View More Interviews. View More Letters. View More Translations. Are you a journalist or media organisation? Visit our Press Resources. View More Calligraphies. On 11th November , a month after his 89th birthday, Thich Nhat Hanh suffered a severe brain hemorrhage stroke. We thank you for continuing to send him energy of compassion and healing to support his recovery.
More Updates. Thich Nhat Hanh has offered mindfulness retreats around the world. His monastic and lay students keep his teachings alive and continue to offer life-changing retreats.
Go to retreats. We have cookies! We use them to analyse our website traffic and provide email and social media features. As a scholar of the contemporary practices of Buddhist meditation , I have studied his simple yet profound teachings, which combine mindfulness along with social change. In the s, Thich Nhat Hanh played an active role promoting peace during the years of war in Vietnam. Hanh was in his mids when he became active in efforts to revitalize Vietnamese Buddhism for peace efforts.
Over the next few years, Thich Nhat Hanh set up a number of organizations based on Buddhist principles of nonviolence and compassion. His School of Youth and Social Service , a grassroots relief organization, consisted of 10, volunteers and social workers offering aid to war-torn villages, rebuilding schools and establishing medical centers.
He also established the Order of Interbeing , a community of monastics and lay Buddhists who made a commitment to compassionate action and supported war victims. In addition, he founded a Buddhist university, a publishing house, and a peace activist magazine as a way to spread the message of compassion. During his years in the U. Thich Nhat Hanh first started teaching mindfulness in the mids.
The main vehicle for his early teachings was his books. This book was translated into English for a global audience.
Instead, he says, just become aware of your breath, and through that come into the present moment, where everyday activities can take on a joyful, miraculous quality. If you are mindful, or fully present in the here and now, anxiety disappears and a sense of timelessness takes hold, allowing your highest qualities, such as kindness and compassion, to emerge.
This was highly appealing to Westerners seeking spirituality but not the trappings of religion. Burned-out executives and recovering alcoholics flocked to retreats in the French countryside to listen to Nhat Hanh.
An entire mindfulness movement sprang up in the wake of this dharma superstar. Among his students was the American doctor Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course that is now offered at hospitals and medical centers worldwide. In fact, the situation for all rights in Vietnam is critical.
Activists are beaten, tortured and jailed. Rights of association are restricted, as is the press and judiciary. Religious freedom is heavily curtailed, and the official Buddhist Church of Vietnam is controlled by the state. To his critics, the monk should have made greater use of his position to draw attention to these abuses. Washington obliged Hanoi by removing Vietnam as a CPC in , to the fury of nonconformists forced into exile. But Nhat Hanh was not totally silent.
During his visit to Vietnam, he asked then President Nguyen Minh Triet to abolish the Religious Affairs Committee, which monitors religious groups. The Plum Village annual journal of went further and called on Vietnam to abandon communism.
His followers paid a heavy price. In September , police and a hired mob violently evicted hundreds of monks and nuns from a monastery that Nhat Hanh had been allowed to build at Bat Nha in southeast Vietnam, which had been attracting thousands of devotees. Yet if Nhat Hanh courted controversy by engaging with the party, he also won the ability to gain access to the Vietnamese people—and that might have been the goal all along.
The impact is still felt by young Vietnamese today. Buddhism teaches that Nhat Hanh needs to offer his presence, and in doing so, he is embracing the roots of his suffering in the Vietnam War. He is surely aware that Hanoi will make political capital out of his homecoming. But then the Zen master is evidently playing the long game—the longest game of all, in fact, which is eternity.
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