By Paul Tingen My first visit to Plum Village, twenty-two years ago, is still as vividly engrained in my memory as if it happened last week, probably because it was packed with surprises, ranging from the eyebrow-raising to the jaw-dropping. I arrived in Lower Hamlet on a warm evening in…
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Practicing the Mindfulness Trainings in Prison
By Mark J. Wilson I am ashamed to admit it but I am a prisoner of the Oregon Department of Corrections (ODOC), serving a life sentence for a murder I committed on June 29, 1987, when I was just eighteen years old. There is nothing I can say to excuse…
Explaining the Reasons for the Grand Offering Ceremonies
By Thich Nhat Hanh Preparations for these ceremonies were being made at least three months before Thay left for Vietnam. The full text of this letter is available on the Plum Village website in Vietnamese; it gives specific instructions as well on how to set up the altar. I imagine…
Dharma Talk: Cultivating Our Bodhisattva Qualities
Bodhisattvas are awakened beings. We also have our nature of awakening, no less than they, but we have to train ourselves. One way is to practice invoking the names of four great bodhisattvas—Avalokiteshvara (Regarder of the Cries of the World), Manjushri (Great Understanding), Samantabhadra (Universal Goodness), and Kshitigarbha (Earth Store).…
Letters
Dear Editor, Thank you for publishing Joanne Friday’s interview in your Winter/Spring 2013 issue. I especially appreciated Friday’s comment on suffering: “There is nothing quite like it to help us to wake up.” This reminded me of Thay’s quote from Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: “We see the nature of…
Returning to Our Spiritual Roots
By Mitchell Ratner and Jerry Braza Early in the morning we leave our Beijing hotel on five deluxe buses: 150 of us from 16 countries, traveling with Thich Nhat Hanh and 30 monks and nuns from Plum Village and the Green Mountain Dharma Center. The major urban arteries are crowded with new cars, bicycles, and…
Letting Our Descendants Speak
Nonviolent Civil Disobedience as a Compassionate Response to Climate Change Seattle protest meditation. Photo by Alex Garland Our caravan of twenty-plus vehicles stretched out along the highway like a small river flowing down the Cascadian foothills towards the ocean and the seaport town of Anacortes, Washington. This river of earth-embracing…
Monks & Nuns: Behind the Projections onto the Robe
Part One By Lori Zimring De Mori On a quiet summer morning in the French countryside near the village of Thenac, several hundred people sit patiently in the boxy, light-filled room which serves as Upper Hamlet’s main meditation hall in Plum Village. Children are at the front—some squirming, some with…
A War Is Never Over
The road from Hue to Dong Ha snakes through villages and countryside, bounded on each side by ankle-deep floodwaters. On this day in October 2007, the rainy season in Central Vietnam is, thankfully, coming to an end. The annual flooding has been particularly heavy this year, with more than forty…
Roses and Garbage
Thích Nhất Hạnh offers a deep teaching on the futility of hate and discrimination, and on the insight of interbeing and nonduality as the way to liberation and non-fear.