Thích Nhất Hạnh

• 1. Introduction

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  Thich Nhat Hanh was born Nguyen Xuan Bao on the 11th of October 1926, in the ancient capital of Hue in central Vietnam. He died there too, on the 22nd of January 2022, at the age of 95, at the same temple where he had first entered monastic life as a teenager. Between those two moments in Hue, he founded the largest Buddhist monastery in Europe and America, coined a term that reshaped how the world understood Buddhism, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr.

  He spent nearly four decades in exile, unable to set foot in the country of his birth. He ran clandestine rescue missions for Vietnamese boat people in the South China Sea. He taught mindfulness to social workers living under daily threat of death, and then watched that same teaching become the foundation of a billion-dollar wellness industry.

  Who was this man who carried a name meaning "one action" and a title his followers translated simply as "teacher"? How did a boy who drank from a mountain well and felt completely satisfied grow into a figure that the editor of a major American Buddhist magazine described as an icon without peer in the Western Buddhist world? And what does it mean that his instructions for his own ashes began with the words: "I am not in here"?

• 2. A Boy from Hue

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  Nguyen Xuan Bao was the fifth of six children. His father, Nguyen Dinh Phuc, worked as an official with the French colonial administration; his mother, Tran Thi Di, was a homemaker from Gio Linh district. Until he was five, he lived with his extended family at his grandmother's home.

  He recalled feeling joy at age seven or eight after seeing a drawing of a peaceful Buddha sitting on grass. On a school trip to a mountain where a hermit was said to sit quietly day and night, the boy explored the area and found a natural well. He drank from it and felt completely satisfied. That moment fixed his direction.

  At twelve he first told his parents he wanted to train as a monk. They were cautious. They let him pursue it at age sixteen, when he entered the monastery at Tu Hieu Temple, the same temple where he would eventually die. His first teacher there was Zen Master Thanh Quy Chan That, from the 43rd generation of the Lam Te Zen school. The novice studied for three years, learning Chinese, English, and French alongside Vietnamese traditions of Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism.

  Dissatisfied with the Buddhist academy he later attended, which he found lacking in philosophy, literature, and foreign languages, he left in 1950 and moved to Saigon. He sold books and poetry to support himself while studying at Saigon University, eventually earning a degree in French and Vietnamese Literature. By the time he reached Columbia University as a lecturer in Buddhism in 1962, he had gained fluency in French, Classical Chinese, Sanskrit, Pali, and English, in addition to his native Vietnamese.

• 3. The Names He Carried

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  Nhat Hanh carried at least five distinct names across his lifetime, each marking a different threshold. As a boy he was registered for school under the formal family name Nguyen Dinh Lang, but was known by the nickname Be Em. When he entered the path toward monkhood he received the spiritual name Dieu Sung. Taking refuge in the Three Jewels gave him the lineage name Trung Quang, which translates as "Clear, Reflective Light". Ordination as a monk brought the dharma name Phung Xuan, meaning "Meeting Spring".

  He took the dharma title Nhat Hanh when he moved to Saigon in 1949. He later translated the two syllables himself: Nhat means "one", implying "first-class" or "of best quality"; Hanh means "action", implying "right conduct", "good nature", or "virtue".

  The title Thich, shared by all Buddhist monastics in East Asian Buddhism, derives from "Thich Ca", meaning "of the Shakya clan". Adopting it signals that one's first family is the Buddhist community. His followers called him Thay, the Vietnamese word for "master" or "teacher", or simply Thay Nhat Hanh. He is also known as Thien Su Nhat Hanh: Zen Master Nhat Hanh. Each name was not a replacement but an addition, a layering of identities as he moved from a child in a colonial household to a figure whose teachings would eventually be translated into more than 40 languages.

• 4. War, Exile, and a Five-Point Plan

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  On the 16th of December 1963, Nhat Hanh returned to South Vietnam at the request of Thich Tri Quang, the monk most prominent in protesting the religious discrimination of the recently overthrown President Ngo Dinh Diem. Within a month, several Buddhist groups had merged to form the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam.

  In 1964, Nhat Hanh co-founded the School of Youth for Social Service, a neutral corps of Buddhist peace workers who built schools, healthcare clinics, and rebuilt war-torn villages. The organization eventually comprised 10,000 volunteers and social workers. That same period saw him create the Order of Interbeing from six members of the SYSS board, three men and three women, who committed to practicing the Fourteen Precepts of Engaged Buddhism.

  On the 1st of June 1966, Nhat Hanh released a five-point proposal to the U.S. government while in the United States. He called on the U.S. to make a clear statement of desire to help the Vietnamese people form a responsive government, to cease air strikes throughout Vietnam, to keep anti-communist military operations purely defensive, to demonstrate willingness to withdraw within months, and to offer reconstruction funds. The South Vietnamese military junta responded by accusing him of treason and communism.

  Also in 1966, he visited Gethsemani Abbey to speak with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. When the South Vietnamese regime threatened to block Nhat Hanh's reentry, Merton wrote an essay titled "Nhat Hanh is my Brother" for the magazine Jubilee in August 1966, stating: "I have far more in common with Nhat Hanh than I have with many Americans, and I do not hesitate to say it." For refusing to take sides in the war, Nhat Hanh was exiled by both the North and South Vietnamese governments. He received asylum in France.

• 5. King, the Nobel Prize, and the Speech at Riverside Church

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  In 1965, Nhat Hanh wrote Martin Luther King Jr. a letter titled "In Search of the Enemy of Man". The following year, during his 1966 stay in the United States, he met King in person and urged him to publicly denounce the Vietnam War.

  In 1967, due in large part to Nhat Hanh's influence, King gave the speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" at Riverside Church in New York City. It was his first speech to publicly question U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Later that same year, King nominated Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize. In his nomination letter, King wrote: "I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than this gentle monk from Vietnam. His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity." King also called him "an apostle of peace and nonviolence".

  King named his chosen candidate with a "strong request" to the prize committee, in sharp violation of Nobel traditions and protocol. The committee did not make an award that year.

  The same year, 1967, Nhat Chi Mai, one of the original six members of the Order of Interbeing, set fire to herself and burned to death in front of the Tu Nghiem Pagoda in Saigon as a peace protest. Nhat Hanh later explained to Western audiences that Vietnamese monks and nuns who self-immolated during the war did not perform acts of suicide; their acts were, in his words, aimed "at moving the hearts of the oppressors, and at calling the attention of the world to the suffering endured then by the Vietnamese."

• 6. Boat People and the Singapore Expulsion

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  When the North Vietnamese army took control of the south in 1975, Nhat Hanh was denied permission to return to Vietnam. The communist government banned his publications. He turned his attention toward Vietnamese people fleeing by sea in the Gulf of Siam.

  Nhat Hanh recounted that he was attending a conference on religion and peace in Singapore when he became aware of the scale of the crisis. He described the policies of Singapore and Malaysia as pushing boat people back into the sea rather than receiving them on land. He said fishermen who rescued survivors were punished with heavy financial penalties to discourage future rescues.

  He stayed in Singapore to organize a secret operation. Aided by individuals from France, the Netherlands, and other European countries, he hired a boat to carry food, water, and medicine to refugees at sea. Sympathetic fishermen who had rescued survivors would contact his team, who then moved refugees to the French embassy in the middle of the night and helped them climb into the compound. His best-known poem, "Please Call Me by My True Names", was written in 1978 during this period.

  When Singaporean authorities discovered the network, police surrounded the operation's office and impounded the passports of both Nhat Hanh and Chan Khong, giving them 24 hours to leave. It was only through the intervention of the then-French ambassador to Singapore, Jacques Gasseau, that they were granted 10 days to wind down. Nhat Hanh was not permitted to return to Singapore until 2010, when he led a meditation retreat at the Kong Meng San Phor Kark See Monastery.

• 7. Plum Village and the Spread of Mindfulness

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  By 1982, the Sweet Potatoes Meditation Centre that Nhat Hanh had established at Fontvannes, near Troyes, was too small for the number of people seeking retreats. That year he and Chan Khong established Plum Village Monastery in the Dordogne, near Bordeaux in southern France. Plum Village grew to become the largest Buddhist monastery in Europe and America, with over 200 monastics and over 10,000 visitors a year.

  By 2019, Nhat Hanh had built a network of monasteries and retreat centers in France, the U.S., Australia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Hong Kong. American centers included Blue Cliff Monastery in Pine Bush, New York; Deer Park Monastery in Escondido, California, established in 2000; Magnolia Grove Monastery in Batesville, Mississippi; and the Community of Mindful Living in Berkeley, California. As of 2017, his monastic order comprised over 750 monastics in 9 monasteries worldwide.

  The 1975 book The Miracle of Mindfulness was the main vehicle for his early teachings in the West. Nhat Hanh said in an interview that the book was originally written for social workers in Vietnam, because "the danger of dying was there every day." Its original English title was The Miracle of Being Awake, because in 1975 "mindfulness" was barely recognized in English.

  His 1975 book was credited with helping to lay the foundations for mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, and the University of Washington psychology professor Marsha M. Linehan, the originator of dialectical behavior therapy, was among those influenced by his work. One of his students, Jon Kabat-Zinn, developed the mindfulness-based stress reduction course now offered at hospitals and medical centers across the world. As of 2015, around 80% of medical schools were reported to have offered mindfulness training. As of 2019, mindfulness as espoused by Nhat Hanh had become the theoretical foundation of a $1.1 billion industry in the United States. Nhat Hanh had published over 130 books by the end of his life, including more than 100 in English, which as of January 2019 had sold over five million copies worldwide.

• 8. Return, Final Years, and the Third Plaque

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  After 39 years in exile, Nhat Hanh arrived in Vietnam on the 12th of January 2005, following lengthy negotiations with the Vietnamese government. He was permitted to teach, to publish four of his books in Vietnamese, and to travel with members of his Order. His return was not without controversy: Thich Vien Dinh, writing on behalf of the banned Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, feared the government would use the visit as propaganda to suggest religious freedom was improving while abuses continued.

  During his 2007 return, Nhat Hanh suggested ending government control of religion to President Nguyen Minh Triet. A provincial police officer later accused him of breaking Vietnamese law, saying he "should focus on Buddhism and keep out of politics." The chanting ceremonies he organized, originally titled "Grand Requiem for Praying Equally for All to Untie the Knots of Unjust Suffering", were renamed after Vietnamese officials objected to the word "equally" being applied to prayers for South Vietnamese and U.S. soldiers alongside northern fighters.

  In November 2014, Nhat Hanh suffered a severe brain hemorrhage. After rehabilitation at a stroke clinic in Bordeaux and further treatment at UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco, he lost the ability to speak verbally for the remainder of his life. In November 2018, he returned to Vietnam for the last time, communicating his wish to do so through gestures, nodding and shaking his head in response to questions from senior disciples. Vietnamese authorities assigned plainclothes police to monitor his activities at Tu Hieu Temple.

  He died at Tu Hieu Temple on the 22nd of January 2022. His five-day funeral began that same day; his cremation took place on the 29th of January, after a seven-day wake. At the conclusion of a 49-day mourning period, his ashes were portioned and scattered at Tu Hieu Temple and temples associated with Plum Village.

  In a 2015 book, he had described what he wanted written on the plaque above his ashes: first, "I am not in here"; then, for those who still did not understand, "I am not out there either"; and finally, "I may be found in your way of breathing and walking."