How the Great Zen Master and Peace Activist Thich Nhat Hanh Found and Lost Himself in a Literary Epiphany – The Marginalian

“Man, the environment we live in, is a place of illusion. Beauty is connected to the attempt to see oneself … to pierce the veil of selfish awareness and join the world as it really is,” wrote Iris Murdoch in a 1970 masterpiece – a strong idea in her time and in her culture, which opposes the ideas of individual choice and Western philosophy to create oneself. Today, practices such as meta-meditation and mindfulness – practices that focus on the dissolution of the self, which remain the most challenging human activities even for the most dedicated meditators among us, offering only brief glimpses of reality as it really is – are flooding the world, drawn from the deep waters of ancient Eastern philosophy and carried by a few cultural pioneers. 1970s.

Chief among them was a great Zen Master and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926-January 22, 2022), who came to America in 1961 to study the history of Vietnamese Buddhism at Princeton Theological Seminary, returning what he learned to his native Vietnam two years later and devoted himself to peace work, where the South Vietnamese government punished him with exile for ten years. After half his life – appointed by Martin Luther King, Jr. to the Nobel Peace Prize, having founded the source of hope for civilization which is Plum Village in France, surviving a stroke that left him unable to speak or walk – he was finally allowed to return to his country, leaving the West that celebrated him as the father of thought.

The journal Thich Nhat Hanh began keeping when he came to America as a young man was published a hundred years later Sweet Palm Leaves: Journals 1962-1966 (public library). These remain his most intimate writings – a rare record of his selflessness, which made him himself: a monk who brought mindfulness to the world.

In a rare diary entry written ten days before his thirty-sixth birthday – the year Walt Whitman opened his book. Leaves of Grass with the declaration “The person who belongs to you I sing to myself, a different person” — Thich Nhat Hanh considers the treacherous nature and dependence of the individual as he faces his masses, involved in the internal conflict of the universe that comes to be a human being in the world, a secret universe in the public sphere:

It's funny how much our surroundings influence our emotions. Our joys and sorrows, our likes and dislikes are determined by the environment we live in so often we let our environment dictate our course. We go along with “public” emotions until we don't even know our true desires. We become a stranger to ourselves, completely shaped by society… Sometimes I feel caught between two opposing personalities — the “me” that society imposes and what I would call my “true self.” How often do we confuse the two and think that the mold of society is our true self. Wars between the two of us rarely result in peaceful reconciliation. Our mind becomes a battlefield where the Five Aggregates – mood, emotions, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness – are scattered like debris in a storm. Trees fall, branches break, houses collapse.

Two centuries after Coleridge viewed the storm as a lens for the soul, and a century after Van Gogh admired the clarifying power of storms in nature and human nature, Thich Nhat Hanh adds:

These are our lonely times. Yet every time we survive such a storm, we grow a little. Without storms like these, I would not be the person I am today. But I rarely feel such a storm until it is upon me. He seems to appear without warning, as if silently stepping on silk slippers. I know it must have been intense, it's been raging in my thoughts and mindset, but when a storm hits, nothing can help. I have been beaten and torn, and I have been saved.

In keeping with Alain de Botton's understanding of the importance of separation, he looks back at what the most formative storm of his life taught him:

I realized that this thing that I had taken to be “me” was really uphill. My true nature, I realized, was more real, more ugly and more beautiful than I imagined.

In a memoir that makes my bibliophiliac soul tingle with the tenderness of recognition, he goes on to explain what caused the storm of his indifference — his version of the garden epiphany that revealed to Virginia Woolf the purpose of her life:

The feeling started just before eleven o'clock at night on October first. I was browsing the eleventh floor of the Butler Library. I knew the library was about to close, and I saw a book that was about my research area. I took it off the shelf and grabbed it with both hands. It was big and heavy. I learned that it was published in 1892, and donated to the Columbia Library that same year. On the back cover was a piece of paper that recorded the names of the borrowers and the dates they checked them out from the library. It was loaned for the first time in 1915, the second time in 1932. I would be the third. Can you imagine? I was only the third borrower, on October 1, 1962. For seventy years, only two other people were standing in the place where I was standing now, they took the book off the shelf, and decided to check it out. I wanted to meet those two people. I don't know why, but I wanted to hug them. But they disappeared, and I, too, will soon disappear. Two points on the same straight line will never meet. I was able to meet two people in space, but not in time.

Suddenly, all the lines dissolved into a limitless field of awareness, without space or time or yourself:

I feel like I've lived a long time and seen a lot of life. I am almost thirty-six years old, not young. But that night, as I stood among the stacks of Butler Library, I realized that I am neither young nor old, I am and I am not. My friends know that I can be playful and mischievous like a child. I love to play and get fully into the game of life. I also know what it is to be angry. And I know the joy of being praised. I often cry tears or laugh. But underneath all these emotions, what else is there? How can I contact it? If there is nothing, why can I be sure that there is?

Still holding the book, I felt a spark of understanding. I understood that I had no ideas, hopes, opinions, or loyalties. I have no promises to keep with others. At that time, my feeling like a business among other businesses disappeared. I knew that this understanding did not come from disappointment, despair, fear, desire, or ignorance. The veil was lifted silently and effortlessly. That is all. If you beat me, stone me, or shoot me, everything that is considered “me” will fall apart. Then, what actually exists will reveal itself—unconscious as smoke, escaping as nothingness, and yet no smoke or nothingness, bad, or not bad, good, yet not good. It's like a shadow in a mirror.

But from this sense of loss of identity, from this complete collapse of his personality, there arose a deep sense of coming to himself, to the fundamental unity of his personality with all humanity:

At that moment, I had a deep feeling he came back. My clothes, my shoes, even the essence of my existence had vanished, and I was indifferent like a grasshopper standing still on the grass… When the grasshopper sits on the grass, it does not think of separation, resistance, or suspicion… The green grasshopper merges completely with the green grass… It does not retreat and does not retreat. They know nothing about philosophy or ideology. He is just grateful for his normal life. Rise from the pasture, my dear friend, and greet yesterday's child. When you don't see me, you will come back on your own. Even if your heart is full of despair, you will find the same grasshopper in the same grass… Some problems of life cannot be solved by study or logical thinking. We just live with them, struggle with them, and become one with them… To live, we must die all the time. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible.

Complete this section of the Palm leaves are fragrant – an absolutely excellent reading – with the poet Lewis Thomas, writing at the same time, how the sea slug and the jellyfish illuminate the unreachable boundary of the self, then revisiting Thich Nhat Hanh with the art of deep listening, the four Buddhist sayings to transform fear into love, and his timeless and dynamic art.