The loss of life was confirmed by a monk at Tu Hieu Pagoda in Hue, Vietnam, who mentioned that Nhat Hanh, referred to as Thay to his followers, died at midnight on Saturday. The monk declined to be named as a result of he isn’t licensed to talk to media.
A publish on Nhat Hanh’s verified Twitter web page attributed to The Worldwide Plum Village Group of Engaged Buddhism additionally confirmed the information, saying, “We invite our beloved world non secular household to take a couple of moments to be nonetheless, to come back again to our conscious respiratory, as we collectively maintain Thay in our hearts.” Born as Nguyen Xuan Bao in 1926 and ordained at age 16, Nhat Hanh distilled Buddhist teachings on compassion and struggling into simply grasped steerage over a lifetime devoted to working for peace.
In 1961 he went to america to check, educating comparative faith for a time at Princeton and Columbia universities.
For many of the the rest of his life, he lived in exile at Plum Village, a retreat centre he based in southern France.
There and in talks and retreats around the globe, he launched Zen Buddhism, at its essence, as peace by means of compassionate listening. Nonetheless and steadfast in his brown robes, he exuded an air of watchful, amused calm, generally sharing a stage with the Dalai Lama.
“The peace we search can’t be our private possession. We have to discover an internal peace which makes it potential for us to change into one with those that endure, and to do one thing to assist our brothers and sisters, which is to say, ourselves,” Nhat Hanh wrote in one in every of his dozens of books, ‘The Solar My Coronary heart’.
Surviving a stroke in 2014 that left him unable to talk, he returned to Vietnam in October 2018, spending his closing years on the Tu Hieu Pagoda, the monastery the place he was ordained practically 80 years earlier.
Nhat Hanh plunged into anti-war activism after his return to his homeland in 1964 because the Vietnam Struggle was escalating. There, he based the Order of Inter-being, which espouses “engaged Buddhism” devoted to nonviolence, mindfulness and social service.
In 1966, he met the US civil rights chief Martin Luther King Jr. Nhat Hanh advised King he was a ‘Bodhisattva’, or enlightened being, for his efforts to advertise social justice.
The monk’s efforts to advertise reconciliation between the U.S.-backed South and communist North Vietnam so impressed King {that a} 12 months later he nominated Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize.
In his exchanges with King, Nhat Hanh defined one of many uncommon controversies in his lengthy lifetime of advocating for peace — over the immolations of some Vietnamese monks and nuns to protest the conflict.
“I mentioned this was not suicide, as a result of in a tough scenario like Vietnam, to make your voice heard is tough. So generally we’ve got to burn ourselves alive to ensure that our voice to be heard so that’s an act of compassion that you simply try this, the act of affection and never of despair,” he mentioned in an interview with U.S. speak present host Oprah Winfrey.
Sulak Sivaraksa, a Thai educational who embraced Nhat Hanh’s thought of socially engaged Buddhism, mentioned the Zen grasp had “suffered greater than most monks and had been concerned extra for social justice”.
“In Vietnam within the Fifties and Sixties, he was very uncovered to younger folks, and his society was in turmoil, in disaster. He was actually in a tough place, between the satan and the deep blue sea — the Communists on the one hand, the CIA then again. In such a scenario, he has been very trustworthy — as an activist, as a contemplative monk, as a poet, and as a transparent author,” Sivaraksa was quoted as saying.
In line with Nhat Hanh, “Buddhism means to be awake — conscious of what’s occurring in a single’s physique, emotions, thoughts and on the planet. In case you are awake, you can’t do in any other case than act compassionately to assist relieve struggling you see round you. So Buddhism should be engaged on the planet. If it’s not engaged, it’s not Buddhism.”
Each North and South Vietnam barred Nhat Hanh from returning after he went overseas in 1966 to marketing campaign towards the conflict, leaving him, he mentioned, “like a bee with no beehive”.
He was allowed into the nation in 2005, when the communist-ruled authorities welcomed him again within the first of a number of visits. Nhat Hanh remained based mostly in southern France.
The dramatic homecoming appeared to sign an easing of controls on faith. Nhat Hanh’s followers have been invited by the abbot of Bat Nha to settle at his mountain monastery, the place they remained for a number of years till relations with the authorities started to bitter over Nhat Hanh’s requires an finish to authorities management over faith.
By late 2009 to early 2010, Nhat Hanh’s followers have been evicted from the monastery and from one other temple the place they’d taken refuge.
To climate the storms of life and understand happiness, he counselled at all times a conscious “return to the breath, even whereas doing routine chores like sweeping and washing dishes.
Nhat Hanh moved to Thailand in late 2016 after which returned to Vietnam in late 2018, the place he was receiving conventional medication therapies for the after-effects of his stroke and loved strolls across the temple grounds in his wheelchair, in keeping with the Buddhist on-line e-newsletter LionsRoar.com.
It was a quiet, easy finish to a rare life, one solely in line with his love for taking pleasure from the humblest elements of life. “No mud, no lotus,” says one in every of his many temporary sayings.