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Thich Nhat Hanh
World-renowned Vietnamese Buddhist and pacifist Thích Nhất Hạnh passed away peacefully on January 22 at home in the Từ Hiếu Temple in Huế, Vietnam at the age of ninety-five. During his life, he opposed all forms of militarism and lived for many years in exile from his home country. In 2018, he returned to Vietnam. In recent decades, he had come to be known for his advocacy of mindfulness, the “ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.”
“Thich Nhat Hanh taught us that if we want a peaceful and just world, we have to learn how to be peaceful and just.”
Through the work of the University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, son-in-law of the late historian and peace activist Howard Zinn, and Dr. Richard J. Davidson, founder of the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Healthy Minds, the traditional Buddhist meditation techniques that foster mindfulness have become popularized in the United States. Today they are used as a self-help tool in stress management, sports psychology, and programs for the treatment of depression, addiction, and pain management.
Thich Nhat Hahn’s spiritual focus however was not primarily on individual well-being. Rather, mindfulness emerged, for him, as a powerful force in his non-violent opposition to the war in Vietnam. Thich Nhat Hanh was an ally and an influence on the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s opposition to that war. In 1967, King nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize, saying he was “an apostle of peace and non-violence, cruelly separated from his own people while they are oppressed by a vicious war which has grown to threaten the sanity and security of the entire world.” However, no prize would be awarded that year.
“Thich Nhat Hanh taught us that if we want a peaceful and just world, we have to learn how to be peaceful and just,” says longtime activist and mindfulness practitioner Lance Smith. “This takes learning to be present in a kind, clear, compassionate, and skillful way. A true Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh practiced what he preached.”
His thoughts and words were featured in numerous articles in The Progressive, here are a few examples:
Labor and peace activist Sidney Lens, writing in the September 1967 issue, said: “In Paris I had a long talk with Thich Nhat Hanh, the impressive Buddhist monk who is associated with Thich Tri Quang and the Unified Buddhist Church. Nhat Hanh, a man of rare integrity and insight, has his own plan for ending the war. Much of it is contained in his sensitive book, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, which is now in its fourth edition in Saigon and has sold more than 100,000 copies even though its circulation there is illegal. For Nhat Hanh, the issue is no longer victory—for either side—but survival, and the only basis for survival is for the United States to permit the democratic voice of the South Vietnamese people to express itself. What the South Vietnamese want more than anything else, he told me, is peace—a view confirmed by a poll made in South Vietnam for the Columbia Broadcasting System.”
Laurence M. Stern, a former reporter and editor at The Washington Post, who wrote for The Progressive about Washington, D.C., from 1964 until 1979 under the pseudonym “Potomacus,” provided us this portrait in July 1971:
In his brown Buddhist robes the Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh is a slight figure who seems, but for the suffering in his eyes, to be barely out of his adolescence. In fact he is forty-four years old, a monk since he joined a Zen community at the age of sixteen, the author of ten books, including three acclaimed volumes of poetry. Since 1966 Thich Nhat Hanh has been in exile from his native South Vietnam, unable to return because of his outspoken opposition to the war and to the military rulers in Saigon. He is the observer of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam at the Paris negotiations. A few weeks ago he visited Washington—perhaps his last such visit, since Saigon has announced it is revoking his passport—and offered these three steps that the United States can take to end the war in Vietnam:
“One—to declare unilaterally an immediate cease-fire, stopping all aerial bombing and ground missions and the use of chemical defoliants, and withdrawing to positions of self-defense. This action will not only stop the destruction of human life but will also clearly prove the American intention to end the war. It will draw considerable sympathy and support within and without Vietnam. It will encourage Vietnamese on both sides to stop shooting at each other.
“Two—to pledge complete withdrawal of all U.S. military forces from Vietnam and to announce a timetable for such withdrawal. This action will assure Vietnamese who support the National Liberation Front that foreign soldiers are not going to be in the country any more, and there is no reason to support a war that kills only Vietnamese. It will also allow Vietnamese on both sides to come together to seek a political settlement.
“Three—to stop supporting the present Saigon government in its attempt to impose itself longer on the Vietnamese people. This action will lead to the end of corruption and dictatorship in Saigon, to the release of political prisoners, to the restoration of religious and civil liberties, and to the formation of a peace government that can get the overwhelming support of the Vietnamese people.”
The most urgent of these steps, the indispensable step, is a ceasefire, Thich Nhat Hanh insisted. In a voice barely audible, he said: “The Vietnamese people are so tired of war. Vietnamization is just an attempt to continue the war with fewer American troops but more American arms. What we need most, what we need now, is an ending of the killing.”
In a June 1977 article entitled “On Rage Remembered,” Ann Morrissett Davidon of the War Resisters League wrote: “But then sometimes there are dramatic images—even if conveyed by the television screen, as in the 1960s—which remind us of the human meaning and historical scope of the struggle. Adrenalin mounts, hearts beat faster, rage rises against those insidious systems which let some men rise on the backs and bodies of other people while so often claiming to help them. . . . The men who happen to be in control will not like it, may not even know quite what they’re doing, but they need to know that we struggle not against them personally, but against the systems of profit and power by which they exploit human beings and the earth’s resources. As the Vietnamese poet-priest Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in the midst of that cruelly protracted and embittering war:
Men cannot be our enemies.
Not even men called “Viet Cong.”
If we kill men,
What brothers have we left,
With whom shall we live then?
And most recently, in September 2009, in a review of the book Fire and Ink: An Anthology of Social Action Writing. Then-editor Matthew Rothschild noted: “You’ll find a lot of inspiration and wisdom here. One essay by Thich Nhat Hanh cautions us that raising our voice is not enough: ‘To educate people for peace, we can use words or we can speak with our lives.’ ”
In a time when the drumbeat for war seems loud in the air, we remember the lessons of this engaged Buddhist monk.