Dharma Talk in Honor of Thay.
This talk was given by Rev. Kosen Greg Snyder on the occasion of a memorial service for Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh on March 9th 2022 at Union Theological Seminary.
Good afternoon. So Thich Nhat Hanh here is teaching us that when we feel loss and despair, we need a source of energy to continue with our work of peace and justice. We must feel the peace, joy, and happiness in our bodies. What he calls the practice of arriving is the coming back to the body and the present moment when our minds are caught – often anxious and despairing – in what Thay often called the prison of past and future.
If we touch the war of our minds and the world without the strength of a deeply felt and lived, bodily life, we may be overwhelmed by it. That overwhelm may look like despair. It may look like relentless, compulsive work that corrodes our health.
If we are living from the intellect’s self-attached, dualistic view of the world, if this is the only ground, then Thay has warned us many times we will add the energy of war, the intention of war to ourselves and to everything we do. We will come from a reactivity without spiritual source that will exhaust us.
Rev. Kosen Greg Snyder
Just like the Buddha, we must touch the earth as our witness, this present reality. We must leave the temptations of the warring mind and come home to the presence of the body, to our original nature, which is our lives without the confusion of separation. We allow the breath to gather who we are, the breath that is always fluidly going beyond inside and outside, self and other, existence and nonexistence, ally and enemy, body and world.
In Thay’s teaching – and in the Buddha’s – what we cultivate in ourselves is what we manifest in the world. If we are cultivating division, even in the name of justice, we are cultivating war within ourselves and in the world. To cultivate justice skillfully requires embodied presence in this moment with all people at heart. It requires sitting with all people, welcoming all people – not agreeing with them – but not excluding them.
Our heart – as it is understood in the East Asian tradition from which Thay comes – is connected to all being. The heart is the hub of the life energy and wisdom of all of life. When we come from our dualistic mind where some aspects of my perception are me and the rest is other, where some people are with me and others against, here we are not free at all, even if we believe we are fighting for freedom. From this mind, we cannot know what it is to be just even if believe we are fighting for justice.
Thay has taught many times that a mind that grasps ideas dividing the world into for and against cannot be in just relationship with that world. We will always be carving up people according to our ideas, making them characters in the theater of our minds. We will always be waging war, coming from war. Even when we get along with people, it will be because they are in agreement with us, on our side. This being so, even times of peace are coming from the mind of war.
When Thay speaks of war here, he is not summoning mere metaphor. He speaks from a body layered in experiences of war. I feel if we are to understand what he hoped to pass to this human life, we can never lose sight of the historical reality that Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings of interbeing and mindfulness were forged in the colonial fires of his warring homeland. He spent his life working to awaken us to this war by cultivating peace in human hearts and bodies everywhere.
In his book, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, Thay writes of being struck by the responses Americans had to the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc, a respected Buddhist elder, who died a few blocks from the presidential palace in Saigon in 1963. They were horrified by this act even though until that moment they were not horrified by the war itself. He recognized the Western world was unable to hear the war, to see the war. It took something as egregious as a burning to wake us up. Not only did we need to cultivate bodies that can see, hear, and feel harm and violence in our world, we need to open to those places in ourselves where compassion and love for all beings are the first instinct, the first gesture, to touch the world deeply so that human lives are loved and valued over wars.
Thay’s life centered a great concern for this depth of feeling and response. If human bodies were not themselves peaceful, if they were not receptive, if they could not see, hear, and feel the suffering of the world, then peace would never be possible. We would simply continue our lives of privileged aloofness, myopic outrage, and dulled senses. Thay instead asked us to enjoy our breath deeply in every moment, feeling our entire bodies in order to wake up.
When asked by one of his students how to respond to the ecological crisis, he replied, “What we most need to do is to hear within us the sound of the Earth crying.” He advocated calming and sensitizing our bodies so that we became peace and felt the suffering of all beings. He insisted that “We have to walk in a way that we only print peace and serenity on the Earth. Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.”
Though he is known in his later years for his teachings of mindfulness and breath, he always understood the engaged and just aspects of compassionate transformation born of awakening presence. In an essay, “Spring Thunder,” Thay wrote, “If you see the suffering of the world but haven’t changed your way of living yet, it means the awakening isn’t strong enough. You haven’t really woken up.” We must feel and we must change. Our actions are intertwined with the world and so they too must be transformed for all of human life to find peace. Feeling the cries of the world fully manifests as transformation, actualizing our realization in our dynamic care of the world.
Thay’s life challenges us to renounce our remoteness, to feel thoroughly, and to act appropriately to end violence and suffering. The efforts of the Vietnamese people to bring about peace in their country live through the mindful breaths Thay encouraged each of us to feel in every moment. For the human world to transform, we must deeply turn the soil of our bodies and minds so that peace is not a detached, quiet state… so that justice is not coming from the mind of war… but that both together, peace and justice, are a fearless, felt, nourishing, loving, compassionate, liberating activity that excludes no one. In other words, the connective tissue of this life itself…never to be torn by our mere ideas of it.
We must do the work of healing that allows us to come from a place of connectivity with all beings, love for all beings. Coming from the whole of the body, mindful of the whole body, mindful of the tissue connecting us to all of life, this is both the ground and activity of liberation. Should our dualistic minds win, should we follow only from our views and not our hearts, it will not matter what ideology stands above the others. We will in the end all suffer. This is the eternal law of the Buddhadharma that Thay taught unflinchingly.
In another talk Thay said, I am not here to give you ideas, not even ideas of peace. It is not our ideas of peace or of justice that will transform the world, it is the transformation of our being that allows us to be in peaceful and just relationship with others. Too often our fears force us onto a war footing so that we might change things at the pace of war – quickly, frustratedly, fearfully. War can be quick. Tanks can roll into a city and change the world in a few days. But this is not the world transformation for which Thay’s stood.
His message was not popular during the war in his country. He was mistrusted by both sides. Minds locked in war are incapable of trusting a body open to peace. They will forever be suspicious of anyone not in lockstep with their views.
But his way was that of a gentle, steadfast, and fearless engagement with the whole of the world, a practice that both embodied and ardently refused to lose sight of a humanity, presence, and peace that at base is common to us all.
Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh died in Vietnam a few days shy of 49 days ago – a sacred memorial number for Buddhists. He died in the Buddhist temple where he was ordained at age sixteen. He was ninety-five. He has left us a profound legacy of practice, transformation, peace, and love for all beings. We will miss his breath in the world and his feet on this Earth. But bestowed upon us is a great treasure, for his life has truly turned the dharma wheel for the sake of all beings. Now it is for our lives to do the same.
As we all consider just relationship with all people and all being, I leave us with two questions – with whom am I making war? And how am I making war with myself?
Let’s come back to the felt wisdom and body and breath for a moment….
