and he was exiled from Vietnam (North AND South) for decades.
The sacred texts he longed to study were largely housed in university libraries of the West, so he learned English in his forties and moved to France to study and later teach at the Sorbonne, Princeton and other iconic academies–teaching French literature as well as philosophy, comparative and applied religion, meditation, peace and reconciliation, and a great deal more. (Thay directed his Sorbonne students in his adaptation of Tartuffe!)
He traveled the world for a half century, speaking and leading mindfulness workshops and retreats in Asia, Australia, Europe and the Americas. He was an early voice of concern for climate change and helped conceive and bring about the Paris Climate talks. Over his time in the West, he eventually built many nonprofit rural retreats (all funds generated go to orphanages and the like) along the lines of Plum Village, where he made his own home, in rural France. His calligraphy has inspired a recognizable typeface. He is called the Father of Mindfulness, emphasizing the primacy of personal non-reactivity, and the ripples of that teaching reach into every backwater of the world as a culture of kindness, ease and understanding in families and other beloved communities.
I think of people like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thay (and Buddha, come to that) as Redeemers, in the tradition of the Old Testament Prophets, more so than as Messiahs. Dostoevski pointed out the problem–in Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor tortures Jesus (who has returned to Earth) and condemns Him, insisting Christ has no right to add to or revise Christian dogma. “Revelation is complete.”
Again, sit and think on this. How can Revelation EVER be complete? Human beings have such short attention spans. Luckily the world is full of redeemers–unlike suckers, one’s not born every minute, but the main difference between them is volume, so to speak–how many creatures they touch. Some live as the beating heart of a family, some of a school or neighborhood, a few like MLK and Thay–this small dapper man with his eyes full of kindness and his dazzling smile–change the lives of millions, of a society or a world.
To redeem is to deem–or to judge–again, the very definition of mindfulness. To redeem is to make a new priority. One does notice that a plurality of redeemers great and small seem to settle on related priorities–the Oneness of all Being, compassion and truth. This gives me Hope.
And Hope is what I want to share with you, Gentle Reader, in spite of the throes at this moment of our suffering world. The truth is that the world of 1968 felt just about as perilous as does 2022. But things change, and with the actions that come from Compassion, change can be for the good.
In 1968, Thay was a man with a price on his head in Vietnam and a plan to change the future, to actively LOVE a new society into becoming. Two decades into this new century, following peace and reconciliation in Vietnam (of which he was, in exile, an architect) Thay was able to return to Hue and breathe his last breaths at home, a national hero, a world historical individual, a star in Creation’s crown.
