78 The Economist January 29th 2022
Obituary Thich Nhat Hanh
Inthewest’simaginationa Buddhistmonkisa model of other
worldliness. He sits silently in his temple, or under a tree in a
manicured garden, lost in the inner vastness of contemplation. A
small bowl of water and a bowl of rice are all that sustain him. His
day is marked out by gentle gongs and bells, and he causes no
more disturbance to the earth than a falling leaf or passing clouds.
Thich Nhat Hanh was a Buddhist monk, drawn to his calling in
childhood by a picture of the smiling Buddha and a cold, astonish
ing draught of water from a natural well. He, too, often prayed. But
there the similarity ended. As a novice he abandoned his Buddhist
training college for Saigon University, where he could study world
literature, philosophy and science. He was one of the first monks
in Vietnam to ride a bicycle, hitching up his robes. He went to
Princeton, taught Buddhism at Columbia and, at the height of the
Vietnam war, confronted Robert McNamara, then secretary of de
fence, with his pleas for peace. Photos from that time showed him,
tiny among towering Americans, with his jaw set, his arms folded
and his gaze firmly determined.
His “engaged Buddhism”, as he called it, went out in the world
solving problems. In the Indochinese war, when French soldiers
shot up his monastery in Hue and killed monks in cold blood, he
knew that the heart of spirituality survived; but Buddhism could
not be a simple spiritual refuge in a country as ferociously fought
over, for so long, as Vietnam was. Instead he founded his own in
stitute, edited a journal that called for Buddhist action and set up a
corps of lay and monastic workers to restore the country as fast as
it was wrecked. Eventually 10,000 volunteers went out to rebuild
villages, set up schools and rescue victims of disasters. He saw
Buddhism as a raft that could lift the whole country and save it.
He and his followers took no sides. His aim was peace and his
motivation was compassion, a wish to understand and lighten the
suffering of others. This “interbeing”, as he called it, was a sense ofconnectedness with the whole fabric of life. As he once told a un
session on disarmament, unfolding a crumpled poem from his
pocket, he was both the 12yearold girl raped by a pirate and that
pirate, forced perhaps by poverty into a life of pillage. He was both
the festering prisoner and his gaoler, the blithe frog and the snake
that slyly ate it. He was not a separate entity, had no separate self;
everything he did affected the suffering of the world.
Suffering meant feelings of anger, fear, intolerance and false
hope, as well as bodily pain. These were man’s enemies, rather
than other people. But just as such suffering was inevitable, so too
it could be ended: by right action, right thinking, right under
standing, and by mindfulness, or full selfawareness. Human be
ings had to embrace the present moment, looking neither forward
nor past, and deal with things as they were. His books showed
how. In everyday life he matched his walking to his breathing, as if
every step was an awakening to peace and his feet were kissing the
earth; he saw an orange as a miracle, slowly colouring and forming
for him under sun and rain; as he cleaned a pot he did so tenderly,
as if bathing a holy child. His daily practice became by the 21st cen
tury the most active Buddhist movement in the West.
The West had also become, by default, his main teaching
ground. After his peace trip to Washington in 1966, when he per
suaded Martin Luther King to speak against the Vietnam war, he
was declared a traitor and barred from returning home for almost
40 years. He used his exile to write dozens of books, go on lecture
tours and turn an old farmhouse in southwest France into a cen
tre for mindfulness, Plum Village, which grew into more than
1,000 practising communities worldwide.
He was revered now as “Thay”, or teacher, by ardent backpack
ers and middleclass seekers alike. But there were plenty of scep
tics and mockers, too. To them mindfulness seemed ludicrous, an
exercise in selfabsorption. To him it was the reverse, a clearing
away of the hindrances of “self” in order to love others. The best
practical example was his operation, in 1978, to rescue the Viet
namese boatpeople who were being turned away from Singapore
to drown or starve at sea. He worked with fishermen to send food,
medicine and bigger boats, and smuggled the refugees into the
compound of the French embassy. Everything was done secretly,
mostly at night, and everything was underpinned by meditations
in which he calmly discerned what was possible. He spent those
hours mentally in the lives of both the politicians and the police,
while floating also with the terrified refugees in the South China
Sea. With mindful diplomacy, thousands were saved.
More modern sorts of suffering caught his eye, too: the profit
motive, the race to the top, the momentbymoment distraction of
devices, carelessness towards the planet. As his fame grew he
found himself invited to the World Bank and the Google campus,
where he told his listeners that voracious consumption was just a
way of papering over unhappiness. They did not need to be num
ber one; their inventions should actively bring healing; and they
should practise “aimlessness”, the art of stopping, looking into
their lives and asking what they were running from.
How far those teachings sank in, he did not know. The future
would tell. But every little helped, as it also helped to be at the Paris
peace talks in 1969, or to lead a walking meditation round the
grounds of Stormont in 2012, bringing Northern Ireland’s factions
together. For a while, they all trod the same earth and were con
scious of doing it. They embraced the present moment as all there
was: no future, no past. This was it. He dreamed of marketing a
watch in which each number was replaced by the word “now”.
In 2014 a severe stroke felled him. Four years later, since he was
no longer a general gadfly, offending governments both Catholic
and Communist as well as conservative Buddhists, he was allowed
to live again in Vietnam. He spent his days sitting silently in his
temple at Hue, the city in which he had been born and died:
though there was no birth or death, only transformation, moment
by moment, like the passing clouds. nThe time is nowThich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist monk and “father of
mindfulness”, died on January 22nd, aged 95