Thay Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay is the respectful and also affectionate term in Vietnamese for “teacher”) always tells me that Thi Kinh still exists today, alive in our own society. Many of us might find ourselves in a situation like that of Thi Kinh (Kinh Tam in Thay’s story) at one time or another, to one degree or another: people unfairly attacking us, whether physically or, more commonly, verbally. How many of us know how to respond as beautifully and compassionately as Thi Kinh did?
Over his many decades of life as a monk and peace activist, Thay has been subjected to a host of grave assaults and threats—some have been attempts on his physical life, countless others more in the nature of character assassination—no less than Thi Kinh. Thay has borne it all with steadfast determination, profound understanding, and great compassion; and he seems to suffer very little. He teaches us concrete ways to touch peace and happiness in every moment—all the sweet fruits of his own practice, day in and day out, over the past sixty-seven years.
I have been a student of Thay Thich Nhat Hanh since 1959, when I was twenty-one years old. Now I am seventy-three. From my fifty-two years practicing as his student, I can attest that our teacher Thay, together with his hundreds and then thousands of other students, has served humanity all over the world, promoting peace and understanding, with a boundless love that never failed nor flagged.
The story of Thi Kinh is a popular Vietnamese folk tale hundreds of years old, but Thay wrote this book to share the story as a teaching, offering a real way of being in the world that is utterly relevant for our own time in this twenty-first century. Every day, Thich Nhat Hanh lives his life in much the same way Thi Kinh lived hers. Whenever people suspecting the worst about Thay’s intentions attack him, he always maintains his faith in humanity (even that of the attackers), his gentleness, and his loving demeanor. The more I look back on the many events that have happened in the lives of Thay and his students—in the 1960s, and now again in the lives of his 379 monastic students at the Prajna (Bat Nha) Monastery in Vietnam starting in 2008—the more clearly I see how Thi Kinh’s story is very much that of Thay and Thay’s students.
When Vietnamese people, whether young or less young, think of Thi Kinh’s story, we always have a tendency to love Thi Kinh and to hate the young woman called Mau who fell in love with a monk, had sex with another man—her own family servant—and then pretended her pregnancy was from an affair with the monk Kinh Tam, even as Kinh Tam was reviled by all and flogged nearly to death by the village authority. All our compassion goes out to the novice who self-healed the wounds from the thrashing and then proceeded to care for Mau’s child until the novice’s death, at which time the truth about Thi Kinh finally came out.
No one could accept a person as vain, selfish, and cruel as Mau or as weak and cowardly as Thien Si. As I myself grew up and matured through decades of brutal wars in Vietnam, I saw the collapse of moral values and the increase in corruption, violence, and depravity everywhere day by day. But anytime I complained to Thay, my teacher, about how ugly people could be, Thay always gently defused my righteous indignation. He told me it’s because of people’s wrong perceptions about things—seeing a “poisonous snake” in the path that really is just a piece of rope—that they react with fear and violence against each other in these horrible ways. It is not these people we need to be rid of, Thay said; it is human beings’ wrong views! We must train our minds and hearts to see more deeply into the whole situation and how it came to be like that, so that rather than condemning we can accept. We train ourselves not to answer violence with violence, but rather to find a way to remove the wrong perceptions that make us suffer and hurt each other.
I remember in 1964, Thay and his students, including myself, started a movement of young people that culminated in the creation of the School of Youth for Social Ser vice (SYSS) in Vietnam. We trained thousands of young monks, nuns, and lay people to go out into the countryside and help peasants rebuild their villages and improve their lives in the areas of education, health, economics, and organization. Our volunteer social workers would come to a village and teach the children how to read, write, and sing. When the people in the village liked what we did, we encouraged them to build a school for the children. One family would contribute a few bamboo trees, another family would bring coconut leaves to make a roof, and so on. After a school was established, we would bring some doctors and medical students to come and help for a day or two and set up a dispensary for medicines.
So the SYSS was founded on that volunteer spirit. We didn’t wait for the government to get around to helping; we just initiated the projects ourselves at the grassroots level. During the war we sponsored more than ten thousand impoverished orphans. That is how we lived our engaged Buddhism. We only wanted to bring relief to people who were sick, wounded, or needy in the war zone and to poor, struggling farmers in other areas. We helped peasants help themselves by sharing ways of taking better care of their health, improving the yields of their food crops, making handicrafts to increase household income, and educating their children; we had no political ambition.
Meanwhile, politicians in Saigon were suspicious and hostile toward us because we called on them (as well as on their opponents, the Communists) to stop the war, which was causing such immense suffering to our people. When the anti-Communist authorities in Saigon saw our success in helping so many, they feared we were becoming too popular or influential. So in May 1966, a group of masked men arrived at dusk to throw grenades into various rooms, including Thay’s room, at the SYSS. The curtain in Thay’s room pushed the grenade back out the window, but in any case Thay was not in his room at that time; he had been invited by Cornell University to come to the United States and had just left the day before.
In June, as we were having a meeting at SYSS, masked men again came and threw grenades at SYSS workers running away from them to hide in rooms here and there. This is when I personally witnessed the first two deaths among my friends; sixteen other people were gravely wounded in that attack. Thich Nhat Hanh was still in the United States at the time, calling for a cessation of hostilities in our country.
Of course we grieved over the deaths, but we knew that those who had ordered the murders must be caught in a wrong perception about us. At the funeral, as we stood before the corpses of our friends, with our beloved teacher physically far away but vividly present in each of our hearts, we could only respond to these terrible violent injustices by declaring that we deeply regretted their wrong perceptions about us, and we also believed they could find ways to help us alleviate the suffering of poor peasants, illiterate children, sick people, and war victims, as we had no ambition other than that. Two weeks later, eight of our social workers were kidnapped and perhaps all killed, as we never heard anything of them again.
Then on July 4, 1966, a band of masked men took five of our social workers out to a riverbank and shot them. All but one of them died; but thanks to that lone survivor, we learned that before shooting our friends one masked man did say, “We’re sorry, but we are forced to kill you.” At the funeral we thanked that man for saying he was sorry he was forced to kill our friends, and we asked that any who received such orders in the future please try to save us any way they could. And in fact no other killings occurred after that.
To show how wrong the belief that we were seeking political power was, our peaceful young people, whose only aim was to care for people of their country, had to accept the murders of fourteen beloved friends without uttering a single word in bitterness or anger. This behavior on our part moved the hearts of many people and may have helped the killings to stop. Silent helping hands appeared everywhere. Day by day, month after month, the number of volunteer social workers grew until it reached nearly ten thousand by 1975.
Thinking back on these tragic events, it’s clear that Thich Nhat Hanh’s students were following in the footsteps of Quan Am Thi Kinh, never answering violence with violence, not even verbally, because they had such a beautiful teacher who taught them how
to behave exactly as Thi Kinh did. In the forty-five years since then, many other sincere and groundbreaking initiatives Thay introduced to renew Buddhism have been savagely attacked; but he continually counseled us to answer with noble silence, understanding, and compassion for those who so seriously misunderstood him and us.
We humans never seem to learn enough from our tragic past. We keep repeating the same mistakes, and we need Quan Am Thi Kinh manifestations everywhere helping us to learn to practice more patience, endurance, understanding, compassion, and inclusiveness and not to retaliate, even verbally, against those who mistreat us. In this new century and new millennium, the story of dangerous wrong perceptions and violence started up again for 379 monastics ordained by Thich Nhat Hanh who were living in Prajna (Bat Nha) Monastery in the Vietnamese highlands around Bao Loc, Lam Dong Province.
After thirty-nine years of exile, in 2005 Thay had been invited back to his homeland, where he led a three-month tour of four provinces offering retreats and other events to help people learn how to cultivate mindfulness, understanding, and compassion in their daily lives. More than half of the Vietnamese population at the time had been born while Thay was exiled outside the country. The teachings he offered were so profound and relevant, they moved 125 young women and men to want to follow Thich Nhat Hanh by becoming monastics like him right away.
The abbot of a temple in Lam Dong Province offered his property to Thay so it could be turned into a monastery for these inspired young people, and very shortly the Prajna Monastery was born. In the beginning this humble temple had a good Buddha Hall and plenty of land, but only a few tin-roof houses for people to live in. Donations from all around the world came in, and we quickly built six large residences to house the hundreds of young men and women aspiring to the monastic life as taught and lived by Thay. Even though the new buildings were large, our monks and nuns slept sixteen to a room. We also built a huge meditation hall to accommodate the thousands of other people who would come to hear Thay speak.
The practice of these young people inspired others who also wished to live such a beautiful and happy simple life. By the end of 2006 there were 267 monastics residing and training at Prajna Monastery; in 2007 there were 357, and by August 2008 the number had increased to 379. They lived and served their community together joyfully, offering many humanitarian ser vices to poor and hungry children in the area. Projects included setting up homes for children in remote villages of the region and seeing that thousands of preschool-age children were cared for, educated, and given a simple meal while their parents worked all day long as manual laborers, mostly picking tea or coffee.
Once again, the success of such a dynamic movement of talented and educated young people scared the regime. Most temples around Vietnam were lucky to ordain two or three monastics in a year. How could that old monk Thich Nhat Hanh have gotten up to several hundred monastic disciples in just three and a half years? (Besides the monks and nuns at Prajna, there were another 118 in Hue City at Thay’s home temple Tu Hieu; 116 at Plum Village in France, where Thay resides; 20 at Thay’s new European Institute of Applied Buddhism in Germany; and a few dozen at our U.S. monasteries in New York and California.) So, in 2008, authorities applied heavy pressure to the abbot of Prajna, who originally had invited and welcomed us in, now to turn against and expel us.
In August 2008 a local police order was issued to the 379 monastics, asserting that they were illegal squatters because the owner of the property did not consent to their presence. Right away the monastics sought to prove to local as well as national authorities that their presence was legitimate, showing them all the receipts for the funds our donors had given for the construction of each building. Nevertheless for fourteen months the monks and nuns of Bat Nha Monastery were continually and increasingly harassed.
For the whole month of September 2008, policemen came to the residences from seven to eleven o’clock every night to question and harass the nuns and monks, the vast majority of whom were under thirty years old. Following the extraordinary living example of kindness given by their teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, our young nuns and monks would exclaim:
“Oh, poor uncle-policemen, because of us you have to work so hard until midnight to investigate. Sisters, brothers, show them your legal papers first, and then let us sing a song for our uncle-policemen.”
“Please prepare some tea for our uncle-policemen!”
“Shall we take a souvenir photo with our uncles?”
After a month of unsuccessful attempts to intimidate our monastics with these nightly visits, this particular practice was abandoned.
The authorities then set up several loudspeakers that blasted insults at the residences twenty-four hours a day. Buses of lay friends who arrived for days of mindfulness practice at the monastery were refused entry by police, and bus owners were threatened. (Our friends found ways to climb the walls to get in to practice with us anyway!) The monastics were then forcibly evicted from one building after another and their belongings literally thrown out of their rooms, often into the rain. These 379 young persons squeezed themselves into smaller and smaller places, but still kept on quietly practicing together to cultivate their mindfulness and their spiritual life.
Their electricity and water supplies were cruelly cut off from June to September 2009. One day during that time, a delegation of venerable monks and nuns from Saigon who came to visit were beaten and pelted with excrement by a mob. On that same day a young woman dressed very provocatively was sent to taunt the monks sitting in meditation. When she came into the meditation hall, she was so struck, so impressed, by their energy, she didn’t know what to do. An old woman, presumably a leader of the mob, pushed the young woman and demanded, “Why are you just sitting there silently? Say something!” At that moment the monks began their chanting practice, and the young woman burst into tears. After receiving two calls on her cell phone, she left the room.
The monks and nuns endured it all with compassion, thanks to the support of local people who secretly brought thousands of bottles of mineral water each night between one and two a.m. when the policemen were asleep. The skies also sent water, raining down every night into the monastics’ collecting containers.
Finally on September 26–27, 2009, the police sent a violent hired mob of two hundred to provoke the monastics in the ugliest possible ways. They planted condoms and sex books in monks’ belongings, yelled at them, and dragged them from their rooms in an effort to load them into thirty taxicabs and four trucks rented specially for the occasion. The monks linked their arms together in circles to resist being thrown into the vehicles. Then the females of the mob actually sank so low as to squeeze the monks’ genitals. This finally forced the monks to release their locked arms, whereupon they were immediately stuffed into the taxicabs.
Even as the mob dragged them down several sets of stairs from the fourth floor to ground level, beat them, and stuffed them into the cars, these young people—among them a boxing champion from Dak Lak Province— still refrained from fighting back or harming either the thugs or the policemen (who were supposedly absent and unaware of events, but really participating undercover). The taxi drivers drove about a hundred meters until they were just out of view of the monastery, then released the monks, some of whom sneaked back into Prajna, while others started walking with all the nuns out on the road. The young woman who had been sent in sexy clothing and then cried in the meditation hall now showed up with a huge bag of cookies for them.
That night the monks and nuns walked eighteen kilometers in a heavy rainstorm to Phuoc Hue monastery where they were given refuge. Every fifteen minutes the police telephoned to threaten the abbot of Phuoc Hue in an effort to get him to expel the Prajna monastics from his temple. This abbot bravely resisted for over two months, up to and beyond December 9, 2009, when the mob showed up again to verbally and physically abuse Thay’s students—even in the presence of a human rights investigative committee from the European Union, which witnessed the entire incident. br />
In November 2009 the authorities declared that if our monks and nuns had other monasteries that would take them in, they would be allowed to continue their practice in those other locations. The authorities thought no one would dare try to house and feed such a large number of young people. Then a few months later, when two large monasteries—Toan Duc in Dong Nai Province and Van Hanh in Dalat—decided to welcome us, their proposals were rejected by the authorities.
On December 17, the Prajna monastics heard the police were planning to mobilize some prisoners who would shave their heads and come wearing monks’ robes on December 31 to beat our monks and nuns until they left Phuoc Hue. Rather than be part of such a violation of the sacred monastic robe, the monks and nuns finally decided to leave their refuge at Phuoc Hue and quietly emigrate to Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Hong Kong to seek refuge, even though they lacked any visas. It is the Thi Kinh story once again, as our monks and nuns stayed true to their practice of doing no harm, no violence, even by words, as they withdrew from Vietnam.
Shortly after the forced departure from Vietnam, a temporary home for all the Prajna monastics became available in Thailand, and nine months later Thay came to visit them there. At a gathering of these refugee monastics plus four hundred lay people from Vietnam, our Thay declared, “This is a genuinely happy moment. I feel that we are very fortunate. We are going through all these hardships, but our hearts’ compassion remains intact; we harbor no anger, not a single wish of retaliation or harm to anyone.”
At the very time that Thay was speaking in Thailand, a strong typhoon was flooding several provinces in Vietnam, killing people and destroying crops and houses. Drawing on the typhoon as a metaphor for the monks’ and nuns’ situation, Thay said, “There are floods in Vietnam. Never mind. We all come over to this safe and dry place. When the floods retreat, we will be back home.” All the listeners had tears in their eyes as this old monk’s profound compassion penetrated their very being.