Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–2022) coined the term “engaged Buddhism,” organised relief work in the middle of a war, was exiled for nearly four decades, and became one of the most widely read Buddhist authors in any language.

He is also frequently read badly: as a gentle writer of aphorisms about washing dishes, detached from the circumstances that produced the teaching. The circumstances matter.

The war #

Born in central Vietnam, ordained at sixteen in the Thien tradition, he was part of a generation of Vietnamese monks who concluded that a Buddhism confined to monasteries could not address what was happening to their country.

In the early 1960s he founded the School of Youth for Social Service, which trained young people — mostly students, many of them monks and nuns — to go into villages and rebuild what the war had destroyed: schools, clinics, houses. They worked on both sides of the line and refused to take sides, which meant both sides regarded them as enemies. Several were killed; some were assassinated specifically for their neutrality.

He also founded Van Hanh Buddhist University and a publishing house, and edited a Buddhist weekly.

In 1966 he travelled to the United States and Europe to argue for a negotiated peace. Martin Luther King Jr. met him, was substantially influenced by the conversation, came out publicly against the war the following year, and nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967 — writing that he knew of no one more worthy. No prize was awarded that year.

Both Vietnamese governments then denied him re-entry. The exile lasted until 2005.

The term #

“Engaged Buddhism” — dao Phat di vao cuoc doi, Buddhism going into life — was his rendering of an idea he traced to the Vietnamese Buddhist tradition, particularly the Truc Lam school founded by a king who abdicated to become a monk and who insisted that practice and worldly responsibility were not separable.

The claim is narrower and sharper than the phrase suggests. He was not saying that Buddhists should also do social work. He was saying that a practice which can be maintained while ignoring the suffering in front of you is not the practice.

His formulation of the question, in a much-quoted exchange: when your village is being bombed, do you stay in the meditation hall or do you go out and help? His answer was that you do both, and that doing only either one is a failure.

The Order of Interbeing #

Founded in 1966, in the middle of the war, with six members — four of them women.

Its Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings are a reformulation of Buddhist ethics for lay practitioners, and several are unusual enough to be worth noting.

The first three concern views: not being idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, including Buddhist ones; not thinking the knowledge one presently possesses is unchanging absolute truth; and not forcing others, including children, to adopt one’s views. Written in a country being destroyed by an ideological war, these are not abstract.

Others address awareness of suffering — not avoiding contact with it, and finding ways to be with those who suffer; simple living; anger; and right livelihood, including not possessing weapons or investing in companies that deprive others of their chance to live.

The order includes monastics and laypeople on comparable terms, which was a deliberate structural choice.

Interbeing #

His best-known doctrinal contribution, and his most-criticised.

Interbeing (tiep hien) is his rendering of dependent origination as universal interconnection. The famous illustration:

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist.

And from there: the logger, the logger’s parents, the wheat that made the logger’s bread, the sunshine. The paper contains everything.

The criticism is that this is not what paticca-samuppada means in the early texts, where the teaching is a specific causal analysis of how suffering arises and ceases — not a claim about cosmic interconnection. Treating them as identical flattens a real distinction.

The defence is that interbeing is recognisably Huayan, which developed exactly this doctrine of mutual interpenetration, and that Thich Nhat Hanh was a Mahayana teacher drawing on his own tradition rather than misreading the Pali canon.

Both points are fair. The useful thing for a reader is to know that interbeing and dependent origination are related doctrines from different periods, not the same doctrine.

Plum Village #

Established in south-west France in 1982, and now the centre of an international community with monasteries in France, the United States, Germany, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Australia.

The practice there is recognisable and distinctive.

Walking meditation at a natural pace, often as a group, coordinating steps with the breath.

The bell of mindfulness — a bell sounded at intervals, at which everyone stops whatever they are doing, including mid-sentence, and breathes three times. Clocks, phones, and the telephone ringing are all used as bells.

Mindful eating in silence, at least for the first part of a meal.

Gathas — short verses recited silently during ordinary activities: waking, brushing teeth, turning on the tap, driving. The practice comes from a Chinese Buddhist tradition of the same kind and is the mechanism by which mindfulness is meant to pervade the day rather than being confined to sitting.

Deep listening and loving speech — a formalised practice of right speech, including “beginning anew,” a structured process for addressing conflict within a community.

Hugging meditation, which he invented after an American friend hugged him goodbye at an airport: three breaths in the embrace, aware of the other person’s presence and mortality.

The style is gentle, and the gentleness is sometimes mistaken for softness. The community he built in the 1960s buried its own murdered members.

Later years #

He returned to Vietnam in 2005, 2007, and 2008, on carefully negotiated visits — the last of which ended with the Vietnamese government suppressing the monastery his followers had established at Bat Nha.

He worked extensively with Western audiences: on mindfulness in schools, in business, and with police officers and prison populations. He was an early and sharp critic of mindfulness stripped of ethics, arguing that the practice without the ethical framework and the aim of reducing suffering was not mindfulness at all — a position directly relevant to the McMindfulness debate.

He suffered a severe stroke in 2014, which left him unable to speak. He returned to Vietnam in 2018, to the temple where he had ordained, and died there in January 2022.

The books #

He wrote over a hundred. The most useful entry points:

The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975) — written originally as a letter to a colleague in the School of Youth for Social Service, still in Vietnam, on how to sustain practice under pressure. It is the best of his books and the one that most shows its origins.

Being Peace (1987) — the clearest statement of engaged practice.

The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (1998) — his systematic presentation of the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, and the rest. The most substantial doctrinally.

Old Path White Clouds (1991) — a retelling of the Buddha’s life from the canonical sources, and among the best narrative versions in English.

Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire (1967) — the wartime writing, and the necessary corrective to reading him as only gentle.

Common questions #

Was he a Zen master? He was ordained in the Vietnamese Thien tradition and held lineage transmission in the Lieu Quan line of the Lam Te (Linji/Rinzai) school. His teaching draws on Zen, Pure Land, and the Pali sources together, which is normal in Vietnamese practice.

Did he invent engaged Buddhism? He coined the English term and gave it its most influential formulation. The impulse is older, and Ambedkar, Taixu, and others were doing comparable work independently. See Engaged Buddhism.

Is “interbeing” orthodox? It is a Mahayana reading with Huayan roots, presented as an interpretation of dependent origination. Theravada scholars generally regard it as a different doctrine under the same name.

Why was he exiled? For calling publicly for a negotiated peace, which both Vietnamese governments treated as support for the other side.

Where can I practise in this tradition? Plum Village in France, Deer Park in California, Blue Cliff in New York, Magnolia Grove in Mississippi, the European Institute of Applied Buddhism in Germany, and several hundred lay sanghas worldwide.

Sources & further reading #

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness (Beacon, 1975). Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (Broadway, 1998) — the doctrinal presentation. Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire (Hill & Wang, 1967). Christopher S. Queen & Sallie B. King (eds.), Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia (SUNY, 1996). Sallie B. King, Socially Engaged Buddhism (University of Hawai’i Press, 2009).