Hudson Valley Commemorates Renowned Zen Teacher Thich Nhat Hanh

HUDSON VALLEY, NY — Ceremonies continue this week to commemorate Thich Nhat Hanh, the peace activist, teacher and contemplative who created Engaged Buddhism and helped spread the practice of mindfulness in the West. Nhat Hanh died Jan. 22 at the age of 95.

According to Nhat Hanh, “Buddhism means to be awake — mindful of what is happening in one’s body, feelings, mind and in the world. If you are awake, you cannot do otherwise than act compassionately to help relieve suffering you see around you. So Buddhism must be engaged in the world. If it is not engaged, it is not Buddhism.”

Blue Cliff Monastery, the mindfulness practice and monastic training center founded in 2007 by Nhat Hanh in Pine Bush, New York, has a list of ceremonies and suggested practices. Find it here.

Blue Cliff is one of the international family of centers connected to Plum Village, the West’s largest and most active Buddhist monastery and retreat center.

It is just one of Nhat Hanh's deep connections in the Hudson Valley.

Nhat Hanh served on the advisory board and the staff of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a global organization dedicated to creating peace based for many years in Nyack, New York.

"The Fellowship of Reconciliation mourns the death today of our teacher, friend, and lifelong member, Thich Nhat Hanh," Ethan Vesely-Flad, FOR Director of National Organizing / Interim Co-Executive Director told Patch. "In 1965, 'Thay' hosted a FOR interfaith delegation in Vietnam, and the following year he came to the U.S. under FOR sponsorship for a nationwide speaking tour. FOR facilitated introductions to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Trappist monk Thomas Merton, Jesuit priest and anti-war activist Daniel Berrigan, and others who would become close friends and colleagues of Nhat Hanh.

Having joined the Fellowship in May 1966, he soon accepted a leadership position in the movement, serving for more than a decade as vice-chair of the organization and inspiring the creation of the affiliated Buddhist Peace Fellowship in 1978. As his meditations and books on engaged Buddhism, mindfulness, and nonviolence have inspired countless millions, Thay's teachings on Beloved Community continue to sustain and guide FOR peacemakers across the globe."

At FOR he worked particularly closely with two Hudson Valley residents, Alfred Hassler and the Rev. Richard Deats, who worked and taught in conflict zones around the world promoting nonviolent action.

A documentary and graphic book about three heroes of non-violence — Nhat Hanh, Hassler and Sister Chan Khong — was released in 2015.

Hassler, a resident of Monroe, New York, died in 1991 at Good Samaritan Hospital in Suffern. Nhat Hanh told the story of his and Sister Chan Khong's visit to Hassler's deathbed in his book "No Death, No Fear." He was in the Hudson Valley that April to lead a retreat at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in Rhinebeck.

Nhat Hanh's relationship with the institute spanned more than three decades.

Born as Nguyen Xuan Bao in 1926 in Hue and ordained at age 16, Nhat Hanh distilled Buddhist teachings on compassion and suffering into easily grasped guidance over a lifetime dedicated to working for peace. In 1961 he went to the United States to study, teaching comparative religion for a time at Princeton and Columbia universities.

For most of the remainder of his life, he lived in exile at Plum Village, the retreat center he founded in southern France. Surviving a stroke in 2014 that left him unable to speak, Nhat Hanh moved from Plum Village to Vietnam in October 2018, spending his final years at the Tu Hieu Pagoda, the monastery where he was ordained nearly 80 years earlier.

In France and in talks and retreats around the world, he introduced Zen Buddhism, at its essence, as peace through compassionate listening. Still and steadfast in his brown robes, he exuded an air of watchful, amused calm, sometimes sharing a stage with the somewhat livelier Tibetan Buddhist leader Dalai Lama.

“The peace we seek cannot be our personal possession. We need to find an inner peace which makes it possible for us to become one with those who suffer, and to do something to help our brothers and sisters, which is to say, ourselves,” Nhat Hanh wrote in one of his dozens of books, “The Sun My Heart.”

The Dalai Lama said he was saddened by the death of “his friend and spiritual brother.”

“In his peaceful opposition to the Vietnam War, his support for Martin Luther King and most of all his dedication to sharing with others not only how mindfulness and compassion contribute to inner peace, but also how individuals cultivating peace of mind contribute to genuine world peace, the Venerable lived a truly meaningful life,” he said.

Nhat Hanh plunged into anti-war activism in 1964 as the Vietnam War was escalating. He was 38. There, he founded the Order of Inter-being, which espouses “engaged Buddhism” dedicated to nonviolence, mindfulness and social service.

In 1966, he met the U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in what was a remarkable encounter for both. Nhat Hanh told King he was a “Bodhisattva,” or enlightened being, for his efforts to promote social justice.

The monk’s efforts to promote reconciliation between the U.S.-backed South and communist North Vietnam so impressed King that a year later he nominated Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In his exchanges with King, Nhat Hanh explained one of the rare controversies in his long life of advocating for peace — over the immolations of some Vietnamese monks and nuns to protest the war.

“I said this was not suicide, because in a difficult situation like Vietnam, to make your voice heard is difficult. So sometimes we have to burn ourselves alive in order for our voice to be heard so that is an act of compassion that you do that, the act of love and not of despair,” he said in an interview with U.S. talk show host Oprah Winfrey. “Jesus Christ died in the same spirit.”

Sulak Sivaraksa, a Thai academic who embraced Nhat Hanh’s idea of socially engaged Buddhism, said the Zen master had “suffered more than most monks and had been involved more for social justice.”

“In Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s, he was very exposed to young people, and his society was in turmoil, in crisis. He was really in a difficult position, between the devil and the deep blue sea — the Communists on the one hand, the CIA on the other hand. In such a situation, he has been very honest — as an activist, as a contemplative monk, as a poet, and as a clear writer,” Sivaraksa was quoted as saying.

Both North and South Vietnam barred Nhat Hanh from returning home after he went abroad in 1966 to campaign against the war, leaving him, he said, “like a bee without a beehive.”

He ended up founding a retreat center in France. Plum Village grew to be the largest Buddhist monastery in the West. He taught mindfulness and meditative practices, lectured, wrote many best-selling books, including "Being Peace" and "The Art of Communication." He was known to his thousands of followers around the world as "Thay," which means teacher.

He was only allowed back into Vietnam in 2005, when the communist-ruled government welcomed him back in the first of several visits.

The dramatic homecoming seemed to signal an easing of controls on religion. Nhat Hanh’s followers were invited by the abbot of Bat Nha to settle at his mountain monastery, where they remained for several years until relations with the authorities began to sour over Nhat Hanh’s calls for an end to government control over religion. However, by late 2009 to early 2010, Nhat Hanh’s followers were evicted from the monastery and from another temple where they had taken refuge.

Over nearly eight decades, Nhat Hanh’s teachings were refined into concepts accessible to all.
To weather the storms of life and realize happiness, he counseled always a mindful “return to the breath,” even while doing routine chores like sweeping and washing dishes.

“I try to live every moment like that, relaxed, dwelling peacefully in the present moment and respond to events with compassion,” he told Winfrey.

Nhat Hanh moved to Thailand in late 2016 and then was allowed to move to Vietnam in late 2018, where he was receiving traditional medicine treatments for the after-effects of his stroke and enjoyed “strolls” around the temple grounds in his wheelchair, according to the Buddhist online newsletter LionsRoar.com.

It was a quiet, simple end to an extraordinary life, one entirely in keeping with his love for taking joy from the humblest aspects of life. “No mud, no lotus,” says one of his many brief sayings.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.