Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese monk and a peace activist. Thich or Thay in Vietnamese means teacher. He is an author of more than 100 books and was nominated for the nobel prize by Martin Luther King Jr. His life has since been dedicated to the work of inner transformation for the benefit of individuals and society.
Nhat Hanh was born in the city of Quảng Ngãi in Central Vietnam in 1926. He was inspired to become a monk when he was seven. He saw the picture of the Buddha sitting on the grass with peace and a smile. He was impressed and had a desire to be like him. At first, his parents opposed his will because they believed that the life of a monk was difficult. When ordaining, Viemanese ordain for their entire life. He kept learning about it until the age of 16 when he had the permission of his parents to enter the monastery in Vietnam. He received training in both Zen and Mahayana.
He was named editor-in-chief of Vietnamese Buddhism in 1956. In the following years, he founded the school of Youth for Social Service, a neutral Corps of Buddhist Peace workers who went into rural areas to establish a school to built a healthcare clinics and help re-build villages.
Vietnam War
In 1960, Nhat hanh came to the U.S. to study comparative religion at Princeton University and a following year was appointed lecturer in Buddhism at Columbia University. Then in 1963, he returned to Vietnam to aid his fellow monks in their non-violent peace efforts, valiantly opposing his own government.
During the Vietnam War, he and his fellow monks had difficulty with a decision: Should he still live peacefully in the monastery to practice mindfulness or go out and help people who were suffering?Since, for him becoming a monk meant having time to practice for transformation and healing himself, and then to help transform suffering and healing other people, he decided to do both
For this decision, he already established the idea of Engaged Buddism – a buddism movement that involves peaceful activism for social reform .
“We often think of peace as the absence of war, that if powerful countries would reduce their weapon arsenals, we could have peace. But if we look deeply into the weapons, we see our own minds- our own prejudices, fears and ignorance. Even if we transport all the bombs to the moon, the roots of war and the roots of bombs are still there, in our hearts and minds, and sooner or later we will make new bombs.
War is seen as a universal concept that often causes discomfort and conflict in relation to civilians. As they are a worrying universal event that has occurred for many decades now, they posed questions to society about human's nature and civilization. Questions such as is humanity sane or insane? and do humans have an obsession with destruction vs creation. These questions are posed from the two anti-war texts; Dr Strangelove by Stanley Kubrick and Slaughterhouse Five written by Kurt Vonnegut.
War is the means to many ends. The ends of ruthless dictators, of land disputes, and lives – each play its part in the reasoning for war. War is controllable. It can be avoided; however, once it begins, the bat...
Thích Nh’at Hanh is a world renowned Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, religious figure and accomplished writer. Living Buddha, Living Christ is only one of his many famous publications. Thích Nh’at Hanh, is famous for his insights into spiritual heritage and mindfulness in the present moment. Many Americans are seeking religious understanding and personal spirituality, even if they do not practice in the traditional manner. Throughout this book Nh’at Hang encourages readers to find meaning, understanding, mindfulness, and peace in the teachings of Buddha and Christ. His main focus is to open meaningful dialogue between different traditions, cultures, and religious groups around the world, for the betterment
Vann arrived in Vietnam on March 23, 1962 as part of the new U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam. He became a chief advisor to an ARVN infantry division. His duty was to advise his Vietnamese counter part, but he officially had no power over any ARVN troops. It was this situation that became a major point of conflict between him and those who were running the war.
He continued to teach Buddhism and enlightenment. These teaching principles can be found in the book Dhamma (Document 6). This was the start of a similar practice of Buddhism. It was not the original since it incorporated some orthodox beliefs.
Thich Nhat Hanh , the author of The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology, is a Buddhist monk. He was born in Hue, Vietnam. He wrote this book to inform the people on Earth about the environmental issues we currently have. He believes that people in the world are like sleepwalkers, who are unaware about the environment. Everything in the world is related to each other. The same thing applied for human; everyone in this world is related and linked to each other like brothers and sisters. Since we all share the Earth, the water and the sun, he points out that we have to be responsible and protect the environment, because everything supports each other in order to adapt to this planet. Although his ideas to practice the mindfulness seems impossible and ridiculous to some people when they first read a few chapters of this book, they are actually possible to practice and succeed. As he indicated in his book, many people and even countries have been practicing his ideas, and that will gradually improve the environment that we live in.
Buddhism was founded by one man, Siddhartha Guatama. He was born into royalty around 563 B.C.E. in a Kingdom near the border of India and Nepal. He was raised in wealth and luxury, and at the age of 16, he married a wealth woman and they had a child together. Around the age of 29, he began to realize that all humans were in a cycle of suffering, dying, and then being reincarnated only to suffer and die over and over again. It was then that he decided to leave his wife and child to find a way out of this repeating cycle of life and death. First he studied with teachers, but found he was coming to no conclusions, so he turned to more extreme things such as self-mortification, but he was still left unsatisfied.
Lintner, Bertil. The resistance of the monks: Buddhism and activism in Burma. New York, NY: .
Ho Chi Minh’s father, Nguyen Sinh Huy, was a teacher and aspiring politician. Minh’s father refused to learn French despite it being required by the ruling French government. Because of Minh’s father’s reluctance to adhere to French rule, Nguyen Sinh Huy was unable to teach in French run schools. Nguyen Sinh Huy instead traveled around Vietnam offering peasants his services. Nguyen wrote letters for poor peasants and provided basic medical care for people in need. Nguyen’s work brought him into contact with the very poor of Vietnam’s society. Nguyen’s work in Vietnam also allowed him to witness the contrast in lifestyles faced by the poor peasants and the French elite who governed Vietnam. Minh’s father became a nationalist questioning the French’s rights to control Vietnam due to seeing such injustice first hand. Ho Chi Minh’s fathers’ stories gave Minh a glimpse of the poor conditions that were being faced by the people of his country at the hand of the French. Nguyen brought his children up to be nationalist. By the time Ho Chi Minh was a teen he had bought into his father’s nationalistic ideals. Ho Chi Minh believed that the people of Vietnam had the right to govern itself without the intervention of colonial
An examination of Ch'en's past gives us an idea of how he formed his beliefs, and fell into a state of isolation. At an early age, his parents were murdered in the pillage of Kalagan. In addition, at age twenty-four, his uncle was taken hostage and killed because he couldn't afford the ransom, and with no wife or children he was severed from any attachment to a family. He was practically brought up by pastor Smithson, representative of the thousands of Christians that were present in Shanghai, who gave him his Christian education. However, "[a]s he was devoid of charity, a religious calling could lead him only to contemplation or the inner life; but he hated contemplation and would only have dreamt of an apostleship, for which precisely his absence of charity disqualified him" (64). Thus, he was u...
Siddhartha Gautama is famously known as Gautama Buddha and was the founder of the idea of Buddhism. The Buddha was known to possess supernatural powers and abilities. He was born in the holy land of Nepal and his journey began in India when he decided to travel and teach himself about life. In the midst of his journey, he discovered Buddhism after he experienced a profound realization of the nature of life, death and existence. Buddhism became a religion based on the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama and since then Buddhism has been popular throughout many civilizations. Buddhism is now one of the most ancient religions in the world, where people follow Buddha, which stand for “awakened one,” and Buddhism which has gained popularity because of the teachings of the Buddha.
One of those men is Xuanzang. Under his brothers training he grew up a young monk and entered monastery in Luoyang at 13. It was there that Xuanzang studied, learned, & meditated about Buddhism. In 623, defying his older brother Xuanzang left their monastery to travel and hear oral teachings. He traveled through Henan, preaching and gaining fame.
He states that “Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need them is essential to the keeping of peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles-which can only destroy and can never create.” (p.114) He is saying that instead of using billions of dollars on weapons that can potentially destroy an entire planted and can never created again, we should reach to have peace over war so we never have to use such a dangerous weapon against each
devout Buddhist that their house was turned into a temple. At the age of 12, Saicho
Scott D. Sagan, the author of chapter two of “More Will Be Worse”, looks back on the deep political hostilities, numerous crises, and a prolonged arms race in of the cold war, and questions “Why should we expect that the experience of future nuclear powers will be any different?” The author talks about counter arguments among scholars on the subject that the world is better off without nuclear weapons. In this chapter a scholar named Kenneth Waltz argues that “The further spread of nuclear weapons may well be a stabilizing factor in international relations.” He believes that the spread of nuclear weapons will have a positive implications in which the likely-hood of war decreases and deterrent and defensive capabilities increase. Although there