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In Celebration of Thich Nhat Hanh

Early Encounters and Influence

I'm a little bit touched to find a wonderful resonance that last Sunday I gave a talk about Martin Luther King Jr., and this day I'll talk about Thich Nhat Hanh. They knew each other, and they influenced each other. Martin Luther King was influenced by Thich Nhat Hanh to be opposed to the Vietnam War, a monumental change in the direction of the work that he did, one that was controversial, and in retrospect, was probably a wonderful and important change.

And in return, partly Martin Luther King, but the whole civil rights movement in the United States had a big impact on Hanh. He learned about it while he was staying here in this country in the very early 1960s. When he went back to Vietnam, it inspired him to do the kind of service work and anti-war work that he dedicated himself to until he was exiled by the government.

Thich Nhat Hanh was one of the great teachers of the 20th century and had a huge influence on Western Buddhism. As I said, he was exiled, I think around 1964, from Vietnam, and then he settled in France. From there, he slowly began to teach more and more.

I became aware of him in the early 1980s. I was living at the San Francisco Zen Center^[1], and he was contacted to support when the Zen Center went through tremendous turmoil around the ethical challenges of its abbot at the time. He was a consultant for both the abbot and for the Zen Center as a whole, and then he came to the Zen Center. He had a big impact on the students at the Zen Center for a variety of reasons.

One was that he included children. He would give a Dharma talk, and he'd have the children come and sit up front, and he would talk to them. Then they would leave, and he'd give a talk for the adults. While this seems like a small thing, in the little bit more austere or strict model of Japanese Zen that the San Francisco Zen Center inherited, that was not done. That kind of blending broke the mold and opened up a whole different kind of softness and kindness.

He also gave a lot of emphasis on lay practitioners. Of course, the San Francisco Zen Center had a lot of lay practitioners, but Thich Nhat Hanh elevated the importance of lay practice and also elevated the importance of lay teachers. I don't think the San Francisco Zen Center had really any recognition of lay teachers at that time. A number of the senior lay practitioners started spending time with Thich Nhat Hanh, some going to France to be with him, and then became authorized to be teachers in Thich Nhat Hanh's lineage. This idea that a layperson could become a Buddhist teacher was also kind of novel and opened up the field and appreciation for laypeople in the scene.

He also had a gentleness and a dedication to non-violence, kindness, softness, joy, and happiness that also was not quite the ethos of the San Francisco Zen Center. He came and gave us meditation instructions that included using phrases, which was very different from the more silent 'just sitting' practice that we did. Some of the phrases were things like: "Breathing in, I calm my body; breathing out, I smile. Stepping, I experience joy; stepping, I feel home." He had all these kinds of phrases that he would incorporate into the meditation practice. I remember using them back then and feeling all this joy and delight. To feel that this was permitted and part of the practice was somewhat novel in the mid-1980s for me and for some of the other Zen students at the time.

He had a big influence on the local Buddhist communities that I was part of, but he did that for much of the world. He traveled around the world and taught all over. After meeting Thich Nhat Hanh at the San Francisco Zen Center, the next time I met him was coincidentally when I flew back to Norway to visit my relatives. When I arrived at the airport, there were all these people, clearly Buddhists, waiting for something special to happen. My relatives who were waiting for me were a little bit like, "What's going on here? Are they waiting for Gil?" But when I came into the arrival section, I had no importance to the people who were waiting. Thich Nhat Hanh flew in on the very next plane, so they were there waiting for him.

Knowing that Thich Nhat Hanh was going to be there, I spent the weekend with him in a school classroom where he was teaching a relatively small group of people. That was really special, to spend this time with him.

Engaged Buddhism and the Vietnam War

Thich Nhat Hanh was a man of tremendous emotional depth and capacity. He suffered a lot, and he openly talked about his suffering, and he wrote poems about it. He was very creative. He was a poet; he was a storyteller. He had a rich imagination, a rich use of language, very evocative. He was innovative. He was probably one of the more animated teachers, especially monastic teachers, of the 20th century, pushing the edge and changing things, and doing innovative things with Buddhism itself. A famous idea of his is that he was one of the first Buddhist monks to ride a bicycle. Maybe it seems like a small thing, but this was really pushing the boundaries into the modern world. He started his own monastic order, the Order of Interbeing, in Vietnam in the 1960s because he saw a need to emphasize a whole different ethos, a whole different approach to Buddhism.

He coined important terms. He coined the term "engaged Buddhism," which involved Buddhism that was actively engaged in the social welfare of the world. He did this to the degree of endangering his own life. In fact, some of his colleagues who had worked with him lost their lives during the Vietnam War in their non-violent work. That was misunderstood by both sides of the Vietnam War. Because he wasn't supporting one side against the other, he was seen as belonging to the other side. So both sides saw him that way, putting him in a risky middle. But he was dedicated to not having enemies, to working for non-violence, working for ending the war. That made him unpopular, so eventually, he became exiled. But this was part and parcel of his engaged Buddhism—that you act, you work in the world.

Maybe it's not a coincidence that his name is Thich Nhat Hanh. The "Thich" part means he's a child of the Buddha. He's in the clan of the Buddha, in the Buddha family. Many monks in Thailand are called "Thich" because of that. Once you ordain, you join as a child of the Buddha. "Nhat" means "one," and "Hanh" means "action." So, he was a man of action. Engaged Buddhism is tremendous action. What the "one" refers to, I don't know; there's a lot of symbolic value in what "one" is. But one thing it meant was that when I knew him, and I think other people felt this too, the tremendous presence he had was to just do the thing he was doing. Whatever action he was doing, that's what he did. If he was drinking tea, it was just drinking tea. If he was walking, just walking.

To be in his presence was to kind of slow down. He brought you into the present because he was so present. There was a commanding quality to his gentleness, his softness, and his slowness. It was commanding everyone to slow down. It wasn't like fast action; it wasn't like he was in a hurry for anything. No hurry whatsoever. One action, you just do one thing at a time. But in doing that one thing at a time, slowly, calmly, he was able to do a phenomenal amount of things: phenomenal teaching, action, support, and innovation. He started monasteries. Certainly, he got lots of help at some point, but in the beginning, he and his colleagues were able to foster a phenomenal Buddhist movement, one of the great movements of the modern world.

Poetry of Suffering and Presence

He had a tremendous amount of wonderful teachings that he offered. We get a sense of his emotional depth and the degree to which he suffered, especially during the time of the Vietnam War, from some of the poetry he wrote at that time. I would like to read some of that.

This poem is titled "For Warmth":

I hold my face in my two hands. No, I am not crying. I hold my face in my two hands to keep the loneliness warm— two hands protecting, two hands nourishing, two hands preventing my soul from leaving me in anger.

He talks about much of what he had to deal with and work with during the Vietnam War, and later, the things that people did to each other left him angry. But he practiced with it. Here's an example of how he practiced with it. This idea of holding his face with his two hands, the cupped hands over the face, holding his loneliness, holding his anger. I think it's a very tender way of being mindful and present.

Some of his fellow monks, some of whom he knew—I don't know if he knew all of them—were the ones who burned themselves in protest of the war. They sat in the streets and poured gasoline over themselves. There are photographs, probably most of you have seen them, of these monks calmly sitting and meditating while engulfed in fire as they burned until they died.

Here's one poem about this:

The fire that burns you burns my flesh with such pain, that all my tears are not enough to cool your sacred soul. Deeply wounded, I remain here, keeping your hopes and promises for the young. I will not betray you. Are you listening? I remain here because your very heart is now my heart.

These things pained him tremendously. The loss, the pain, the suffering. This is a man who suffered a lot, but he was not afraid to suffer. He was not crippled by his suffering. He practiced with it. He turned it around, he composted it, he dedicated it to a different way of living.

Here's another poem. This was printed in 1966 for the Fellowship of Reconciliation as a Christmas card, titled "Message":

Life has left her footprints on my forehead, but I have become a child again this morning. The smile, seen through leaves and flowers, is back, to smooth away the wrinkles. As the rains wipe away footprints on the beach, again a cycle of birth and death begins.

I walk on thorns, but firmly, as among flowers. I keep my head high. Rhymes bloom among the sounds of bombs and mortars. The tears I shed yesterday have become rain. I feel calm hearing its sound on the thatched roof. Childhood, my birthland, is calling me, and the rains melt my despair.

I am still here, alive, able to smile quietly. O sweet fruit brought forth by the tree of suffering! Carrying the dead body of my brother, I go across the rice fields in the darkness. Earth will keep you tight within her arms, my dear, so that tomorrow you will be reborn as flowers, those flowers smiling quietly in the morning field. This moment, you weep no more, my dear. We have gone through too deep a night. This morning, I kneel down on the grass, when I notice your presence.

Flowers that carry the marvelous smile of ineffability speak to me in silence. The message, the message of love and understanding has indeed come to us.

So telling. It is a powerful poem to describe his own despair, his own suffering, and the depth of it. Probably it's true that he carried his dead fellow monk to be buried while mortars and bombs were blowing up around him. He was right there where it was happening around him. And then to end with a message of love—what a powerful thing to do.

The Miracle of Mindfulness and Interbeing

He would come to us here in the West, and he would do walking meditation with us. He would do tea meditation with us. To walk with Thich Nhat Hanh outdoors on the ground, slowly, mindfully, was quite a powerful experience.

Here's a poem called "Walking Meditation":

Take my hand. We will walk. We will only walk. We will enjoy our walk without thinking of arriving anywhere.

Walk peacefully. Walk happily. Our walk is a peace walk. Our walk is a happiness walk.

Then we learn that there is no peace walk; that peace is the walk; that there is no happiness walk; that happiness is the walk.

We walk for ourselves. We walk for everyone always hand in hand.

Walk and touch peace every moment. Walk and touch happiness every moment. Each step brings a fresh breeze. Each step makes a flower bloom under our feet.

Kiss the earth with your feet. Print on earth your love and happiness. Earth will be safe when we feel in us enough safety.

To go from the suffering of Vietnam and the first poems, and his dedication to be in the present moment and keep looking, keeping present and seeing what is here—to be fully with his suffering, then fully with the flowers the next day. To be fully with the suffering and ready to smile soon thereafter. To be fully present for this, and here we are walking: "Earth will be safe when we feel in us enough safety." What does it take to feel safety within us? Is that where safety is to be found? Is the earth safe when we find safety in us? I think he would say yes to all those questions.

He dedicated himself to teaching people what he called "the miracle of mindfulness"—to show up for this moment right here. But it wasn't just to show up for it; he emphasized penetrating through to the depth of it. Seeing through to the ultimate that was there.

The gāthā^[2] I read at the beginning of the meditation, I'll read it again. The Chan or Zen tradition that he was part of classically used a lot of gāthās, four-line verses. When I was in Japan, we were given verses to recite when we washed our hands, used the toilet, and did all kinds of ordinary things. He had one here:

I have arrived, I am home, in the here, in the now. I am solid, I am free. In the ultimate I dwell.

This emphasis is on coming home, but here, finding it in the present moment: "I have arrived, I am home, in the here, in the now. I am solid, I am free. In the ultimate I dwell."

Here's another poem, "Angry in the Ultimate Dimension":

I close my eyes and look deeply. Three hundred years from now where will you be and where shall I be?

Speaking to his anger: "In 300 years from now, where will you be and where shall I be? Angry in the ultimate dimension." Then he wrote:

"When we are angry, what do we usually do? We shout, scream, and try to blame someone else for our problems. But looking at anger with the eyes of impermanence, we can stop and breathe. Angry at each other in the ultimate dimension, we close our eyes and look deeply. We try to see three hundred years into the future. What will you be like? What will I be like? Where will you be? Where will I be? We need only to breathe in and out, look at our future and the other person's future. We don't need to look as far as three hundred years. It could be fifty or sixty years from now, when we have both passed away."

He kept emphasizing looking deeply. But for him, looking deeply with impermanence also opened this rich multi-dimensional world that used the imagination, imagining 300 years in the future. He would look at a piece of paper, and a famous exercise he gave was to basically look and see deeply with your imagination. You see more than just the paper. You see the tree that grew that became the paper. You see the rain in the soil that nourished the tree to grow. You see the sun that shone its sunlight on it that allowed the tree to grow. You see the person who cut the tree down, the people who converted the paper, the people who brought the paper to the store, the storekeeper who sold it to you. You see this rich world that included the ecology that we're in, the social world we live in. To see all of it together in some big way for him was part of waking up to this world.

It's partly maybe why he had such a strong social message. He saw us living in what he called an "interbeing" world, an interdependent world where our own being was no more separate than the being of everyone else. We "inter-are." We exist because someone else exists.

Here he wrote a poem. The title is "Interrelationship":

You are me, and I am you. Isn't it obvious that we "inter-are"? You cultivate the flower in yourself, so that I will be beautiful. I transform the garbage in myself, so that you will not suffer.

I support you; you support me. I am in this world to offer you peace; you are in this world to bring me joy.

So, we inter-are, interbeing. He saw this at a social level, at an environmental level, all kinds of levels. He kept emphasizing this level in which we inter-are. Powerful teachings from him.

A Future to Be Possible

Last week, I read a passage by Martin Luther King Jr. where he said that "God is love." I don't know to what degree that influenced Thich Nhat Hanh, but he had this wonderful book—an anthology of different people writing in it—and just the title was inspiring and very meaningful for me when it first came out. The title is For a Future to Be Possible: Commentaries on the Five Wonderful Precepts. The Five Precepts^[3] that we have, he called "wonderful precepts." He would always put these adjectives in front of things—superlatives like "wonderful" and "wondrous."

He's talking about the five ethical precepts, but for a future to be possible. I think it's a powerful idea. Isn't the future going to come? Futures will always come. But will we be there as a human race for the future? What kind of future will we have? Ethics is part of that. He wrote:

"The Five Wonderful Precepts are love itself. To love is to understand, protect, and bring well-being to the object of our love. The practice of the precepts accomplishes this. We protect ourselves and we protect others. I am confident that our children and their children will have an even better understanding of the Five Precepts and will obtain even deeper peace and joy."

This hopeful message. He was looking into the future, he was looking into the past, he was looking at this worldwide creative imagination. And he was saying: just show up here. When you walk, just walk, only walk. Really drink your tea, and just drink your tea. This man had this capacity to switch orientations: to understand, to grow, to develop, to open up, to focus, to be here, and to work through his sorrow and his grief and find happiness and joy. It was phenomenal. The humanity of this man, and to bring so much humanity into his Buddhist teachings, was exceptional, I think, for any Buddhist teacher.

A Life as a Message

So he died; I think on Thursday, we say he died. I suspect if he said that for himself—"I died"—he would have followed it up by: "There is no death." He talked about that sometimes: there is no death. This idea of no birth and no death, it's not to be believed or understood logically, but it's to be discovered in really being present, just here and now. Free of our abstract ideas or proliferations, free of our stories, free of our concepts.

There's something about just being present in the purity and simplicity of presence that shows a deathless realm. It shows a birthless realm. It shows some aspect of attention, of awareness, that is free of concepts and ideas of past and future, free of anything but just here. To find his freedom and peace and to feel at home, and to recognize this is the ultimate. This is profound. This is a profundity which is always here. It's a dimension that, in a certain way, doesn't depend on our concepts and ideas and our thoughts. In a sense, it doesn't depend on our existence. But it's a true home. In it, there's no birth and death; there's just being present.

To be fully present at the moment of your death, for that moment, is to be in a timeless, deathless moment. Then afterwards, well, it continues to be the same timeless moment. There's freedom there that's the avenue for love. The richness that he was so much about was inclusive of all this.

He has a final tribute, and maybe in a way that he would appreciate, to quote him again. He was a teacher, and he spent a tremendous amount of time teaching. The testimony of all his teaching is all the books that were produced, something like a hundred books in English. But he wrote or said:

"Teaching is not done by talking alone. It is done by how you live your life. My life is my teaching. My life is my message."

So, my life is my message. That message continues. He's still alive. His example lives in us, in our memories, in those of us he touched, and those of us who learn about him. It's a teaching that points back to ourselves: imagine, how would you live if your life was the message? If your life was your teaching?

Then maybe we would realize our true nature in the way that he refers to in such language. He said:

"Our true nature is the nature of no birth and no death. Only when we touch our true nature can we transcend the fear of not existing, the fear of annihilation."

I'm inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh. I'm saddened by his passing. I'm inspired by his passing because his passing is just as much his message. To not see his passing as part of his teachings, part of his message, is to miss his teachings, to miss what he was about. To hold both—to hold this wide range of feelings we have and not to get caught in the feelings and stuck in them, but to see them too as part of this interbeing that is not ours alone. By seeing with the eyes of impermanence, seeing with depth, we find our freedom and perhaps our smile in the midst of our sadness.

May it be that Thich Nhat Hanh's life grows the smiles that can exist in this world. The smiles of the children—may the children smile a lot, and may we support that. The smiles of our elders—may our lives be one that brings smiles to them so they experience smiles before they die, and their smiles grow. Smiles for our neighbors, smiles for our colleagues, smiles for our family, our friends. May we live a life that spreads smiles throughout the world. Smiles that can help us to hold kindly, lovingly, compassionately, the sorrows of this world as well. May the memory of Thich Nhat Hanh support us, guide us, inspire us, and continue to benefit this world for a long time. Thank you all.