HANOI, VIET NAM: Exiled Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, 79, answers journalists questions ... [+]
Sunday, March 13, marks 49 days since the passing of the great Vietnamese Zen teacher and activist Thich Nhat Hanh. This is an important milestone in the Buddhist tradition for both the deceased and the bereaved alike. For those seven weeks after death, a person is thought to be transitioning between this life and what comes next, a kind of liminal space known as the bardo. During this time, family and friends may keep an altar and conduct various rituals of remembrance, in part to ensure safe passage; the dead, whether you believe them to be on such a metaphysical journey or not, are nonetheless quite literally “between worlds” in the sense of existing less and less in corporeal form, their body actively decomposing, while living on more and more in our hearts and memories.
Perhaps that is what Hanh, or Thay (meaning “teacher”) to his followers, meant when he said, at the end of a lecture on the subject in 2014, the same year he had a stroke that would leave him unable to speak, “What happens when you die is: you don’t die.”
At first glance, this statement seems wrapped in the enigmatic paradox typical of Zen: to die is—of course!—not to die. Such paradoxes can have a salubrious function in jarring us out of our either/or thinking, something Hamlet perhaps would have benefited from in swapping his “or” for an “and” (“To be, and not to be” admittedly doesn’t have the same ring to it). But beyond being a cognitive wrench thrown in the gears of duality, this punchline—eliciting uproarious laughter from his audience, and a wry smile from Thay himself—makes a kind of literal sense that, it would seem, we keep having to remind ourselves of.
Though we die to this body when we take our last breath, we don’t die to our greater “body” of influence, extending through all those we have touched, directly and indirectly, rippling out and out into who knows what farthest reaches of time and space. When Thay led a half-day mindfulness workshop at Google, in 2011, he encouraged employees simply “walking from the parking lot to your office” to be mindful, so that “you may enjoy every step.” But in addition to improving our quality of life (since our life is only ever lived in the present), and perhaps even boosting productivity (since to be here now is to focus on what matters), arguably there’s a deeper teaching here: that every step counts, each and every footfall, each blade of grass squashed and slowly springing back, each stone crunched underfoot or sent skittering away, is a consequence of our action.
The Buddhists call this karma, but once again you don’t have to buy into the metaphysics to get the gist: our actions impact others. Imagine if we were as aware of the effect we have on those around us, and in this case on those that come after us, as Google staffers were of those grasses and stones in Thay’s presence. How might that change our relationships? How would you behave differently with such heightened sensitivity?
For this reason, it makes sense to refer to Thay—and other great teachers in our lives, for that matter—in the literary present tense, a convention that honors the lasting influence of a person as a kind of continuation. Not “Thay said” but “Thay says.” Thay says, borrowing from Sartre (thus a continuation of another teacher’s continuation), “Man is the totality of his acts.” Thay says, paraphrased by his senior disciple Brother Phap Dung (ditto continuation), any container for his ashes should have a sign that says, “I am not in here,” and another that says, “I am not out there either.” Thay says, “If I am anywhere, it is in your mindful breathing and in your peaceful steps.”
If Cicero, via Montaigne, was right in saying that philosophy is preparation for death, perhaps we might add that leadership, true teaching in Thay’s sense, is about what comes after. For Thay, there is “no such thing as retirement,” and even from his wheel chair, incapable of speech, he was one to gently direct his followers, “still living his life, doing what his body and health allows.”
At the most basic level, this is a lesson that begins with ourselves, recognizing the influence wielded not just between people but within them. In Reconciliation: Healing the Inner Child, one of over 100 books to his credit, Thay says that just as your living extension continues in others posthumously, so too do your former selves continue to live on inside you—particularly the wounded inner child. That kid who, at times, did not get what they needed, did not receive the love and attention they deserved (or worse, was neglected or outright abused), is still alive, ready to be treated kindly but also equally on guard against more hurt. To see that, and touch that tender spot inside ourselves with compassion, is the start of extending that same grace to others, the start of the legacy we will one day leave behind.
“With practice,” Thay says, “we can see that our wounded child is not only us.” He continues: “Our mother may have suffered throughout her life. Our father may have suffered.” In a reversal of the old Larkin line about how they eff you up, “your mum and dad,” showing dourly that “Man hands on misery to man,” Thay reminds us: “Perhaps our parents weren’t able to look after the wounded child in themselves.” Perhaps we can do so—look after the wounded child in ourselves, in our parents, in anyone and everyone we meet—now.
Expressing condolences on Twitter, the Dalai Lama acknowledged Thay’s “truly meaningful life” before going on to say: “I have no doubt the best way we can pay tribute is to continue his work.” Work: suddenly the day job can be seen extending through all our days, past and future, in a long line reaching back to our teachers and forward to those we end up teaching. Perhaps that is why Thay, politically active as he was, claims in verse of his own, the 1964 anti-war poem, “Condemnation,” to “Beware!” The “real enemies,” he says, are inside of us: “ambition, violence hatred and greed.” If only more of us would “go to work” each morning on ourselves, perhaps we might someday leave such a legacy worth continuing.
