A Gift of Dharma for 11.8.09
by Danny Fisher
Today’s quote comes to us from the Most Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh.
A Buddhist monk from the age of sixteen, he is also a poet and activist credited with coining the phrase “Engaged Buddhism.”
As a young monk in the 1960s, Nhat Hanh founded the School of Youth Social Service in Saigon. An organization devoted to rebuilding destroyed villages, offering medical care, and providing other forms of relief, the S.Y.S.S. attracted thousands of student members despite government disapproval. During this time, Nhat Hanh also founded the La Boi Press and the Van Hanh Buddhist University in Saigon.
Around the year 1966, he founded the Order of Interbeing. That same year, while travelling abroad, he was barred from returning to Vietnam. (He was not able to come back again until 2005.)
In 1969, he founded the Unified Buddhist Church in France. The organization helped to lay the foundation for a community of exiles and monastics that, in 1982, became Plum Village. Nhat Hanh resides there to this day.
He has written well over 100 books, including such iconic titles as Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life; Interbeing: Fourteen Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism; The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation; Being Peace; Stepping Into Freedom: An Introduction to Buddhist Monastic Training; Creating True Peace: Ending Violence in Yourself, Your Family, Your Community, and the World; Living Buddha, Living Christ; Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames; Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha, and No Death, No Fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life. Perhaps his most famous work is the breathtaking poem “Please Call Me By My True Names”.
After taking Nhat Hanh’s advice to publicly speak out against the Vietnam War in 1967, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, writing (among many other lovely things): “I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than this gentle Buddhist monk from Vietnam…He is a holy man, for he is humble and devout…His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity.”
Here’s the quote–from Nhat Hanh’s book The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation (Broadway Books, 1999), pg. 153:
Be yourself. Life is precious as it is. All the elements for your happiness are already here. There is no need to run, strive, search, or struggle. Just be.
[Photo by Don Farber.]
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