In 1978, when Vietnamese boat-people were being turned away from Singapore, he spent hours mentally in the lives of the politicians, the police, and with the terrified refugees. With mindful diplomacy, thousands were saved
Thich Nhat Hanh was a Buddhist monk, drawn to his calling in childhood by a picture of the smiling Buddha and a cold, astonishing 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 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 of connectedness with the whole fabric of life. As he once told asession on disarmament, unfolding a crumpled poem from his pocket, he was both the 12-year-old girl raped by a pirate and that pirate, forced perhaps by poverty into a life of pillage.
The West had also become, by default, his main teaching ground. After his peace trip to Washington in 1966, when he persuaded 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 south-west France into a centre for mindfulness, Plum Village, which grew into more than 1,000 practising communities worldwide.
More modern sorts of suffering caught his eye, too: the profit motive, the race to the top, the moment-by-moment 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.
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