Many plays in the form of popular musical theater (hat cai luong in South Vietnam, hat cheo, hat ke chuyen in North Vietnam) as well as many popular Buddhist storytellers in temples have presented the life of Quan Am Thi Kinh with respect and admiration as a real-life manifestation of the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion, Avalokiteshvara. Everyone hates Mau as the most crude and despicable person. But Thich Nhat Hanh’s retelling of the story is in my opinion the expression of his own lived experiences of being unfairly treated and his teaching that compassion extends to everyone, as evidenced by his empathy even for Thien Si and Mau among the characters in the story.
Reading this story increases our capacity for love and understanding toward any and every being, the “bad” as well as the “good.” We don’t need to feel contempt toward Thien Si; we don’t bear anger or hatred toward Thi Mau. We can feel we are one with every person in the story. I have read this story as told by Thay several times, and every time I do, I feel as though I’m reading it for the first time. The last time I read it, it touched me so deeply inside that tears flooded my eyes. I told myself I must read it every week to continually remind myself not to look at things superficially, as has happened in the past.
I could be Thien Si, so shallow, self-centered, and easily carried away by strong personalities like his controlling, jealous mother. How many of us have allowed ourselves to be pulled along, just like Thien Si, by the worst in other people who cannot run their own lives in a proper way? Many of us could be like Mau—proud, reckless, collapsing in our own shame and cowardice, and lying even while another person is severely punished for our own misdeeds. And the council chairman using “moral” authority to judge everyone else—we could be like that too.
Looking back on my life, I see there were many times when I did not know how to look deeply into many conflicts in families and society, to have more understanding and more ability to respond helpfully. The story of Thi Kinh is only the beginning of my training to look more deeply into things that seem obviously “true,” but later turn out to be wrong. I train myself to remember Thi Kinh and ask questions. Am I, are we, behaving shallowly like Thien Si, out of weakness or fear of judgment? Am I, are we, letting strong personalities pull us in a wrong direction? Am I, are we, acting like Mau, blinded by arrogance due to too many gifts and successes, losing our way?
Sometimes it can seem as though we’ve gone too far to turn around. Our society is like that everywhere. I must train myself to make room, to make the time and space, for taking a deeper look into myself and into the person I am interacting with and perhaps judging. There is always room for more understanding, and I train myself to see the deeper truth of each situation. I know that peace in this world is possible if we train ourselves to take a deeper look, especially into people or actions we want to punish because they seem so obviously wrong and deserving of blame. When understanding arises, we can love, we can embrace and be compassionate toward even the worst people, because we see that their weaknesses are also our own. This is how Thay has been able to find so much energy to look directly at the most vicious and virulent acts of violence in our world and work for peace for nearly seventy years, with very little suffering. Let us all embrace wholeheartedly Thay’s practice and be his continuation, starting today.
Practicing Love
by Thich Nhat Hanh
Whenever the monks and nuns of Plum Village open a large retreat, a day of mindfulness, or a public talk for many people, we always begin by offering a chant of taking refuge in the great compassion of Quan Am, Avalokiteshvara. This chant invariably moves the hearts of many in attendance, often to tears. When we chant or when we bow down and touch the Earth in homage to Quan Am, in fact we are getting in touch with the energy of boundless love in ourselves. We see we also have the capacity to listen deeply, to love and to understand. First of all, we listen to ourselves, in order to hear ourselves and love ourselves; because if we cannot understand and love ourselves, how will we have the energy to love and understand others?
There are days when you feel nothing seems to work out. You rely on your intelligence, on your talent, and think you can succeed just on that. But there are days when everything seems to go wrong. When things go wrong you try harder, and when you try harder, things continue to go wrong. You say, “This is just not my day.” The best thing to do is to stop struggling, go home to yourself, and recover yourself. Don’t just keep slogging on, counting on your talent and intelligence to make things right. You have to go home and reestablish your solidity, freedom, peace, and calm before you try again.
In 1964, I helped found the School of Youth for Social Ser vice (SYSS) in Vietnam. It was created during the war to help with the problems of violence, poverty, sickness, and social injustice. We trained young monks, nuns, and lay people to do social work.
There were some villages with no schools, where the children had to work from a very young age to help their parents cultivate the land, go out fishing, and do many other things; they had no opportunity to get an education. We went to these villages and set up very humble schools. We did not have any money. Just one or two of us would go and play with the children and begin to teach them how to read and write.
When it rained, we would ask one of the villagers for permission to use a house to continue teaching. Gradually the parents could see that the children liked us. Finally, we proposed that people in the village help us to build a school. The school would be made of bamboo and coconut leaves—coconut leaves for the roof and bamboo for the walls. It would be the first school ever built in the village. When people saw that we were doing a good thing, then they helped us make the school bigger, so that other children could come. We also offered classes in the evenings for the children and adults who could not attend class during the day. We found friends who donated oil or kerosene, so we could light lamps for night classes. We began with what we knew and the few resources we had. We did not expect anything from the government, because if you wait for the government, you will wait a long time.
Sometimes we would bring a lawyer or judge from the city to the village, so that the villagers could get birth certificates for their children. If the children did not have birth certificates, they could not enroll in public school. On one morning we might issue twenty birth certificates, and the children who had attended our school could then go to a public school.
We also set up health centers made of coconut-leaf roofs and bamboo walls. We mixed mud with straw and made the walls very warm. I showed the young people how to do it. We also put some cement in it to make it stronger. We asked six students who were about to graduate from medical school to come each week to help diagnose and treat the peasants. Villagers came to the center with all kinds of diseases including cataracts, coughs, and colds. We did not have a budget; we only had our hearts. We were young, and it was the energy of love that helped us do these things.
We also showed people how to build toilets. Up until then, they went to the toilet in many places. If they had diarrhea, the bacteria could get into the water supply, and then other people would get diarrhea. We showed them how to use cement and sand in order to make a very cheap toilet. We also taught people how to make compost and how to raise chickens. We learned the techniques at school and then went into the countryside and shared our knowledge. We did a lot of things like this, and we had a lot of joy.
We also helped form cooperatives and taught people how to organize themselves and invest their money. One person would borrow money from the other families in order to build a house or to invest in a small business. Then the next month another person would be able to borrow money from others.
In this way, we set up pilot project villages. When we arrived at the village, we took photographs of how the people were living. Then, after a year of work and the transformation of the village, we took more photos. We invited peasants from other villages to come and see, so they would be inspired to transform their villages in the same way. We didn’t rely on any government, b
ecause there were two governments at that time in Vietnam— one Communist and one anti-Communist—and they were fighting each other. We did not want to take sides, because we knew that if we took one side, we would have to fight the other side. When you invest your time and your life in fighting, you cannot help people.
This is a difficult stand to take, because in a situation of conflict, if you align yourself with one warring party, you are protected at least by that party, but if you don’t align with either side, you are subject to attack from both parties. When we reminded each side that the other side was not evil and was nothing other than human beings like themselves, we were met with extreme hostility and exposed, my students as well as myself personally, to many dangerous situations. And the pattern has continued from the 1960s all the way up to this day. If I am still sitting here alive today, that is a true miracle, because many of my friends and students were killed.
During the war, bombing destroyed many villages, creating so many desperate refugees. At the beginning, we had planned to work in rural development, but when the war became so intense, we instead took care of refugees and tried to resettle them. In 1969 a village that we had helped build in Quang Tri Province was bombed. It was very close to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separating the North and the South. The village is called Tra Loc. We had spent more than a year making the village into a beautiful place, where people enjoyed living. Then one day American planes came and bombed the village. They had received information that Communist guerrillas had infiltrated it.
The people in the village lost their homes, and our workers took refuge in other places. They sent word to us and asked whether they should rebuild the village, and we said, “Yes, you have to rebuild the village.” We spent another six months rebuilding, and then the village was destroyed for a second time by bombing. Again, the people lost their homes. We had built many villages like that throughout the country, but it was very difficult near the DMZ. Then our workers asked us whether we should rebuild it a third time, and after much deliberation we said, “Yes, we have to rebuild it.” So we rebuilt it for the third time. Do you know what happened? It was destroyed for a third time by American bombing.
We were very close to despair. Despair is the worst thing that can happen to a human being. We had built the village for the third time, and it was bombarded for the third time. The same question was asked: “Should we rebuild? Or should we give up?” There was a lot of discussion at our headquarters, and the idea of giving up was very tempting—three times was too much. But, in the end, we were wise enough not to give up. If we gave up on Tra Loc village, we would be giving up hope. We had to maintain hope in order not to fall into despair. That is why we decided to rebuild it for the fourth time.
I remember sitting in my office at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Saigon when a group of young people came to me and asked, “Thay, do you think that the war will end someday? Is there any hope?” Tra Loc village was just one place where the situation was very hard. People were killing each other and dying every day. There were Communists, anti-Communists, Russians, Chinese, and war personnel. Vietnam had become the victim of an international conflict. We wanted to end the war, but we could not, because the situation was not in our hands—it was in the hands of big powers.
“Thay, is there any hope?” Imagine my sitting there, with eighteen young people asking me that question. It seemed as though there was no hope, because the war had been dragging on and on. There was no light at the end of the tunnel. When I was asked that question, I had to practice mindful breathing and going back to my true home—the island of self.
Finally, very calmly, I said, “My dear friends, the Buddha said that everything is impermanent, nothing can last forever. The war also is impermanent; the war will end sometime. Let us not lose hope.”
That is what I told them. I did not have a lot of hope myself, I have to confess; but if I’d had no hope, I would have destroyed these young people. I had to practice and nourish a little hope, so that I could be a refuge for them.
The conditions I’m describing here may sound like something very rare and extreme. But in fact there are all kinds of battles being fought all over the world every single day. Some of them do involve bombs and guns. But millions of us who live far from what are normally considered “war zones” are also facing many battles— in our work lives, our communities, and even our own families—and are overwhelmed with anger, resentment, fear, and grief, though we may pretend otherwise. If you yourself are not in such a situation, most likely someone close to you is.
People ask me how I manage not to give in to anger and despair when confronted with great violence and injustice. I think everyone is a victim. If you are not a victim of this, you are a victim of that. For example, when you are full of rage and fear, you are a victim of your rage and fear, and you suffer very deeply. Having a bomb physically explode next to you can make you suffer, that is certainly true; but living day after day with rage and fear makes you suffer also—maybe even more.
We may be abused by others, but we also may be the victims of ourselves. We tend to believe that our enemy is outside of us, but very often we are our own worst enemy because of what we have done to our bodies and our minds. Some people who find themselves in a very difficult situation do not let rage or anxiety take over their minds, and that is why they don’t suffer as much as other people in the same situation. Since they are not victims of anger and fear, their minds remain calm and clear, and they can do something to help change the situation.
The people running repressive governments are victims also—victims of their own anger, frustration, and limiting ideas about how to attain safety and security. They are victims of the idea that violence and punishment will make their opponents drop their resistance and violence. That is why helping these people remove the obstacles in their minds not only helps them; it helps everyone. I propose that we look deeply in order to identify our true enemy. For me, our true enemy is our way of thinking—blinded by our pride, anger, and despair.
Whenever there is violence, usually both parties are victims of these kinds of ideas and emotions. The practice recommended in Plum Village is not to destroy the human being, but to destroy the real enemy that is inside the human being. If you want to help someone with tuberculosis, you kill the bacteria, not the person. All of us are victims of the bacteria called violence and wrong perception.
In Plum Village we have helped small groups of Israelis and Palestinians to sit down together, locate the real enemy, and discuss how to remove it. When you still have a lot of anger, fear, and despair, you are not lucid or calm, and you’re not able to undertake the right action that can bring real peace. These retreats were deeply moving and very successful, and after the groups went back to the Middle East, they began to actively work to bring greater understanding and reconciliation to the people living around them.
I had a student, Sister Tri Hai, a nun who had graduated from Indiana University in Bloomington with a degree in English literature. After she went back to Vietnam and worked for peace and human rights, she was caught, arrested, and put into prison. Right there in prison, in her small cell, she practiced walking meditation, and she also shared that practice of cultivating inner peace with several other women. In order to keep her courage up so she could survive, she had to practice walking meditation. She had been taught by me how to do mindful walking, to be in the present moment, to nourish herself and her hope. She was able to help many people in prison develop their own source of spiritual strength.
In a situation like that, you survive through your spiritual life; otherwise you will go insane, because you have no hope, you are frustrated, and you suffer so much. That’s why the spiritual dimension of your life is so important. Without it you are overwhelmed by anger, despair, and fear, and you cannot help yourself, so how can you help other people? Anger is fire; fear, despair, and suspicion are fire; and they continue to burn you. We have gone through the fire, and we know how hot it
is.
Sister Tri Hai practiced walking meditation all night so she could keep herself together and not lose herself in the fire. She went back to her true home within herself. Her true home is not in Paris, London, or Tra Loc, because that home can be bombarded or taken away. Your true home is within yourself. The Buddha said, “Go home to the island within yourself. There is a safe island of self inside. Every time you suffer, every time you are lost, go back to your true home. Nobody can take that true home away from you.” This was the ultimate teaching the Buddha gave to his disciples when he was eighty years old and on the verge of passing away.
Many years ago I had a hermitage in a wood, about two hours’ drive from Paris. One morning I left the hermitage to go for a walk. I spent the whole day out there, had a picnic lunch, practiced sitting meditation, and wrote poetry. It was very beautiful in the morning, but by late afternoon I noticed that clouds were gathering and the wind was beginning to blow, so I walked back home. When I got there, my hermitage was a mess, because in the morning I had opened all the windows and the door, so that the sunshine could come in and dry everything inside. During my absence the wind had blown all the papers off my desk and scattered them everywhere. The hermitage was cold and desolate.
The first thing I did was to close the windows and the door. The second thing I did was to make a fire. When the fire began to glow, the sound of the wind became joyful for me, and I felt much better. The third thing I did was to pick up all the scattered sheets of paper, put them on the table, and put a stone on them as a paperweight. I spent twenty minutes doing that. Then, finally, I sat down close to the woodstove. The hermitage had become warm and pleasant, and I felt cozy and wonderful inside.