By Brother Chan Phap Hai 

Here is Brother Chan Phap Hai’s written speech for accepting the Mission Be Mindful Hero Award on behalf of our dear teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, on May 24, 2019, at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, California. Dharma teacher Chau Yoder attended the event to represent Thay in lieu of Brother Phap Hai. 

Mission Be is an organization that teaches mindfulness to children. For more information, you can visit their website at missionbe.org. 

Dearest Friends, 

I am humbled and grateful to be standing before you today representing the Most Venerable Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, upon whom you are bestowing this honor. 

It is a great honor for our teacher to be recognized as the Mindfulness Hero of the Year this evening. Our teacher worked his whole life in support of human rights, religious freedom, inclusiveness, and nondiscrimination. On his behalf, and on behalf of the Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism, we thank you for extending this hand of friendship to him and to our community. 

Our teacher founded the meditation center, Plum Village, and the tradition found throughout the world. Working together as a multicultural Sangha, thousands of communities of mindful living have been founded on every continent. The transformative practice of mindfulness is now being offered all over the world in educational settings by wonderful organizations, such as Mission Be. Utilizing this concert and sacred space to feature music and sound as an integral way to promote mindfulness, we can all celebrate the beauty and practice of heartfulness, something that our teacher would undoubtedly support. 

In Buddhism, we practice the insight of nonself. If our teacher and our community have been able to do anything to help the world, it is thanks to the Sangha as a whole. Believing strongly that the Sangha was the masterwork of the Buddha, our teacher often reminded us that “the Buddha himself was an excellent Sangha builder.” After enlightenment, the first thing the Buddha did was seek his community. He knew that he couldn’t realize his dream of helping the world without a community. This is why, a year after his enlightenment, he had a monastic Sangha of over one thousand monks, which continued to grow throughout his lifetime to include nuns and people from all walks of life. 

When our dear teacher Thay met the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1966, they discussed the importance of community building. Dr. King also knew that without the power of a Beloved Community, lasting transformative change would not be possible. 

If you have confidence in the Buddha’s teachings and if you admire visionaries like our dear teacher Thay, Dr. King, and Mahatma Gandhi, and would like to participate in bringing lasting transformation to our world, you will need a community in order to realize your aspiration. Only when there is a Sangha infused with mutual understanding and love can we achieve our goal and realize this dream. 

For thousands of years, mindfulness practitioners have known that wisdom is a living stream that must be applied to each and every moment of our daily lives. Mindfulness is not an icon preserved in a museum. It is a living spring of deep wisdom that must be experienced so that it can be passed on to future generations. 

In Plum Village, we learn how to generate the energies of peace, joy, and happiness in our bodies, hearts, and minds during each and every moment of our daily life. By engaging in these energies, we avoid causing suffering in those around us as we help them to do the same. This is our deepest learning and our most important practice. 

For many years now, the modern world has been profoundly influenced by the culture of individual achievement and recognition at the cost of collective awakening and advancement. As science, technology, and businesses have become the primary forces behind economics and politics, we’re beginning to realize that we will only survive when we narrow the gap between science and spirituality, the secular and the sacred. Now is the time to turn toward one another, because these insights can only be lasting if they’re experienced on a collective scale. We must recognize that building true Sangha, true community, is the greatest medicine for our times. 

Therefore, our love and compassion must be concrete, tangible, and expressed in our daily actions. We must direct our compassion not only to our own nations but to all living beings, and to our entire planet. Everything is interconnected and interrelated. Let us enlarge our hearts by having the courage and conviction to disseminate mindfulness, this masterwork of healing, with every step we take. 

Thank you so much for extending this award to our teacher, who has finally returned to his country of origin, Vietnam, where he continues to practice mindfulness, concentration, and insight in spite of having suffered a serious stroke. We deeply appreciate your generosity, love, and blessings, and wish you nothing but success in your endeavor to bring mindfulness and well-being to our children.