Thich Nhat Hanh

It was around 1942, in Huế, in central Vietnam.

A sixteen-year-old boy entered Tu Hieu Temple. He had come to become a novice monk. He received a religious name: Thich Nhat Hanh.

He had been born in 1926. He would spend his life speaking of peace, in a country that was about to know war.

In 1951, he was fully ordained as a monk.

In the early 1960s, in the spirit of an engaged Buddhism, outside the temples, Thich Nhat Hanh founded the School of Youth for Social Service.

About ten thousand young volunteers took part. They went out into the countryside. They helped build schools and clinics. Everything rested on nonviolence.

For him, meditation did not mean escaping the world. It meant seeing what is going on, within yourself and all around you.

In 1966, he founded the Order of Interbeing. The word said it all: nothing exists alone.

That same year, he left for the United States and Europe. He had been invited. He came to call for peace.

On May 31, 1966, in Chicago, he stood beside Martin Luther King Jr. in front of the press.

In 1967, Martin Luther King nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. He said of him:

But Thich Nhat Hanh had not taken sides. Not for the North, not for the South. He had only asked for peace.

So both sides shut the door on him. Neither the North nor the South would let him come home.

His exile would last thirty-nine years.

He kept on acting. In 1969, he led the Buddhist delegation to the Paris Peace Talks. In 1976, he chartered a ship to rescue people at sea, off the coast of Singapore.

In France, he first founded, in 1975, a community near Paris. In 1982, he moved to a larger piece of land in the southwest of the country. It came to be called Plum Village.

In 2005, after thirty-nine years, he was finally able to return to Vietnam.

In Huế, he walked through the gate of Tu Hieu Temple. The temple he had entered at sixteen.

In 2014, he suffered a severe stroke. In late 2018, he went back to live at Tu Hieu.

He passed away in the early hours of January 22, 2022, at the temple, in the Deep Listening Hut.

His path is that of Vietnamese Buddhism. It is distinct from Ubuntu. But when it says that nothing exists alone, it echoes it.

A boy had entered a temple in Huế. An old man walked through its gate again, long afterward. Between the two, thirty-nine years of exile, and always the same word of peace.