Ensuring the Future of Our Spiritual Community

We all feel great love and affection for our monastic sisters and brothers. Their mindful living provides a beautiful example of the joy we may experience by living simply in our busy society. Their study and practice in spreading the Dharma fulfills our desire to bring peace to our world community. Their care for our retreat centers and educational institutions ensures we will enjoy places of respite and healing. Our monastic sisters and brothers selflessly serve our community and ask so little in return.

Thich Nhat Hanh currently leads about six hundred monks and nuns living in the United States, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, France, Australia, and Germany. These special people have an enormous positive impact as they travel and provide retreats and Dharma talks all over the world. Our monastics share the practice of mindfulness, face to face, with more than 200,000 people a year.

In the Buddhist tradition, members of the monastic community relied on the support of the lay Sangha to provide for the basic needs of their simple lives. They still do so today.

The Monastic Trust Fund is an endowment* that has been created to care for the needs of the monastics while ensuring that your gift continues giving. Only the interest that your gift earns is used to support the monastics. This means your gift will support these spiritual leaders in perpetuity.

Our goal is to grow this fund to ten million dollars in order to ensure the care and continuation of our monastic community. Your gift will provide for the well-being of our monastic brothers and sisters for many years to come by providing ensured funding for sustenance, shelter, and health care.

In 2013, a very generous member of our Sangha will contribute two dollars for every dollar you contribute this year, up to $500,000! This 2:1 match helps ensure that your gift will provide the greatest benefit possible to our monastic sisters and brothers. This means that, for example, your gift of $1,000, matched with $2,000, will result in a total fund gift of $3,000.

Supporting our monastic community is an honor and a way to express our deep gratitude to Thay. Our sisters and brothers are the loving spirits sowing and nurturing the seeds of mindfulness, compassion, and peace. To support them in this loving work they do in the world on behalf of all of us, please consider generously supporting our brothers and sisters with a gift to the Monastic Trust Fund.

Please make your check payable to the Monastic Trust Fund and send to:

Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation 2499 Melru Lane Escondido, CA 92026

For further information or to make your gift online, visit: ThichNhatHanhFoundation.org.

*The Monastic Trust Fund is a separate 501c3 organization established solely to support our community’s monastic sisters and brothers.

I was in Florida, on my way to work. It was a beautiful day. The sky was a clear blue all the way to the horizon. I remember appreciating the beauty of the sky, then thinking of my niece and nephew, wondering if, when they get older, having faced all the challenges that life has to offer, they will still be capable of enjoying something so simple as the clear blue sky. I know that growing up, nothing in my education had taught me how to do that. And because of all the love and peace that was in me at that moment, it became very clear to me what I wanted to do with my life. Just as Thay had helped me, I wanted to help others to wake up to the wonders of life and to find peace and happiness.

-- Sister Lanh Nghiem