What’s Going On When I Google "Plum Village"?
by Danny Fisher
I received an email today from the Rev. Tom Gilbert, asking me if I knew what was going on with Plum Village’s website.
Plum Village (or, in Vietnamese, Làng Mai), of course, is the well-known Buddhist meditation center in the south of France founded by the Very Venerable Thích Nhất Hạnh and Bhikkhuni Chân Không in 1982.
As Rev. Gilbert let me know in his email, Googling “Plum Village” and then clicking on the link to its official website right now results in a warning that indicates accessing the site would be “harmful for your computer.” (Simply typing the URL into your browser, though, takes you there without incident.)
Rev. Gilbert wondered, and so do I, if this has anything to do with the recent trouble at Bat Nha Monastery in Vietnam, where several members of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Order of Interbeing have been staying.
Here’s the story very quickly: The monastery itself is not affiliated with Nhat Hanh’s movement, but rather the official Buddhist Church of Vietnam. Following Nhat Hanh’s return to his homeland in 2005, the abbot at Bat Nha invited Order of Interbeing members to study and teach at the temple. The Order spent upwards of $1 million on new land and buildings at the monastery so that they might have appropriate space to do their work and not interfere with the other trainings taking place at Bat Nha. Then, presumably upset with some of Nhat Hanh’s outspokeness on several hot-button political issues, local authorities cut off water, electricity, and telephones to the group. Then things turned violent. International concerns about religious freedom have long confronted the Vietnamese leaders, who responded to criticism about the situation at Bat Nha Monastery, saying they only want to “manage” Nhat Hanh’s community, not “control” it.
Anyway, this may or may not have anything to do with what’s going on with Plum Village’s website. Anybody have any information?
I've been wondering the same thing – was contemplating at least an email tomorrow. Please let us know if you hear anything!
– EdaMommy
I emailed Plum Village about this two days ago and got no reply. I emeailed again yesterday and just got an "out of office until September" autoreply. Don't think they care.
Perhaps they are on retreat?
Rev. Danny, others, are you still getting this error? I don't get it when googling Plum Village and then clicking through.
It should be noted that this sort of message is a fairly generic google malware warning, and generally indicates there is some bad script or malware on the site. It could have been that someone got a bad script on the front page somehow, and likely has little to do with recent events.
This is a generalization though, and there of course could have been something else going on.
I'm glad to say that it's gone now – it wasn't yesterday afternoon.
– Dwan
To reiterate what Kevin Radcliffe, this warning comes from Google when it encounters a website that has (what Google's robots perceive as) potentially bad code. Could be a script error, a Flash error, a misplace comma. A good friend of mine who's got a burgeoning indi film company had the exact same problem with their website due to poorly coded Flash.
In short, it probably wasn't political. (But who knows!)
I was able to get through to the Plum Village site today with no problem. I suppose it was just a bad code problem; but I was concerned because of the situation in Vietnam. My thanks to Rev.Fisher and everyone else for trying to discern what was happening. I appreciate everyone's contribution. Many Blessings to all.
–Rev.Tom Gilbert