Thich Nhat Hanh
In How to Relax, Thich Nhat Hanh explains how we can achieve deep relaxation, control stress and refresh our minds. He guides us towards healing and calm, at ease in our own company, so that we can all reap the benefits of relaxation no matter where we are.
ISBN 9781846045189
Order direct from www.penguin.co.uk
Thich Nhat Hanh
Thich Nhat Hanh brings his signature clarity, compassion and humour to the thorny question of how to love. He shows us how to open our hearts to ourselves and embrace the world.
ISBN 9781846045172
Order direct from www.penguin.co.uk
Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese Buddhist Zen Master, poet, scholar and peace activist. During the Vietnam War his work for peace and reconciliation moved Martin Luther King to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967. He founded the Van Hanh Buddhist University in Saigon and the School of Youth for Social Service. He was exiled as a result of his work for peace but continued his activism, rescuing boat people and helping to resettle Vietnamese refugees. He has written more than 100 books, which have sold millions of copies around the world. He now lives in France where he founded a Buddhist community and meditation centre.
Thich Nhat Hanh was born Nguyen Xuan Bao in 1926 in Central Vietnam during the French colonial occupation. In his youth, he was deeply affected by images of the Buddha radiating peace in stark contrast to the strife and suffering he witnessed all around him. At sixteen he asked his parents’ permission to become a monk, and he entered Tu Hieu monastery in Hue, ordaining as a novice monk in the Linji (Japanese: Rinzai) school of the Vietnamese Zen tradition.
The fundamental training of a novice in Vietnam is essentially to practice being present in every moment and to do whatever one is doing with full awareness. Nhat Hanh lived amongst the forests and gardens of Tu Hieu with his community of brother monks, studying and practicing under the guidance of the abbot, a wise and experienced teacher who loved and understood his students.
After three years, Nhat Hanh left Tu Hieu to attend the Buddhist Institute in Hue. He then went to Saigon, the center of the movement to renew Buddhism and make it relevant to people’s everyday lives and the reality of modern society. He helped to found Van Hanh University, an Institute of Higher Buddhist Studies, and he became the editor of the journal Vietnamese Buddhism, which gave creative Buddhist thinkers a voice and encouraged the unification of all the schools of Buddhism in Vietnam.
The journal was closed down after two years by the conservative Buddhist leadership. Nhat Hanh continued to teach and write, and his writings continued to be opposed by the Buddhist leadership and the increasingly repressive and dictatorial Diem regime.
In 1962 Nhat Hanh went to the US to study comparative religion at Princeton University. In 1963 he was offered a teaching position at Columbia University. After the fall of the Diem regime in 1963, the Buddhist leadership was more open to reform, so Nhat Hanh cut short his stay in the US and returned to Vietnam in 1964 to see the fulfillment of a dream, the founding of the Unified Buddhist Church, which brought together all the various Buddhist congregations of Vietnam.
The war in Vietnam continued to escalate, causing more and more chaos and devastation in the towns and countryside. Whole villages were destroyed, resulting in many refugees. In 1964 Nhat Hanh founded the School of Youth for Social Service (SYSS), training young social workers, both monastic and lay, to go into villages, live amongst the people, help them rebuild and reorganize their villages, and help refugees relocate. Because Nhat Hanh and the SYSS workers refused to take any side other than the side of helping people, they were viewed with suspicion by the Communist and pro-American forces alike. But their love, dedication, and ethical way of working won the hearts of many people. Many of Nhat Hanh’s students, friends, and colleagues were killed or injured during this time.
As the war continued to intensify, Nhat Hanh decided to return to the source of the war, traveling to Washington to call for peace and going on a North American speaking tour to inform people in the United States of the devastating effects of the war on the people of Vietnam. It was at this time that Nhat Hanh met and made a deep impression on the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who later nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. When the government of South Vietnam heard of these activities, they refused to let Nhat Hanh return to Vietnam, and he became an exile in the West, eventually settling in France.
This was a lonely and difficult time for Nhat Hanh. There were very few Vietnamese people outside Vietnam at the time. Everything he knew, his work, and his students were back in Vietnam. But gradually he came to know the people, trees, birds, and the fruits and flowers of the West. He made friends with adults and children in whatever country he found himself, and he began to feel at home everywhere. Wherever he went, he befriended people, whether they were Catholic priests, Protestant ministers, rabbis, imams, or trade or humanitarian workers. Nhat Hanh continued to go on speaking tours in North America, Europe, and Asia, sharing his methods of practice and voicing the desire of the Vietnamese people for peace. In 1969 he became the representative of the Buddhist Peace Delegation at the Paris Peace Accords, and was able to express the desire of the Vietnamese people for an end to the war.
The end of the war came finally in 1975, but the Communist regime, the new government of Vietnam, was also not willing to allow Nhat Hanh to return home. The Unified Buddhist Church was outlawed, and many of its leading monks were imprisoned. In 1976, while at a conference in Singapore, he heard of the plight of the Vietnamese boatpeople, refugees from Vietnam who had left their country by boat. Many of them died at sea. In unseaworthy boats with little or no food and water, they were at the mercy of storms and sea pirates. If they finally reached shore, they were often pushed back out to sea because many countries would not accept boat-people or had very low quotas for accepting refugees.
Nhat Hanh and his colleagues rented boats, and joined by friends from Europe, brought food and water to the boatpeople, trying to make arrangements with everyone from fishermen and police to government officials, in order to find a place for the boatpeople to land. At the same time they were making efforts to inform the world of the plight of these refugees in an attempt to influence governments around the world to increase their quotas and allow the boatpeople to resettle.
Upon his return from Singapore, Nhat Hanh continued to live in France and to lead retreats and share his teachings in many countries. He continued to support social work efforts in Vietnam and to work for the release of imprisoned monks. He founded a hermitage, the Sweet Potato Community, outside Paris where he went to walk in the forest, grow vegetables, write, and practice.
When this became too small for the number of students who wanted to come and practice with him, Nhat Hanh founded Plum Village in 1982, a practice center and monastery in southwest France, where he still lives. There are currently nine practice centers and monasteries worldwide, in the US, Europe, Asia, and Australia, where his monastic students, today numbering over six hundred, share mindfulness practices in what is now known as the Plum Village Tradition. There are also over one thousand lay Sanghas, communities of people practicing together, worldwide.
In 2004 the Vietnamese government invited Nhat Hanh to visit Vietnam after almost forty years of exile. During his three-month visit in 2005, he led retreats for monks, nuns, and laypeople—mostly young people from all over the world. He had in-depth exchanges with leaders of the Buddhist community as well as with leaders of the government and Communist Party. He returned again in 2007, this time to lead ceremonies to commemorate those who had died in the war and to bring peace, healing, and reconciliation to the survivors, so their suffering would not be passed on to the younger generations. He visited Vietnam for the last time in 2008.
Nhat Hanh continued to travel relentlessly throughout the world to teach and lead retreats, right up until late 2014, when he suffered a serious stroke. In an extraordinary teaching career spanning sixty-five years, Nhat Hanh has taught hundreds of thousands of people, on every continent and from every walk of life. He has led retreats for families, health-care workers, business people, veterans, young people, psychotherapists, teachers, artists, environmentalists, members of congress, and parliamentarians. Many of these students and friends refer to Nhat Hanh affectionately as “Thay,” which means “teacher” in Vietnamese. On his eightieth birthday, when asked if he planned to retire, Nhat Hanh 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.”
‘My life is my teaching. My life is my message.’
Thought provoking and inspiring, At Home In The World is a collection of autobiographical stories from the life of Zen master and peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh. They range from tales of his childhood and the traditions of rural Vietnam, to his years as a teenage novice, young teacher and writer in war-torn Vietnam. Later we see him travelling widely to teach mindfulness, founding practice centres and monasteries around the globe, and influencing world leaders.
The tradition of Zen teaching stories goes back thousands of years. Here, Thich Nhat Hanh uses storytelling to share important insights drawn from his own rich and remarkable life, and from the lives of others.
Monastics and laypeople practice the art of mindful living in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh at retreat communities worldwide.
To reach any of these communities, or for information about individuals and families joining for a practice period, please contact:
Plum Village 13 Martineau 33580 Dieulivol, France plumvillage.org
Magnolia Grove Monastery 123 Towles Rd. Batesville, MS 38606 magnoliagrovemonastery.org
Blue Cliff Monastery 3 Mindfulness Road Pine Bush, NY 12566 bluecliffmonastery.org
Deer Park Monastery 2499 Melru Lane Escondido, CA 92026 deerparkmonastery.org
The Mindfulness Bell, a journal of the art of mindful living in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, is published three times a year by Plum Village.
To subscribe or to see the worldwide directory of Sanghas, visit mindfulnessbell.org.
A portion of the proceeds from your book purchase supports Thich Nhat Hanh’s peace work and mindfulness teachings around the world. For more information on how you can help, visit www.thichnhathanhfoundation.org.
Thank you.
When I was four years old, my mother used to bring me a cookie every time she returned from the market. I would go to the front yard and take my time eating it, sometimes taking half an hour or forty-five minutes to eat one cookie. I would take a small bite and look up at the sky. Then I would touch the dog with my feet and take another small bite. I just enjoyed being there, with the sky, the earth, the bamboo thickets, the cat, the dog, the flowers. I was able to spend so much time eating my cookie because I did not have much to worry about. I was not thinking about the future; I was not regretting the past. I was dwelling entirely in the present moment, with my cookie, the dog, the bamboo thickets, the cat, and everything.
It is possible to eat our meals as slowly and joyfully as I ate the cookie of my childhood. Maybe you have the impression that you have lost the cookie of your childhood, but I am sure it is still there, somewhere in your heart. Everything is still there, and if you really want it, you can find it. Eating mindfully is a most important practice of meditation. We can eat in a way that we can bring back to life the cookie of our childhood. The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.
Life in Vietnam when I was young was quite different from the way it is now. A birthday party, a poetry reading, or the anniversary of a family member’s death would last all day, not only a few hours. You could arrive and leave at any time. You didn’t need to have a car or a bike—you just walked. If you lived far away, you set out the day before and spent the night at a friend’s house along the way. No matter what time you arrived, you were welcomed and served food. When the first four people had arrived, they were served together at a table. If you were the fifth, you waited until three others came so you could eat together with them.
The word “leisure” in Chinese is written with the character for door or window. Inside the door or window, there is the character for moon. It means that only when you are truly at leisure do you have time to see and enjoy the moon. Today, most of us don’t have such luxury. We have more money and more material comfort, but we aren’t really happier because we simply do not have time to enjoy each other’s company.
There is a way to live our daily life that transforms normal life into a spiritual life. Even very simple things, like drinking tea with mindfulness can be a deeply spiritual experience, which can enrich our lives. Why would people spend two hours just drinking one cup of tea? From a business viewpoint, this is a waste of time. But time is not money. Time has much more value than money. Time is life. Money is nothing compared with life. In two hours of drinking tea together, we don’t get money, but we do get life.
Some people may ask, “How can I possibly be happy cleaning the toilet?” But in fact we’re lucky to have a toilet to clean. When I was a novice monk in Vietnam, we didn’t have any toilets at all. I lived in a temple with over one hundred people and not a single toilet, and yet we managed to survive. Around the temple there were bushes and hills, so we just went up on the hill. There were no rolls of toilet paper up on the hill—you had to take dry banana leaves or hope to find some dead leaves you could use. Even when I was a child at home, before becoming a monk, we didn’t have a toilet either. Only very few people were rich enough to have toilets. Everybody else had to go into the rice fields or up on the hill. At that time, there were twenty-five million people in Vietnam, most of them without toilets. So having a toilet to clean at all can be enough to make us happy. We can be truly happy when we recognize that we already have more than enough conditions for happiness.
One day when I was a child, I looked into the large clay water jar in the front yard that we used for collecting water and I saw a very beautiful leaf at the bottom. It had so many colors. I wanted to take out and play with it, but my arm was too short to reach the bottom. So I used a stick to try to get it out. It was so difficult I became impatient. I stirred twenty times, thirty times, and yet the leaf didn’t come up to the surface. So I gave up and threw the stick away.
When I came back a few minutes later, I was surprised to see the leaf floating on the surface of the water, and I picked it up. While I was away the water had continued to turn, and had brought the leaf up to the surface. This is how our unconscious mind works. When we have a problem to solve, or when we want more insight into a situation, we need to entrust the task of finding a solution to the deeper level of our consciousness. Struggling with our thinking mind will not help.
Before going to sleep you may say to yourself: “Tomorrow I want to wake up at 4:30.” The next day you naturally wake up at 4:30. Our unconscious mind, which in Buddhism is called our “store consciousness,” knows how to listen. It collaborates with the thinking part of our mind that we use a lot in daily life. When we meditate, we don’t only use our mind consciousness; we need to use and trust our store consciousness. When we plant the seed of a question or problem in our consciousness, we need to trust that eventually an insight will rise to the surface. Deep breathing, looking deeply, and allowing ourselves simply to be, will help our store consciousness offer the best insight.
When I was a small boy of seven or eight, I happened to see a drawing of the Buddha on the cover of a Buddhist magazine. The Buddha was sitting on the grass, very peacefully, and I was impressed. I thought the artist must have had a lot of peace and calm within himself at the time to be able to draw such a special image. Just looking at the drawing made me happy, because so many people around me at the time were not very calm or happy at all.
Seeing this peaceful image, the idea came to me that I wanted to become someone like that Buddha, someone who could sit very still and calm. I think that was the moment when I first wanted to become a monk, although I didn’t know how to describe it that way at the time.
The Buddha is not a god; he was very much a human being like the rest of us. Like many of us, he suffered greatly as a teenager. He saw the suffering in his kingdom and he saw how his father, King Suddhodana, tried to reduce the suffering around him, but seemed to be helpless. To young Siddhartha, politics seemed ineffective. Even as a teenager, he was searching for a way out of suffering. Although he had been born a prince, all the material comforts were not enough to make him happy, at home, or at peace. He left the palace where he was raised in order to find a way out of suffering and to find his true home.
I think that many young people today feel the same as the young Siddhartha. We are searching for something good, true, and beautiful to follow. But looking around we can’t find what we’re looking for and we become disillusioned. Even when I was very young, I had that kind of feeling in me. That’s why, when I saw the drawing of the Buddha, I was so happy. I just wanted to be like him.
I learned that if I practiced well, I could be like a buddha. Anyone who is peaceful, loving, and understanding can be called a buddha. There were many buddhas in the past, there are buddhas in the present moment, and there will be many buddhas in the future. Buddha is not the name of a particular person; buddha is just a common name to designate anyone who has a high degree of peace and who has a high degree of understanding and compassion. All of us are capable of being called by this name.
When I was a child, I used to enjoy playing with a kaleidoscope that I made from a tube and a few pieces of ground glass. When I turned the tube, many wonderful patterns and colors revealed themselves. Every time I made a small movement of my fingers, one image would disappear and give way to the next. I didn’t cry at all when the first spectacle disappeared, because I knew that nothing was lost; another beautiful sight always followed.
When we look into a kaleidoscope, we see a beautiful symmetrical image; and whenever we turn the kaleidoscope, the image disappears. Can we describe this as a birth or a death? Or is the image merely a manifestation? After this manifestation, there’s another manifestation that’s equally beautiful—nothing is lost. I have seen people die very peacefully, with a smile, because they understand that birth and death are only waves on the surface of the ocean, not the ocean itself, just like the beautiful images in the kaleidoscope.
There is no birth and no death. There is only continuation.
When I was growing up, I lived in the province of Thanh Hoa in North Vietnam. One day, our schoolteacher told us that we were going on a trip to the top of a nearby mountain called Na Son. He told us that on top of the mountain there lived a hermit—a monk who lived alone and sat quietly day and night to become calm and peaceful like the Buddha. I had never met a hermit before, and I was very excited.
The day before the trip, we prepared some food for our picnic. We cooked rice, rolled it into balls, and wrapped them in banana leaves. We prepared sesame seeds, peanuts, and salt to dip the rice in. We also boiled some water to bring along. Early the next morning, we set out for a long hike to reach the foot of the mountain. Once there, my friends and I started to climb as quickly as we could. We did not know how to practice walking meditation yet. We walked very fast all the way up the mountain.
When we reached the top, we were very tired. We had drunk all of our water on the way up. I looked around for the hermit but did not see him anywhere. I only saw his hut made of bamboo and straw. Inside I discovered a small cot and an altar made of bamboo, but no hermit. Maybe he had heard us coming up the mountain and was hiding somewhere away from the noise and the many children.
It was time to have lunch, but I wasn’t hungry. I was so disappointed that I hadn’t seen the hermit. I left my friends and started climbing further up the mountain hoping to find him. As I walked deeper into the forest, I heard the sound of dripping water. It was a beautiful sound. I started to climb in the direction of that sound, and soon I found a natural well, a small pool surrounded by big rocks of many colors. The water was so clear that I could see all the way to the bottom. I was very thirsty. I knelt down, scooped some water in my palms, and drank it. The water tasted so good. I had never tasted anything as good as that water. I felt completely satisfied; I did not need or want anything at all—even the desire to meet the hermit was gone. I had the feeling that I had met the hermit. I imagined that perhaps the hermit had transformed himself into the well.
I was tired. I lay down on the ground to rest so I could spend a few more minutes with the well. I looked up and saw the branch of a tree against the blue sky. I closed my eyes and soon I fell into a deep sleep. I don’t know how long I slept. When I woke up, I didn’t know where I was. Then I saw the branch of the tree against the sky and the wonderful well. I remembered everything.
It was time to go back to join my classmates. Reluctantly I said goodbye to the well and began to walk back down. As I walked out of the forest, from deep within me a sentence came to my mind. It was like a one-line poem: I have tasted the most delicious water in the world.
I sat down to eat with my friends. They were glad to see me and asked me where I had been, but I had no desire to talk. I wanted to cherish and keep my experience to myself a little longer, as it had touched me deeply. I sat down on the ground and ate my lunch quietly. The rice and the sesame seeds tasted so good.
It was many years ago that I climbed that mountain. But the image of the well and the quiet, peaceful sound of the dripping water are still alive inside me. You too may have met your hermit. Maybe as a rock, a tree, a star, or a beautiful sunset.