The Heart of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Teaching

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Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

With a headline like, “Thich Nhat Hanh, Monk, Zen Master and Activist, Dies at 95”, we were greeted with the news of the passing of Thich Nhat Hanh on January 22, 2022 in Hue, Vietnam. Headlines in the news media contained such phrases as “Buddhist monk”, “Zen master”, “peace activist”, “political reformer”, and “mindfulness teacher” to describe what Thich Nhat Hanh was in his life. Thich Nhat Hanh, to be sure, was all of what these phrases describe in his life. No single phrase, however, will suffice to describe what Thich Nhat Hanh was in his life, considering that he was an inspiration for millions of people worldwide: peace activists, monastic brothers and sisters, lay practitioners, educators, and leaders in business and government.

As a Buddhist monk with his unwavering commitment to Engaged Buddhism, Thich Nhat Hanh has touched the lives of millions of people worldwide with his thoughts, speeches, and actions. For those of us who are familiar with his teaching of “no birth and no death”: “Our true nature is the nature of no birth and no death.” (No Death, No Fear, 2002, p.7), Thich Nhat Hanh, or our beloved teacher “Thay”, did not die but simply ceased to exist in the form of the five aggregates in the conventional world. Thay will continue to live among us in his “continuation body” with his teaching he has shared with us in his dharma talks and writings: “I am continued in my friends, students, and monastic disciples. I am continued in the countless people all over the world whom I have never met but who have read my books, listened to one of my talks, or practiced mindfulness with a local community or in one of our practice centers.” (The Art of Living, 2017, p.72)

As a Zen Master with his deep understanding of the Buddha’s teaching, Thich Nhat Hanh has nurtured generations of students of Buddhism with his accessible expositions of Buddhist philosophy and psychology. To say “No Mud, No Lotus”, with a lotus flower in his hand, was Thay’s way of teaching the Buddhist concept of “dependent origination”, which he rephrased as “interbeing”: “Interbeing is the teaching of the Buddha that everything is made by and made up of everything else.” (Happiness: Essential Mindfulness Practice, 2009, p.70) The Buddhist concept of “consciousness”, in Thay’s exposition, was made into a house with two levels: “According to Buddhist psychology, our consciousness contains the store consciousness at the base, and the mind consciousness in the upper level. In the store consciousness there are many seeds, both wholesome and unwholesome. These seeds are the results of our past actions, and they can either manifest or remain dormant according to how we attend to them.” (Peaceful Action, Open Heart, 2008, p.260)

As for the question of life and death, what Thay urges us to do is to look deeply. By looking deeply, we begin to see the things others cannot see, including the wrong views that lie at the base of our suffering: (1) the idea that we are a separate self cut off from the rest of the world; (2) the view that we are only this body, and that when we die we cease to exist; and (3) the idea that what we are looking for—whether it be happiness, heaven, or love—can be found only outside us in a distant future. Thay challenges us to break away from these wrong views, for “when we can break away from these wrong views, we can master the art of living happily in peace and freedom.” (The Art of Living, 2017, p.3)

When we can break away from these wrong views, we acquire Right View, which is one of the eight factors of the Noble Eightfold Path. What is Right View, then? “Right View is not an ideology, a system, or even a path. It is the insight we have into the reality of life, a living insight that fills us with understanding, peace and love.” (The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, 1998, p.54) That insight into the reality of life we seek comes from practice. This is where “mindfulness” comes in, for “In Buddhism, mindfulness is the key. Mindfulness is the energy that sheds light on all things and all activities, producing the power of concentration, bringing forth deep insight and awakening.” (Zen Keys, 1974, pp.25-26)

Mindfulness is what Engaged Buddhism is all about: “Engaged Buddhism means we practice mindfulness wherever we are, whatever we are doing, at any time. When we are alone, walking, sitting, drinking our tea, or making our breakfast, that can also be engaged Buddhism.” What is important for us to realize is that our practice is not for ourselves, as Thay goes on to say: “Engaged Buddhism is not just self-help. It helps us feel stronger and more stable and also more connected to others and committed to the happiness of all beings.” (Good Citizens: Creating Enlightened Society, 2008, p.52)

Engaged Buddhism is the brand of Buddhism Thay has advocated in order to create Enlightened Society in the world in the twenty-first century, for the twentieth-century world was characterized by individualism and mindless consumption that have brought about the division between rich and poor societies and the crisis in our natural environment and our planet. What does it take to create Enlightened Society, then?

In the first place, we need to practice “mindful living”: “The practice of mindful living can be described as the practice of happiness, the practice of love. The capacity of being happy, the capacity of being loving, is what we have to cultivate in our lives.” (Teachings on Love, 1995, p.92) We must, then, develop new forms of solidarity and togetherness, extending that capacity of being happy, that capacity of being loving, to include all living beings. The teaching that guides our path is already with us, for “The teaching of the Buddha … opens up a path of living, not just for personal benefit, but for our whole species. We have the power to decide the destiny of our planet.” (The Art of Living, 2017, p.6) If the destiny of our planet is in our hands, what do we need to do? We have to see, Thay teaches us, that we are Mother Earth and that Mother Earth is us: “If we look at the Earth as just a block of matter lying outside of us, then we have not yet truly seen the Earth. We have to see that we are a part of the Earth, and the entire Earth is in us. We have to see that we are Mother Earth and that Mother Earth is us.” (The Science of the Buddha, 2012, p.66)

To keep on practicing “mindful living” is what we can do to preserve the legacy of Thay’s teaching. But mere preservation is not enough. Our practice will gather collective energy when we take refuge in our friends and communities around the world, for one Buddha is not enough and collective awakening is needed to change the world to create Enlightened Society. Mindfulness will show us the way: “When you practice mindful breathing, mindful walking, mindful sitting, you bring peace and serenity into yourself, you get understanding and compassion, and you radiate peace while you walk, sit and speak. Love, understanding, and peace can be seen, and that is the living Dharma.” (One Buddha Is Not Enough: A Story of Collective Awakening, 2010, p.213)

Which Earth Did We Pitch On: A Splendid One or A Blighted One?

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Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

There is a passage in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, where Tess and her little brother Abraham engage in a conversation about stars while delivering beehives to the retailers in Casterbridge on the family wagon as their father did not wake up to do the job himself because of his excessive drinking the previous day. When told by Tess that most stars are splendid and sound, except for a few blighted ones, Abraham asks her: “Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?” Tess’s answer was: “A blighted one.”

As a country girl with no formal education, Tess was not able to give a more detailed answer than this to satisfy her little brother’s curiosity. But was Tess wrong about her description of the kind of star the earth was? When Tess of the d’Urbervilles was published in 1891, nobody had heard of “global warming.” As a matter of fact, it was only in the last few decades of the twentieth century that the phenomenon of “global warming” started to attract the attention of the general public, after the first reference to it in a scientific journal in 1975. If so, Tess’s—or Thomas Hardy’s—use of the expression “a blighted star” could be said to have anticipated the kind of climate change the earth would go through with global warming, including desertification of drylands around the world.

It should be noted that the earth, in the minds of so-called primitive peoples, had never been a blighted star but a life-giving and bountiful planet as exemplified by the Winnebago Indian saying: “Holy Mother Earth, the trees and all nature are witnesses of your thoughts and deeds.” Stewart Udall recognized, as he should have as one who was the Secretary of the Interior under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, such attitude of primitive peoples towards the earth when he stated: “The most common trait of all primitive peoples is a reverence for the life-giving earth, and the native American shared this elemental ethic: the land was alive to his loving touch, and he, its son, was brother to all creatures.” (The Quiet Crisis, 1963) If primitive peoples had maintained a reverence for the life-giving and bountiful earth, it was those of us who call ourselves civilized that have transformed it into an inhospitable planet for all creatures, with the destruction of rain forests, the polluting of rivers and lakes, and the burning of fossil fuels in our passion to move around and enhance our material standards of living.

It is incumbent on us humans, however, to take care of the earth as the habitat for all creatures. Edward Wilson, an American naturalist and writer who passed away on December 26, 2021, reminds us of the need to preserve biodiversity as our sacred duty because the earth is our home, and “the human impact on biodiversity, to put the matter as briefly as possible, is an attack on ourselves.” (The Meaning of Human Existence, 2014) Given that Edward Wilson used to be affectionately called “Ant Man” for his exhaustive study of ants, it is ironic that Donald Robert Perry Marquis, a fellow American writer, had warned of the possibility of the earth turning into a planet habitable only for insects like ants: “it wont be long now it wont be long/ man is making deserts of the earth/ it wont be long now/ before man will have used up/ so that nothing but ants/ and centipedes and scorpions/ can find a living on it” (archy does his part, 1935).

What happens to us humans when the earth becomes inhabitable? Some people are seriously contemplating the possibility of emigration, including scholars as evidenced by such recent titles as Emigrating Beyond Earth and Human Migration to Space. For business tycoons such as Jeff Bezos and Eon Musk, human emigration to other planets is not a futuristic dream but a worthwhile business venture as space-age technology is already available to us to carry us out of the earth. While technology is there, we humans are not ready for leaving the earth. As a matter of fact, Edward Wilson goes as far as calling emigration into space as “a dangerous delusion,” abandoning our sacred duty to take care of the earth as a life-giving and bountiful planet: “It is an especially dangerous delusion if we see emigration into space as a solution to be taken when we have used up this planet.” (The Social Conquest of Earth, 2012)

If emigration into space is indeed a dangerous delusion, what are we to do? After all, it was not that we humans happened to pitch on a blighted star, as Tess’s little brother Abraham says. If the earth was once a life-giving and bountiful planet for us humans, it is our sacred duty to keep it that way by our constant effort to maintain biodiversity, with a full recognition of the fact that we share it with all other creatures. It would be useful to remind ourselves that the earth is “a little space ship,” as Adlai Stevenson, an American diplomat, so wonderfully put it in his 1965 speech to the United Nations: “We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.”