Thich Nhat Hanh

Nguyễn Xuân Bảo was born in 1926 in central Vietnam and became a novice monk at sixteen at Tu Hieu Pagoda in Hue. He was given [[buddhism|the Dharma]] name Thich Nhat Hanh — Thich is the family name taken by all monastics of the Vietnamese tradition (from Thích-ca, the Vietnamese form of Shakya, the Buddha’s family name); Nhat Hanh means one action. He was a fully ordained monk by the early 1950s and during his twenties combined traditional monastic training with study at Saigon University, where he encountered Western literature, philosophy, and the Catholic theology that would shape his later interreligious work.

Engaged Buddhism

The crisis that defined his early career was the Vietnam War. From the early 1960s onward, Thich Nhat Hanh and a small circle of monastic and lay co-workers founded the School of Youth for Social Service in Saigon, which trained young people to do village relief work in war-torn rural Vietnam — rebuilding bombed villages, evacuating wounded, distributing food, establishing schools and clinics. Thirteen of these workers were killed during the war; Thich Nhat Hanh later said that the work taught him that contemplative practice and active care for suffering were not separable.

He coined the term [[engaged-buddhism|engaged Buddhism]] to describe this orientation — Buddhism that engages directly with social, political, and ecological reality rather than withdrawing from it. The term has since been adopted by an international movement (Sulak Sivaraksa in Thailand, [[ambedkar|B.R. Ambedkar]]‘s Dalit Buddhists in India, the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement in Sri Lanka, others) but Thich Nhat Hanh was its principal early articulator.

In 1966 he traveled to the United States and Europe to advocate for peace; the South Vietnamese government refused to allow him to return, and he lived in exile for the next fifty-two years. Martin Luther King Jr. nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967 (the prize was not awarded that year, in part because of King’s nomination). [[thomas-merton|Thomas Merton]] met him at Gethsemani in 1966 and wrote a public statement in support of him; the friendship that began in that meeting was one of the most consequential Christian-Buddhist exchanges of the period.

Plum Village

In 1982, settled in southwestern France, Thich Nhat Hanh and his closest student Sister Chân Không founded [[plum-village|Plum Village]] — a monastic community that would grow into the largest community of monks and nuns in the Thiền tradition outside Vietnam. From [[plum-village|Plum Village]] he taught — through retreats attended by thousands annually, through more than 130 books, through the Order of Interbeing (a community of lay practitioners who take simplified monastic vows), and through visits to schools, prisons, parliaments, and corporations.

His teaching emphasized:

• Mindful breathing as the foundational practice — a single full breath, attended to, is the basic Buddhist meditation.
• Interbeing — his term, drawing on the Mahāyāna doctrine of [[dependent-origination|dependent origination]], for the recognition that nothing exists independently. Every flower contains [[the-cloud-of-unknowing|the cloud]], the soil, the sunshine, the gardener, the air. The recognition has clear ecological and social implications and was central to his teaching.
• The Five Mindfulness Trainings — accessible reframings of the traditional Buddhist precepts (no killing, no stealing, no sexual misconduct, no lying, no intoxication) into present-day practical commitments.
• Walking meditation as a daily practice — short or long, alone or in silent group.
• The Bell of Mindfulness — at [[plum-village|Plum Village]] and increasingly elsewhere, a bell rings periodically and everyone stops what they are doing to take three breaths in mindfulness.

Return and death

In 2014 Thich Nhat Hanh suffered a severe stroke from which he never fully recovered the use of speech. In 2018 — after a delicate negotiation with the Vietnamese authorities — he returned to Tu Hieu Pagoda, the temple where he had been ordained as a sixteen-year-old. He died there in his sleep on January 22, 2022 at age ninety-five.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[zen]]
• Parallels: [[thomas-merton]] · [[spirituality]]
• Member of: [[person]]

Sources

1. Thich Nhat Hanh. The Miracle of Mindfulness. Beacon, 1975. Source class: book / primary.
2. Thich Nhat Hanh. Peace Is Every Step. Bantam, 1991. Source class: book / primary.
3. Thich Nhat Hanh. Living Buddha, Living Christ. Riverhead, 1995. Source class: book / primary, Christian-Buddhist.
4. Thich Nhat Hanh. The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching. Broadway, 1998. Source class: book / primary, comprehensive Dharma teaching.
5. Thich Nhat Hanh. Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha. Parallax, 1991. Source class: book / primary, biography of the Buddha.
6. Sister Chan Khong. Learning True Love: Practicing Buddhism in a Time of War. Parallax, 1993 (rev. 2007). Source class: book / co-worker memoir.

Lenses still to grow

• The early Engaged Buddhist movement in Vietnam, the School of Youth for Social Service, the thirteen killed workers.
• The Merton meeting of 1966 and the friendship that followed.
• Interbeing as a piece of contemporary Buddhist philosophy and ecological theology.
• The [[plum-village|Plum Village]] community as a continuing institution; its current direction post-Thay.
• The [[plum-village|Order of Interbeing]] as a model for lay engaged practice.