The day after one of his Boulder presentations, I spoke to him about daily life in a Vietnamese monastery, about his tireless efforts to establish religious freedom in Vietnam, and about the relationship between monasticism and culture.

David Denny: Why are we so afraid of deep spiritual transformation?

Thich Nhat Hanh: We are afraid of not being ourselves anymore. To understand something is is to give up ourselves in order to be one with something or someone else. We resist doing so. I think that is the most outstanding feature of this civilization. One day I was talking with a group of Christians, non-Buddhists, at the United Nations Church Center in New York and one lady came up and said to me, “I have asked many of our Catholics to come listen to you but they didn’t want to. They said they are afraid they might like you.” That is an illustration of it.

A Buddhist Cowboy

DD: Can you describe your early life in the monastery?

TNH: Well, I was very young and I needed a lot of sleep but I had to wake up at four or four-fifteen each morning. So sometimes I had to hide myself under the Buddha altar and take a nap. Three years after I came to the monastery I was sent to the Buddhist Institute, but the Buddhist Institute is not like regular schools. We had to work in the garden, for example, and classroom time was just one small part of it.

The first year I was a cowboy! The monastery had three cows, not for milk, not for meat, but just for compost. It was a mountainous area and in the morning, I woke up and I had to prepare tea for the monks—first three bells for waking up and then fifteen minutes later the great bell began to sound. There would be 108 sounds of bells, each sound distinct from the other. When the 108th sound ended, the morning recitation began.

This is called morning công phu. But during that time each monk, each novice, sat in meditation on his own bed. He had to arrange it, to transform it into a sitting place. So I prepared for my master and other monks. And after that I went to the shrine hall for morning recitation. And after the recitation at my time there was no breakfast. Maybe there was not enough rice for three meals. We had to wait until noon in order to have our first meal.

DD: How many monks were in the monastery?

TNH: At my time there were only twenty but on the three-month retreat there were a hundred or more. And I took the cows out to the mountains and also two big baskets. I had to cut the leaves on the bushes because they didn’t have hay. I gathered two big baskets of leaves that served as bedding for the cows. We also had rice fields and lay people helped till the land and pound the rice, fetch the water, to do everything in the monastery. After I finished cutting the leaves, I had then to sit down under a tree and open my first book of discipline and learn it by heart. It’s not in Vietnamese; the text is in classic Chinese. It’s like you: you learn in Latin or Greek.

When I heard the bell of the noon offering, I took the cows in and I took a shower near the well. There’s no bathroom. And when I came in, everyone was already in his cell. I ate lunch alone and then I had two hours of rest and study. In the afternoon I did the same thing—taking the cows out. In the late afternoon, there will be the bell for meditation and then the Sutra recitation, that is the afternoon công phu. Sutras in the shrine hall, one hour. And then in the late evening, before going to sleep we had a recitation and then sitting in our own rooms. That’s the first year.

Six months later I was asked to work in the garden. The third year I became attendant to my teacher. That’s a very good time for learning because you are close to your teacher and you see his way of doing things and he understands you and he assigns you work and studies. After that he sent me to the Buddhist Institute, which is a very fortunate event in my monkhood because they selected the best novices to go there. Otherwise, I would have stayed on and learned in the more traditional way. The Institute was in Hue, about five or six kilometers away. Each month my monastery had to pay with rice.

The First Lesson

DD: What did you study at the Institute?

TNH: It was systematic Buddhism, but at my time we had to copy all the texts by hand.

DD: If you were a novice master today, what would you say is the first, most important lesson that a monk should learn when he or she comes to the monastery?

TNH: The first lesson would be chopping the wood, carrying the water, cooking the meal, cleaning the house in mindfulness. And to help the student be constantly mindful, there is a book of discipline containing many short poems galled gathas. When you bring up a cup of tea like this to drink, you say to yourself the gatha: “Cup of tea in my two hands. Mindfulness is being held—perfectly. My body and mind dwells perfectly in the here and now.” And you drink. Washing your feet, rinsing your mouth, opening the door, there is a gatha for everything you do.

So that lesson is the most important lesson—the first one and the last one. You have to learn by heart the book of gathas (verses) in order to practice. And also you learn by heart the texts for the recitation—morning, afternoon and evening recitations. And if you do well, you’ll be transformed in six months, a year, two years.

We can tell how long a novice has been in the monastery by just looking at him or her, the way she or he does things. Because if you practice that, you become a real monk or nun and if you don’t practice that, no matter how much you study, it’s worthless. We call it the taste of Dhyana: Zen taste. We say “that boy has no zen taste.” That means he does not practice; he doesn’t have the appearance, the personality, the nature of a monk. I think you do the same in your Christian tradition.

I have helped in writing more gathas for modern life because in the old time they did not drive cars. Nor did they use the telephone. So now we have gathas for driving cars, for using telephones. I would like to offer you one gatha that I wrote a few years ago concerning planting a tree. It may be interesting for you Christians:

“I entrust myself to Earth.” When you plant something, you identify yourself with that plant. So you don’t do it as if you are a different thing. And that’s important. “I entrust myself to Earth. Earth entrusts herself to me.” That’s the two first lines. It means that thanks to the earth, I can grow as a plant, but thanks to me, the plant, the Earth can be as rich as she is. The rich layer of soil is called the vegetal soil. It has been made by vegetation. I need earth but earth also needs me to be rich and giving.

And then the next two lines: “I entrust myself to Buddha (Buddha means the Awakened One), Buddha entrusts himself to me.” Because without me, Buddha cannot be. Buddha is a noun, indicating the body of awakening and compassion in humans. If I see understanding and compassion in you, Buddha is shown in you; you are a Buddha. You are a Buddha body. Understanding and compassion need you and me in order to become real things. I entrust myself to Buddha. I take Buddha as a refuge but the Buddha also needs me very much to be seen—Buddha not as person but as the nature of awakening in the Buddha nature. We must learn how to live in a way that each minute becomes a jewel. That’s the point.

DD: How do you present that to Westerners? Those of us in this room are in a very unusual situation. For example, we’ve never been at war. We’ve never been hungry. We’ve known security all our lives. All that puts us to sleep. Unfortunately, one way people seem to awaken is through terrible suffering, yet our job is to alleviate as much of that suffering as we can in the world. When we begin to alleviate it, as we’ve done in some superficial ways in our Western culture, we end up sleepwalking. We end up bored. We have this quiet desperation of the bourgeois. Is it the teaching of mindfulness that touches the heart and begins to awaken Westerners? Or is there some other way to convey that awakening?

TNH: Our habits play a very important part in it. For instance, Americans, when they go abroad, are afraid of non-American things. They have Hilton Hotels everywhere and they can never get out of America. Even if they fly a lot. The people outside America know that, so they prepare prefabricated America in order to offer it to American tourists. I know of a person who goes to a Chinese restaurant and never dares to order new things—just omelette—because he is afraid of ordering something he doesn’t like. I think not to be afraid to be something else than ourselves is the way out. As you see the suffering of people, real suffering, you realize that your own suffering may be useless.

People in this country have a lot of suffering in their feelings—psychological problems. Some Buddhist teachers here just tell their students to make a thousand prostrations to make them tired so they can divert them. I think that is a good teaching. Once you are tired you cannot think of your own suffering. In Vietnam we have the School for Social Service; sometimes if a young person got into that kind of suffering I said go there and try to work hard, help other people and you will be healed. You don’t need a particular medicine, a particular practice. Just see the suffering of other people and try to help and then you will be healed. This may be true with people over here. They suffer because they are caught in a situation where they can’t be in touch with what’s going on outside.

On Exile

DD: How did you discover that you couldn’t go back to Vietnam and what were your feelings about not being able to return?

TNH: I was fortunate that even if I could not go back to Vietnam, I was still able to continue the work for the people there from the outside. I did not feel alienated from my country, my people. In some ways I have never gotten out of Vietnam. I’m really fortunate because my writing is still being read by the Vietnamese even if it ‘s not in a printed form. I’m more present in Vietnam than many of our Vietnamese who are actually living there. So it’s not too bad for me.

My suffering seems to depend on the suffering of other people. Forgetfulness would destroy that kind of contact. You need a certain amount of suffering in order to keep you awake. Not too much. If too much, your heart would become a stone. Anything should be in a good dosage—like medicine. Life is both wonderful and dreadful. You have to be in touch with both sides of life; you know about yourself and you know how much of this you need to keep you sane and alive.

Buddhist Reflections on the Eucharist

TNH: I have participated in the rite of the Eucharist with Christian monks and I see that it is a very good exercise of mindfulness. We usually drink and eat in a dream. We don’t know what we drink and what we eat. Everyday we do things like machines. But the drink, the piece of bread can be either a ghost, a phantom, or the ultimate reality. A piece of bread is wonderful. It is everything: it is the sunshine, it is the stream of water, it is the clouds. Everything! And if you eat the piece of bread in that spirit, you receive the ultimate reality—God, Jesus. The body of Jesus is to be understood as the body of awakening—the ultimate reality. And when you eat that piece of bread in that awareness, you are wholly alive. If you don’t eat in that way, if you just receive the bread as a habit, a merely ritual thing, I think it would not help.

Maybe participating in the same rite with a lot of Christians, I would be more Christian than some of the so-called Christians who sat with me in that event. It depends on the content and not the form. The communicant must remember that now he is really eating the bread as the wonder of life and not just as a phantom of life. I think many Christians will agree with that and will see that if they rediscover the Christian traditions with new eyes, fresh eyes, they will be able to renew Christianity’s richness.

Emptiness and Fullness

DD: Last night was the first time I had heard the idea of emptiness, or no-self-conveyed with such beauty. We Christians have a problem with the idea of no-self because we have an eternal soul that has been given to us. And so we must cherish that gift. I’ve been trying to figure out where there might be a link. How can we bridge this gap that sometimes comes up?

We speak in personal terms and Buddhists speak in impersonal terms. We speak in terms of soul and Buddhists say no-self. What you’re saying bridges the gap: what we really mean by “person” is a deep, everlasting relatedness. And being a person doesn’t mean that you’re something separate and over against everything else but rather you’re a point where all the connections meet or where all the relationships come together. And then it’s up to us to make sure that those relationships are loving and reverent.

Last night you said when we activate this sense of no-self, the more empty of self we are, the more full of everything we are. At least to my mind, that’s a wonderful description of what a person ought to be and what a soul ought to be. I love it when you talk this way because you’re meeting a tremendous need. We need reminders from people like you as to what it means to be a person.

And just to connect what you said about the Eucharist: Our teacher, John of the Cross, once talked about the Host, the piece of bread, and how when we taste it and understand it superficially, it’s very bland and we think there’s no mystery there, no wonder. But he said if we really taste the Host, we’ll see that what on the surface looks bland is like sunlight, you see that every color of the rainbow is there. And so he said every taste in the world, every delight in the universe is there in the bread if you really eat it mindfully.

Politics and Spirituality in 1980s Vietnam

DD: I would like to return to the present situation in Vietnam: How do you deal with a corrupt regime? Do you do it directly, do they hear you? Or does all your work have to be underground and hidden? Are you able to do anything practical or is it more in terms of meditation?

TNH: I think we can. The political path is quite a dangerous way, because in order to succeed in it you have to be too flexible. And you slowly lose your integrity. I think it’s quite a dangerous course. So I don’t think that monks should engage themselves on that path, or in partisan politics. Because to engage in partisan politics means to only support one side against the other. But the non-dualistic view is that the good never belongs to one side alone. And the suffering is on both sides. Whether water is clear or muddy, it’s the same water. It can be muddy or it can be clear.

If you have one glass of water and it is not pure, you cannot throw it away. You have to use that very glass of water and make it into a clear cup of water. We have to try even to help a government that is doing and causing much suffering to our people. A politician would say that, well, if I have a very good idea, I will keep it for myself: in case I gain power, I will use it. I would not reveal it to a Communist government. It might imitate it and put it into practice. But we nonpolitical people don’t do that. We say that if the Communist government applies this, it’s also good for the country.

I told the anti-Communist scholars, “Why don’t you publish your findings concerning what direction Vietnam should go as far as the economy and politics are concerned? Even if you don’t get the power your research will help your own people.” We engage in that kind of thing. When a high monk in the hierarchy is arrested and put in prison, you can ask people to write telegrams of protest. A politician will protest in a different way, protest in order to make known to the mass media that, “I have taken action.”

But if we want the monk to be released, then our telegram would be different. We would not condemn, we would not say angry things; we say, “please, you have promised freedom of religion. This monk has not done any bad thing, so please give him back his freedom.” The content of our telegram is completely different, although to all appearances we did the same thing.

We try to change the way of life around us. This is very important, because it is the basis for keeping the awareness of suffering alive in the minds, in the daily lives, of the people. Everything in our society is for making us forget. We have lots of machines that can wash our clothes for us, our dishes for us, heat for us, and yet we complain that we don’t have time. Nowadays a farmer has hundreds of acres to farm, he has a lot of machines and yet he’s very busy and he even complains that he cannot make a living. And in former times you owned a very small parcel of land, you worked with your hands and yet you had time to sit and chat with your neighbors a lot.

We have to change our civilization and we can do so as monks and nuns. You don’t need to go out and demonstrate against this or that. Meditation helps you while you plant a tree, while you clean the house. You dwell on that kind of meditation to find out a way of life that will permit people a future. Live in a way that a future will be possible. And then radiate that kind of spirit and have your neighbor do the same, be the same. Doing research, writing articles, demonstrating that to live simply does not mean you cannot live happily. Happiness can be found in a simple life. Establish a community where people can live simply and yet happily.

There are lots of things we can do. Things that you Americans know better than any of us who came from Asia. And you are the ones who create the kind of practice that will make Christianity into a very alive thing in your society—engaged Christianity, engaged contemplation. Contemplation can be very engaged.

Buddhist Vietnam: A History of Engagement

DD: Historically the monastery in the West has been the saving channel through which a decadent civilization would move and then rebloom on the other side. What’s the history of the monastery in southeast Asian culture?

TNH: Buddhism has helped in the efforts to prevent invasion of the country by the Chinese. Like “Van Hanh,” a well-known Vietnamese monk. He lived in the eleventh century. His name “Van Hanh,” means “10,000 actions,” and my name “Nhat Hanh,” means only one action. I always joke that I don’t know which one. To be lazy, that may be it. At one time when China was about to invade Vietnam, there was trouble in our government. Van Hanh did not seem to have moved away from his temple, but through his disciples who lived in the capital he arranged for a non-violent coup d’état to give back order and authority for the government to discourage an invasion from China. But he never became a cabinet minister.

I did some research into what he did: he used poetry to do it. Because at that time the Vietnamese believed in sâḿ truyêǹ, predictions of the future in the form of poems. People believed in that kind of literature that predicts what will happen. So Van Hanh predicted in poetry who would be the king. And what would be the best ways to stop the invasion from China. That poetry was taken by his disciples to spread in the population. Poetry played a very important role in political action. He’s said to have been the architect of Thăng Long, the new capital of Vietnam at that time. The present Hanoi.

And then in the fourteenth century there was a king who became a monk and founded an entirely Vietnamese-style Zen school called the Bamboo Forest Zen School. While his son was on the throne he walked barefoot; like the monk he was practicing Buddhism in a very classic, traditional way. And every year after completing his ninety-day retreat on a mountain, he came down from the mountain barefoot and went from village to village teaching the people how to practice Buddhism, how to abandon bad habits: drinking, illegal sexual life, and things like that.

He didn’t say anything about politics. He didn’t urge the people to support the government of his son. Buddhism and politics somehow went together, and we had a very happy period in history. Politicians at his time, seeing that the father of the king was practicing Buddhism, wanted to practice Buddhism too. There was a kind of fashion in practicing Buddhism. Of course some did not do it authentically.

The Buddhist temple always played the role of teaching children while there was no school yet in the village. In the time of hunger the government asks Buddhist temples to serve as agents of social welfare. And Buddhist monks, since they know Chinese well, could read Chinese medical books. They learn the art of medicine and set up medical offices for helping the people, of course, without pay because each pagoda has its own rice field donated by sons and daughters of good families. The pagoda becomes a kind of religious and social center of the village. It has always been like that—Buddhism is not engaged just recently. When the war disrupted everything, it was natural that the Buddhists had to intervene and work against the war. It’s not something new.

Children and Friendship

DD: You invite people to bring children to your retreats. We have a good friend who says that meditation is a natural function, like eating or drinking. So he has a little child whom he’s teaching to meditate. How do you involve the children in your retreats? Do you think it’s a good part of any basic education to teach meditation? When in a child’s life do you think it should be introduced?

TNH: I think it can begin even before the birth of the child. The mother should do it for both. That’s our tradition. The mother has to begin before the child is born—meditate for both. When the child is in the cradle, meditation should go on so in the house there is an atmosphere of meditation and the child gets it too, even if his consciousness is immature. The way you live in the family affects the child. It’s not up to the child to meditate as an individual yet, but the child participates in your meditation in a real way. Slowly, slowly, the child will be participating. I mean, actively, as a person.

DD: In your Vietnamese monastery, what did you do to sustain communion and friendship among yourselves?

TNH: The monastic oath and the six principles of co-habitation and the seven principles of settling disputes are very old principles—techniques of reconciliation. And then confession each half a month—not to the Buddha, but to each other—to the community and to each other. After a ninety-day retreat, I would kneel in front of you, you kneel in front of me, and I sincerely ask you to tell me how I have done during the ninety-day retreat. And you sincerely tell me and you very reverently ask me to do the same to you and I do it with all my heart to you.

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If you want to cry,
please cry.
And know
that I will cry with you.
The tears you shed
will heal us both.
Your tears are mine.
The earth I tread this morning
transcends history.
Spring and Winter are both present in the moment.
The young leaf and the dead leaf are really one.
My feet touch deathlessness,
and my feet are yours.
Walk with me now.
Let us enter the dimension of oneness
and see the cherry tree blossom in Winter.
Why should we talk about death?
I don’t need to die
to be back with you.

Published in Call Me by My True Names, by Thich Nhat Hanh (1993)