Buddhism · Mahayana · Zen / Chan · Secular contemplative

Thich Nhat Hanh

Thích Nhất Hạnh · 釋一行

1926 – 2022Historically documented person

Vietnamese Zen monk, poet and peace activist (1926–2022), founder of the Plum Village tradition and of the Order of Interbeing. He coined the term “engaged Buddhism” during the Vietnam War, spent thirty-nine years in exile and turned mindfulness into an everyday practice accessible to the West. Author of more than a hundred books, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967. He died at his root temple in Huế.

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works: 135works
editions: 209editions
quotes: 7quotes
videos: 12videos
images: 7images

Thich Nhat Hanh en París, 2006 · CC BY-SA 2.0

In their words

«Breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile. Dwelling in the present moment, I know this is the only moment.»

Being Peace (1987), capítulo 1, «Suffering Is Not Enough»: la gatha de la respiración

To begin, one work

The Miracle of Mindfulness

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Their central idea

Peace is not the outcome of a negotiation but a way of being: whoever is not peace in their own breath cannot bring it to a conference table. Hence the title Being Peace, which reverses the usual order of means and ends.

See in context

Biography

6 min read

The boy who drank from the well

Nguyễn Xuân Bảo was born on 11 October 1926 in Huế, the old imperial capital of Annam, into a large family of officials and scholars that claimed descent from the poet Nguyễn Đình Chiểu. He himself traced his vocation to two childhood images he repeated into old age: a drawing of the Buddha seated on the grass, seen in a magazine at seven or eight, and a school outing to a mountain where a hermit lived whom the boys never found, but near whose hut the child discovered a natural well and drank until he felt “completely satisfied”. He told the story many times, and it is worth saying that he was the one who told it: this part of the narrative rests on his own testimony, not on any document.

At sixteen, in 1942, he entered Từ Hiếu Temple on the outskirts of Huế as a novice under Master Thanh Quý Chân Thật, of the forty-first generation of the Lâm Tế Zen school—the Chinese Linji—and the seventh of its Vietnamese Liễu Quán branch. He received the lineage name Trừng Quang (“clear, reflected light”) and, on ordination, the Dharma name Phùng Xuân (“meeting spring”). The title Nhất Hạnh (“one action”) he adopted on moving to Saigon in 1949. There, dissatisfied with a Buddhist institute that taught neither philosophy nor languages, he did something then unheard of for a monk: he enrolled in the secular university, read French and Vietnamese literature and supported himself by selling books and poems. In 1951 he received the bhikshu precepts at Ấn Quang Pagoda.

A Buddhism that goes out into the street

The 1950s were years of friction. He edited the official journal of the General Association of Buddhists, which senior monks suspended over his insistence on unifying the Vietnamese sanghas; his name was struck from the Ấn Quang registers; he withdrew with a few companions to a forest near Đà Lạt, to a small “community of resistance” called Phương Bối. From 1961 to 1963 he studied comparative religion at Princeton and taught Buddhism at Columbia. The journals of that period, published much later as Fragrant Palm Leaves, show a man in his thirties reading Protestant theologians, watching the snow and noting, one winter night, an awakening experience that he describes with the sobriety of someone who distrusts large words.

He returned to Saigon in December 1963, after the fall of Ngô Đình Diệm, called to help reorganise Vietnamese Buddhism. In little more than two years he set up the institutions that would define his life: the School of Youth for Social Service, a neutral corps of some ten thousand volunteers who rebuilt villages and opened clinics without taking sides; Vạn Hạnh Buddhist University; the Lá Bối publishing house; and, in February 1966, the Order of Interbeing (Tiếp Hiện), with six members—three women and three men—and fourteen precepts that rewrote the bodhisattva vows for a country in flames. The expression “engaged Buddhism”, which he coined in 1967 in Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, was not a theory: it was the name of what they were already doing.

Thirty-nine years away

On 1 May 1966, at Từ Hiếu, he received from Chân Thật the “lamp transmission” that made him a Dharma teacher and heir to the temple. Days later he left for the United States to plead for an end to the bombing. He appeared with Martin Luther King Jr. in Chicago, presented a five-point peace proposal, fasted for five days and talked with Thomas Merton at the Abbey of Gethsemani; when Saigon threatened to bar his return, Merton wrote an essay titled “Nhat Hanh Is My Brother”. The threat was carried out, and Hanoi added its own: both governments refused him entry. On 25 January 1967 King nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in a letter that called “this gentle Buddhist monk from Vietnam” an apostle of peace and non-violence; the committee awarded no prize that year.

The exile lasted thirty-nine years. He led the Vietnamese Buddhist Peace Delegation at the Paris talks, lectured at the Sorbonne, lived with refugees on the outskirts of the city and, in 1975, founded the Sweet Potato community near Troyes. There he wrote, for the social workers still in Vietnam who lived each day with the possibility of dying, a short manual published in English as The Miracle of Mindfulness. The word “mindfulness” barely existed in ordinary English in 1975; his book did much to bring it into being. In 1976–1977 he led a moving and clandestine effort to aid the boat people in the Gulf of Siam, which ended with his expulsion from Singapore; in 1978 a letter about a twelve-year-old girl raped by a pirate, who then drowned herself, led him to write “Please Call Me by My True Names”, the poem in which he recognises himself at once as the girl, the pirate and the member of the Politburo.

Plum Village

In 1982 the community moved to the Dordogne and Plum Village, Làng Mai, was born, with Sister Chân Không at his side as she had been since the School of Youth. What began as a hamlet with plum trees became the largest Buddhist monastery in Europe, with more than two hundred monastics and thousands of visitors a year, and the mother house of a network of centres in California, New York, Mississippi, Germany, Thailand, Hong Kong, Australia and, in time, Vietnam. From 1986 Parallax Press published his books in English—more than a hundred, translated into over forty languages—and from there came the forms now associated with his name: the mindfulness bell that stops all activity, walking meditation, the Five Mindfulness Trainings that recast the lay precepts, retreats for families, veterans, police officers or members of Congress. He taught in English, French and Vietnamese, in a low voice and short sentences, and commented on the Heart Sutra, the Diamond Sutra and Mind-Only psychology in the same tone in which he explained how to wash the dishes.

In 2005, after long negotiations, Hanoi allowed him to return on a visit, to teach and to publish four books; he came back in 2007 to hold great chanting ceremonies for all the war dead, whichever side they had fought on. The banned Unified Buddhist Church called those trips an accommodation with the regime; in 2009 police and hired gangs beat and expelled hundreds of his monks and nuns from Bát Nhã monastery. In a sense the exile never quite ended.

Continuation

On 11 November 2014 he suffered a brain haemorrhage that left him without speech. He was rehabilitated in Bordeaux, San Francisco and Thailand, and in October 2018, by gestures, he made it known that he wished to return to Từ Hiếu to stay. He lived there three more years, in a wheelchair, visiting the temple ponds, discreetly watched by plainclothes police. He died shortly after midnight on 22 January 2022, aged ninety-five, in the Deep Listening Hut. He had asked that no stupa be raised for him; if they insisted, the plaque should read “I am not in here”, a second one “I am not out there either”, and a third “I may be found in your way of breathing and walking”. He was cremated on 29 January and, after forty-nine days, his ashes were divided between his root temple and the centres he had founded.

What is documented about him is abundant and verifiable: dates, institutions, books, an archive of thousands of recorded talks. What his disciples hand down—the story of the well, the tone of the retreats, the ease with which a Vietnamese monk turned “interbeing” into an English word—already belongs to that other form of continuation he himself preferred to immortality.

Sources: Nhat Hanh, Thich. Being Peace. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1987. ISBN 9780938077008. · Nhat Hanh, Thich. The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation. Trad. Mobi Ho. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975 (ed. revisada 1987; ISBN 9780807012390). · Nhat Hanh, Thich. Fragrant Palm Leaves: Journals 1962–1966. Trad. Mobi Warren. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1998 (reed. 2020, ISBN 9781946764720). · Nhat Hanh, Thich. Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire. Prólogo de Thomas Merton. Nueva York: Hill and Wang, 1967. Digitalizado en Internet Archive (préstamo). · Nhat Hanh, Thich. The Heart of Understanding: Commentaries on the Prajñaparamita Heart Sutra. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1988.

Timeline

A life, year by year

Each point is a documented event. Click to read it, with its source and degree of certainty.

19261950197419982022

October 11, 1926age 0Huế, Annam (Indochina francesa)

Birth in Huế

Nguyễn Xuân Bảo is born, the fifth of six children, in the old imperial capital. His father, Nguyễn Đình Phúc, was an official of the French administration; his mother, Trần Thị Dĩ, came from Gio Linh district.

DocumentedWikidata, «Thích Nhất Hạnh», QID Q310913 (VIAF 87670142; LCCN n50006399).

October 11, 1926 · age 0
Birth in Huế
Nguyễn Xuân Bảo is born, the fifth of six children, in the old imperial capital. His father, Nguyễn Đình Phúc, was an official of the French administration; his mother, Trần Thị Dĩ, came from Gio Linh district.
Documented
1942 · age 16
Enters Từ Hiếu as a novice
At sixteen he enters Từ Hiếu Temple under Zen master Thanh Quý Chân Thật of the Lâm Tế (Linji) school, Liễu Quán branch. He receives the lineage name Trừng Quang and, on ordination, the Dharma name Phùng Xuân.
Documented
1951 · age 25
Full ordination as a bhikshu
Having left the Báo Quốc Buddhist Academy in 1950 over its neglect of philosophy and languages, he receives the bhikshu precepts in Saigon. He studies at a secular university, unusual for a monk, supporting himself by selling books and poems.
Documented
1961 – 1963 · age 35
Princeton and Columbia
On a scholarship he studies comparative religion at Princeton Theological Seminary and in 1962 lectures on Buddhism at Columbia. His journals from these years, published as Fragrant Palm Leaves, record an awakening experience on a winter night.
Documented
1964 · age 38
School of Youth for Social Service, Vạn Hạnh University and Lá Bối press
Back in Vietnam after Diệm's fall, he founds the School of Youth for Social Service (some ten thousand volunteers rebuilding villages without taking sides), co-founds Vạn Hạnh Buddhist University, and his students open the Lá Bối publishing house.
Documented
February 1966 · age 39
The Order of Interbeing (Tiếp Hiện) is founded
He ordains the first six members—three women and three men from the School of Youth—with fourteen precepts that recast the bodhisattva vows for a time of war.
Documented
May 1, 1966 · age 39
Lamp transmission
He receives the “lamp transmission” from his teacher Chân Thật, making him a Dharma teacher and spiritual heir of Từ Hiếu, days before leaving for the United States.
Documented
May 31, 1966 · age 39
Press conference with Martin Luther King Jr. and the start of exile
On his tour of the United States and Europe calling for an end to the war he appears with King in Chicago and visits Thomas Merton at Gethsemani. Both Saigon and Hanoi bar his return: a thirty-nine-year exile begins.
Documented
January 25, 1967 · age 40
King nominates him for the Nobel Peace Prize
Martin Luther King Jr. writes to the Nobel Institute proposing “this gentle Buddhist monk from Vietnam” (1967 nomination no. 48). No prize was awarded that year. He publishes Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, coining “engaged Buddhism”.
Documented
1969 – 1973 · age 42
Buddhist Peace Delegation at the Paris talks
He leads the Vietnamese Buddhist Peace Delegation during the negotiations leading to the Paris Accords, lectures at the Sorbonne and lives with Vietnamese refugees on the outskirts of the city.
Documented
1975 · age 49
Sweet Potato community and The Miracle of Mindfulness
He founds the small Sweet Potato community near Troyes. There he writes The Miracle of Mindfulness, conceived as a manual for the social workers still in Vietnam, and The Sun My Heart.
Documented
1978 · age 52
Boat-people rescue and the poem “Please Call Me by My True Names”
With Sister Chân Không he secretly organises relief for refugees at sea until Singapore expels them. After a letter about a twelve-year-old girl raped by a pirate he writes his most famous poem.
Documented
1982 · age 56
Plum Village is founded
The community moves to south-west France and Plum Village (Làng Mai) is born; it will become the largest Buddhist monastery in Europe and the mother house of a network of centres in the United States, Germany, Thailand, Hong Kong, Australia and Vietnam.
Documented
January 12, 2005 · age 78
Return to Vietnam after 39 years
Hanoi allows him to visit, teach and publish four books. He returns in 2007 (great chanting ceremonies for all the war dead) and 2008; in 2009 the authorities violently expel his monastics from Bát Nhã monastery.
Documented
November 11, 2014 · age 88
Severe stroke
A brain haemorrhage leaves him unable to speak for the rest of his life. He undergoes rehabilitation in Bordeaux, San Francisco (2015) and Thailand.
Documented
October 28, 2018 · age 92
He returns to his root temple to stay
He signals by gestures his wish to spend his remaining days at Từ Hiếu, which he had entered as a novice seventy-six years earlier.
Documented
January 22, 2022 · age 95
Death
He dies shortly after midnight in the Deep Listening Hut. Five days of funeral rites, cremation on 29 January and, after forty-nine days, his ashes are divided between Từ Hiếu and the Plum Village centres.
Documented

Works

Essential works

The works without which their legacy cannot be understood.

Written work · 1975

The Miracle of Mindfulness

Phép lạ của sự tỉnh thức

The book that carried the word “mindfulness” into everyday English. Simple exercises—washing the dishes in order to wash the dishes, following the breath, the tangerine eaten with attention—and an exposition of the Sutra on the Four Establishments of Mindfulness. It was born of war, not of self-help.

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5 editions · amazon.com

Written work · 1991

Peace Is Every Step

His most widely read book: short pieces on breathing, smiling, walking, driving, eating, anger and “interbeing”, bringing practice into the gestures of the day. In Spanish it was titled “Hacia la paz interior” and in German “Ich pflanze ein Lächeln”.

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4 editions · amazon.com

Written work · 1988

Old Path White Clouds

Đường xưa mây trắng

A novelised life of the Buddha reconstructed from the Pali and Chinese canons, told in part through the young buffalo-herder Svasti. With no added miracles, in a serene prose, it is his longest work and the one he regarded as his most important.

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5 editions · amazon.com

Written work · 1998

The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching

His most complete doctrinal treatise: the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the Three Dharma Seals, the twelve links of dependent arising, read from experience rather than scholasticism. The reference book of his retreats and of his monastics' training.

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4 editions · amazon.com

Quotations

Quotations located in a specific work. Each carries its provenance and its level of confidence.

Breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile. Dwelling in the present moment, I know this is the only moment.

VerifiedBeing Peace (1987), capítulo 1, «Suffering Is Not Enough»: la gatha de la respiración

1 / 7

Essential ideas (editorial summary)

Out of respect for copyright, these ideas are summarised in our own words and are not presented as literal quotations.

Peace is not the outcome of a negotiation but a way of being: whoever is not peace in their own breath cannot bring it to a conference table. Hence the title Being Peace, which reverses the usual order of means and ends.
Nothing exists by itself. A sheet of paper contains the cloud, the rain, the logger and his breakfast; to be is always to inter-be. The emptiness of the Heart Sutra does not mean that things do not exist but that they are empty of separate existence and therefore full of everything else.
A cloud does not die when it becomes rain: it changes form. Birth and death are notions, not ultimate realities; what we are continues in our actions, words and thoughts, as he himself wished to be read on his non-existent stupa.
Consciousness is a storehouse of seeds: anger, fear, joy, compassion. Each time one manifests, it is watered. Practice consists in deliberately watering the wholesome seeds and holding the painful ones without suppressing them, as a mother picks up a crying child.
Engaged Buddhism does not add social action to Buddhism: it holds that meditating and acting are a single movement. If bombs fall on the village, sitting in the temple doing nothing is not contemplation but evasion; and acting without calm reproduces the violence one hopes to cure.
Suffering is necessary for understanding, as mud is for the lotus. It is not to be suppressed but looked into deeply until it reveals its causes, and not allowed to grow beyond what it already is.
Wash the dishes in order to wash the dishes: if one scrubs while thinking of the cup of tea to come, one lives neither the washing nor the tea. Mindfulness is not a concentration technique but the decision to be where one is.
Deep listening—listening with the sole purpose of relieving the other's suffering, without correcting or judging for that time—is, for him, the political practice par excellence: the one that lets two enemies see each other as human beings again.

Apocryphal quotes or disputed attributions (3)

«There is no way to happiness—happiness is the way.»
Attributed to Thich Nhat Hanh on thousands of pages, but it is a variant of “There is no way to peace; peace is the way”, a line of the pacifist A. J. Muste (1940s), which he occasionally quoted without claiming it. It is not found in any of his works in that wording.
«Smile, breathe and go slowly.»
A card-and-T-shirt motto that sums up his teaching but does not appear as his sentence in any locatable work; probably a condensation of several passages from Peace Is Every Step.
«To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don't need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.»
Widely circulated on social media and in quotation anthologies; it could not be traced to any book or specific talk. Listed here as unverified, not as false.

Last words

There are no verifiable records of their last words.

There is no reliable record of any last words. After his stroke of November 2014 he lost the ability to speak and communicated by gestures in his final years. The Plum Village announcement of 22 January 2022 says only that he passed away “peacefully” in the Deep Listening Hut at Từ Hiếu Temple shortly after midnight. In place of last words the community cites his 2015 request that no stupa be built for him: “I am not in here… I may be found in your way of breathing and walking.”

Source: PBS NewsHour / Associated Press. «Influential Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh dies at 95», 22 de enero de 2022 (recoge el comunicado de Plum Village).

Ask

What their work answers

Twelve great human questions and what their texts allow us to answer, with references. We never put words in their mouth.

What is the Absolute? Does God exist?
God and nirvana belong to the ultimate dimension, which no concept reaches
The unnameableStated explicitly
Thich Nhat Hanh does not defend a creator God, consistent with his Vietnamese Zen formation, but neither does he simply deny one. In Living Buddha, Living Christ he proposes reading the word God, when contemplative Christians use it, as a name for the ultimate dimension of reality, comparable to nirvana: the water as opposed to the waves, which rise and fall while the water remains water. That dimension is not described by the notions of being and non-being, birth and death, one and many; nirvana, he insists, is precisely the extinction of all notions. He therefore advises against arguing whether God exists or does not exist: both concepts fall short. What he does propose is touching that dimension here, through mindful breathing, instead of turning it into an object of belief.
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Who am I? Is there a true self?
There is no separate self: we are made of non-self elements
There is no permanent selfStated explicitly
Thich Nhat Hanh translates the Buddhist doctrine of non-self (anatta) into his notion of interbeing. In The Heart of Understanding, his commentary on the Heart Sutra, he invites us to see in a sheet of paper the cloud, the rain, the tree and the logger: the paper is made entirely of non-paper elements. The same holds for the person: made of ancestors, food, culture, earth and others, and not existing apart from them. In The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching he presents non-self as one of the three Dharma seals, together with impermanence and nirvana. The point is not to deny that there is anyone, but to stop conceiving that someone as an isolated and permanent entity; this view, he insists, reduces fear and makes compassion possible.
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Why do we suffer?
Suffering is fed: understanding what nourishes it begins its healing
Craving and attachmentStated explicitly
Thich Nhat Hanh starts from the four noble truths, which he comments on in The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching, but sets them out with his own accent. Suffering does not arise from nothing: it is fed by what we consume — food, sense impressions, intentions and consciousness — the four kinds of nutriment of early Buddhism. In Understanding Our Mind he explains that store consciousness holds seeds of anger, fear or desire that grow when watered; attachment, wrong perceptions and inherited habits keep the cycle going. He therefore insists on recognising suffering, embracing it with mindfulness as a mother embraces a crying child, and looking deeply into its roots. He also stresses that without mud there is no lotus: understood suffering is the material from which understanding and compassion are born.
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What happens after death?
Nothing is born and nothing dies: there is only manifestation and continuation
What I am is never born and never diesStated explicitly
Thich Nhat Hanh devotes a whole book to death, No Death, No Fear, whose thesis is that birth and death are notions, not ultimate realities. He uses the image of the cloud: when it turns into rain it does not die but continues in another form; nothing passes from being into non-being. Relying on the Heart Sutra — no birth and no death, no increasing and no decreasing — he holds that the person does not disappear either: she continues in her acts, her children, her students, in everything she has touched, because she never existed separately from the rest (interbeing). The practice in the face of death, therefore, is not to believe in a survival but to look deeply until one sees one's own continuation already present, and so to let go of fear. When his mother died, he relates, he recognised her alive in his own hands.
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How is liberation or salvation attained?
Nirvana is touched here and now through mindfulness practised daily
Through disciplined practiceStated explicitly
Thich Nhat Hanh places liberation within the classical framework of the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path, which he sets out in The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching, and organises it around the three trainings: ethics, concentration and insight. His distinctive emphasis is that nirvana is not a future place but the extinction of notions (birth and death, being and non-being) that can be touched in the present moment. The means is mindfulness applied to breathing, walking, eating or washing the dishes, as presented in The Miracle of Mindfulness. Practice is not a means of getting elsewhere: each mindful step is already a fragment of freedom, and it is sustained by the community (sangha).
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Is a teacher necessary?
The sangha is refuge and teacher: one practises and awakens in community
Community and traditionStated explicitly
Thich Nhat Hanh, a teacher of the Vietnamese Linji Zen school, did not deny the role of the teacher, but shifted the weight towards the community. In his account of the Three Refuges, the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, he insists that the Sangha is not an add-on: without a community practising together, individual practice dies out, like an ember separated from the fire. That is why he founded communities, from the Order of Interbeing in the 1960s to Plum Village in France, and proposed the fourteen precepts of Interbeing as a common framework. The teacher transmits and guides, but each person must practise in their own life, and the community sustains and corrects that effort.
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Is the world real?
Everything inter-is: a cloud floats in this sheet of paper
A web of causes without substanceStated explicitly
Thich Nhat Hanh renders the Buddhist doctrine of dependent arising with his own term, interbeing. In The Heart of Understanding, his commentary on the Heart Sutra, he invites us to look at a sheet of paper until we see in it the cloud without which there would be no rain, no tree, no paper, and also the logger, the sun and the very mind looking at it. Nothing has a separate, independent existence: each thing is made of elements that are not itself. That is what emptiness means, not non-existence but emptiness of a separate self. The world is not illusion; what is illusory is conceiving things as isolated entities, and that mistaken perception generates suffering.
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What is love?
To love is to be present and to understand: kindness, compassion, joy, equanimity
Boundless compassionStated explicitly
Thich Nhat Hanh defines true love through the four immeasurables of Buddhism: loving kindness (maitri), the capacity to offer joy; compassion (karuna), the capacity to relieve suffering; sympathetic joy (mudita); and equanimity or inclusiveness (upeksha), which leaves no one out. He holds that love is born of understanding: one cannot love someone one does not understand, and understanding requires looking deeply into the other's suffering. In True Love he makes it concrete in four phrases or mantras, the first of which is to recognise the other's presence: when you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence; how can you love if you are not there? Love begins with oneself — tending one's own wounds — and extends to all beings, not excluding the enemy, in whom suffering is also recognised.
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Are we free, or is everything determined?
We continue our actions, and we choose which seeds to water
Karma and choiceInferred from their doctrine
Thich Nhat Hanh translates the Buddhist doctrine of karma into an agricultural image: store consciousness holds seeds of anger, fear, compassion or joy, inherited from ancestors and from our own acts, and what sprouts depends on which ones are watered. Mindfulness practice consists precisely in selective watering, so that the past conditions but does not decide. At the same time, his teaching of interbeing prevents us from imagining an isolated self choosing from outside the causes: every act is the fruit of countless conditions and, in turn, continues in the world. In *No Death, No Fear* he holds that we are the continuation of our thought, speech and action, which gives each present choice a lasting weight.
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Why meditate or pray?
Stopping and looking deeply: the attention that heals and understands
Seeing reality as it isStated explicitly
For Thich Nhat Hanh meditation has two inseparable aspects: stopping (*śamatha*), which calms and heals, and looking deeply (*vipaśyanā*), which reveals impermanence, non-self and interbeing. His most widespread teaching, gathered in *The Miracle of Mindfulness*, consists in bringing full attention to the breath and to every daily activity —washing dishes, walking, eating— so that there is no separation between the meditation session and life. The *gathas* he offers, such as breathing in calming the body and breathing out smiling, serve to return to the present moment. But presence is not the end: it is the condition for understanding the nature of things, and from that understanding love and compassion are born.
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Can reason know the ultimate?
Notions are rafts: they must be let go to touch reality
The ultimate lies beyond the mindStated explicitly
Thich Nhat Hanh values study but constantly warns against attachment to ideas. The first training of the Order of Interbeing, which he drafted in the 1960s, asks one not to be idolatrous about any doctrine, theory or ideology, not even Buddhist ones: teachings are means to guide, not absolute truths, like the raft left behind after crossing the river. In *No Death, No Fear* and *The Heart of Understanding* he insists that reality lies beyond notions such as birth and death, being and non-being, one and many, and that nirvana is precisely the extinction of all notions. Conceptual thought can point; what transforms is direct contact, the deep looking born of mindfulness.
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Withdraw from the world or transform it?
Engaged Buddhism: when villages are bombed, meditation goes into the street
Engage with the worldStated explicitly
Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the creators of so-called Engaged Buddhism. During the Vietnam War he founded the School of Youth for Social Service, which rebuilt bombed villages and cared for refugees, and in Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire (1967) he explained to Western readers the position of the Buddhists who supported neither side. He holds that practice cannot be shut up in the temple: when bombs fall, one must go out and help, and do so mindfully so as not to reproduce the violence. That is why the fourteen precepts of the Order of Interbeing, which he founded in 1966, include not closing one's eyes to suffering, not clinging to ideologies and working for peace. At the same time he insists that only one who has peace can make peace: action without practice turns into rage.
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Affinities & tensions

Affinities and tensions

Calculated question by question from their positions. The reason for each agreement or clash, on click.

Thinks most like

Thinks most unlike

They agree on

Thich Nhat Hanh · Teresa of Ávila

Among the pots and at the sink: attention in small things

Teresa of Ávila consoles the nuns busy in the kitchen by reminding them that the Lord walks among the pots and pans (Book of the Foundations, ch. 5, 8), and in the seventh dwelling places of the Interior Castle she concludes that Martha and Mary must go together. Thich Nhat Hanh teaches in The Miracle of Mindfulness to wash the dishes attending to washing the dishes, without separating the meditation session from the rest of life. Both refuse to confine the inner life to a separate moment and carry it into domestic tasks; both distrust discourse, since the point is not to think much but to love much, Teresa writes (Fourth Dwelling Places, 1, 7); and both measure practice by its fruits: works and service in her, understanding and compassion in him.

Why: The convergence is one of practice, not doctrine. Teresa prays to a personal God present in all things, the kitchen included; Thich Nhat Hanh addresses no one, but looks deeply into the impermanence and interbeing of what he holds in his hands. Yet both face the same difficulty: communities with daily manual work, where contemplation cannot depend on free time. The reformed Carmel and Vietnamese Zen solve it in the same way, making the task the place of presence. No relation between them is recorded; the affinity stems from the community life both organised and from their shared distrust of a merely intellectual spirituality.

They clash onApparent contradiction

Thich Nhat Hanh · The 14th Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso)

No birth and no death, or a detailed map of dying: two Buddhists facing the end

Thich Nhat Hanh devotes No Death, No Fear to arguing that birth and death are notions: the cloud does not die when it becomes rain but continues in another form, and the Heart Sutra teaches that there is neither birth nor death. The Dalai Lama, in Advice on Dying and Living a Better Life, instead describes precisely what happens at death: the dissolution of the elements, the arising of the mind of clear light, the intermediate state and a rebirth whose character depends on karma. One seems to deny that anything dies; the other, to chart the journey of what continues. Yet neither affirms a self that survives: for Thich Nhat Hanh what goes on is the continuation of actions and of interbeing; for the Dalai Lama, a continuum of subtle mind without any substance of its own. Both prepare for death by contemplating it daily.

Why: The opposition is apparent because they speak from the two truths distinguished by Mahayana Buddhism. Thich Nhat Hanh deliberately places himself in the ultimate dimension, where nothing is born or dies because nothing exists by itself; he does not deny rebirth but reformulates it as continuation. The Dalai Lama speaks on the conventional plane, that of experience and practice, and from the Tibetan tantric tradition, which has a meticulous description of dying. Audiences matter too: the Vietnamese monk writes for Western readers who fear annihilation; the Tibetan comments on a classical text for practitioners who must prepare. Each would accept the other's truth at its own level.

They clash onApparent contradiction

Thich Nhat Hanh · Jiddu Krishnamurti

No method versus daily practice: two ways of not turning attention into a technique

Krishnamurti rejects every system of meditation: repeating a mantra, controlling the breath or following a master's steps produces a mechanical mind and strengthens the self that wants to achieve something (Freedom from the Known; The Only Revolution). Thich Nhat Hanh, on the contrary, proposes concrete practices: returning to the breath, reciting short gathas, walking mindfully (The Miracle of Mindfulness). It looks like method against the absence of method. But what both describe is very similar: an attention that accompanies every act rather than being kept for a session, that observes thoughts and feelings without condemning or justifying them, and from which understanding and the end of conflict arise. For both, meditation is not a means to a future goal but life seen as it is.

Why: The contradiction is largely apparent: both fight meditation understood as a technique for obtaining a state. Krishnamurti, raised in the occult disciplines of the Theosophical Society, attacks the word method because it implies time, imitation and a progressing self. Thich Nhat Hanh keeps the language of practice because he teaches monastic and lay communities that need a shared discipline, but he insists that peace is not the goal of the path but the path itself. The real difference lies in pedagogy: one trusts immediate perception; the other, the habit that makes it possible. There is no record that they ever met.

They agree on

Thich Nhat Hanh · Jesus of Nazareth

The Holy Spirit as the energy of mindfulness: a Zen monk before the living Christ

In Living Buddha, Living Christ, Thich Nhat Hanh proposes reading the word God, when contemplative Christians use it, as a name for the ultimate dimension of reality, comparable to nirvana: the water as against the waves. In the same work he presents the Holy Spirit as the energy of mindfulness that heals and makes present, and he sees in prayer in secret and in the trust in the Father asked for by the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 6:5–13) a way of returning to the present moment. The Gospels present a Jesus who withdraws to pray alone and teaches not to multiply words. Both locate what is decisive in a presence that transforms whoever welcomes it, rather than in adherence to formulas.

Why: The relationship is documented in one sense: Thich Nhat Hanh read and commented on the Gospels, was in dialogue with Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King, and in 1995 published Living Buddha, Living Christ to show convergences. His reading draws on Paul Tillich's theology, which speaks of God as the ground of being. The affinity, however, is asymmetrical: the Gospels present a personal God, the Father who sees, listens and forgives, and Thich Nhat Hanh translates that language into the Buddhist ultimate dimension, in which there is no creator. Many Christian and Buddhist theologians consider that the translation blurs real differences. It is a bridge built from one bank.

Anecdotes and stories

Testimonyc. 1937

The hermit's well

When he was eleven, his school organised an outing to Na Son mountain, where a hermit was said to live who could sit in silence day and night until he became as serene as the Buddha. The boys climbed up hoping to see him and did not: the hut was empty. Tired and thirsty, young Bảo wandered off from the group, heard water and found a natural well among the rocks. He drank his fill and felt—so he told it all his life—that the hermit had turned into that well and that he needed nothing more. He lay down beside the water and fell asleep. When he woke a French sentence came to him whose origin he did not know: “J'ai goûté l'eau la plus délicieuse du monde”. From that quenched thirst he dated his monastic vocation, and in his Plum Village talks he used it again and again as an image of what practice offers: not a doctrine, but water. The story rests solely on his own testimony, repeated in many talks and collected in At Home in the World.

Origin of the story: Autobiographical story told by Thich Nhat Hanh himself in Dharma talks and published in At Home in the World (Parallax, 2016). No independent witnesses or documents.

Source: Nhat Hanh, Thich. At Home in the World: Stories and Essential Teachings from a Monk's Life. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2016 (ISBN 9781941529423).

Documented1966

Gethsemani: “Nhat Hanh Is My Brother”

In May 1966, in the middle of his American tour calling for an end to the bombing, Thich Nhat Hanh travelled to the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky to meet Thomas Merton. Merton, the most widely read monk in the Catholicism of his day, was struck by the slight Vietnamese who spoke of his training with the same precision Merton would have used for his own: the novitiate years, the chant, the silence. When the Saigon regime threatened to bar his return, Merton wrote a short essay, “Nhat Hanh Is My Brother”, declaring that he had more in common with this Buddhist monk than with many of his compatriots, because both saw things the same way and looked at the world with the same eyes. The piece, published in several journals and later collected in Faith and Violence (1968), was one of the first public defences of Thich Nhat Hanh in the West and the beginning of a friendship that Merton's death in 1968 cut short. Decades later Thich Nhat Hanh would remember him as the first Christian with whom he felt the practice was the same.

Origin of the story: The meeting and the essay are documented by Merton's own text (1966, in Faith and Violence, 1968) and by the official Plum Village biography.

Source: Merton, Thomas. «Nhat Hanh Is My Brother» (1966), recogido en Faith and Violence. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968.

Documented1966–1967

Martin Luther King's letter to Oslo

On 31 May 1966 Thich Nhat Hanh and Martin Luther King Jr. appeared together before the press in Chicago. A year earlier the monk had written him an open letter, “In Search of the Enemy of Man”, explaining that the monks who set themselves alight in Saigon were not committing suicide but trying to move the hearts of the oppressors; King, who had not yet publicly condemned the war, listened. On 25 January 1967, as the 1964 laureate, he wrote to the Nobel Institute proposing Thich Nhat Hanh for the Peace Prize. In the letter—recorded as nomination number 48 of that year—he said he did not personally know of anyone more worthy of the prize than this “gentle Buddhist monk from Vietnam”, whose ideas, if applied, would build “a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity”. King broke Nobel protocol by making the nomination public. The committee awarded no prize that year. Two months later, on 4 April 1967, King delivered his “Beyond Vietnam” speech at Riverside Church, his first public condemnation of the war; Thich Nhat Hanh always attributed part of that decision to their conversations. Exactly one year later King was assassinated.

Origin of the story: Nomination record in the Nobel Foundation archive (1967, no. 48); letter text transcribed by Buddhistdoor and reproduced by Plum Village. Transcriptions differ in one word (“personally”).

Source: Nobel Prize Nomination Archive. «Nomination for Nobel Peace Prize, 1967, number 48»: nominee Thich Nhat Hanh, nominator Martin Luther King Jr.

Testimony1978

The girl on the boat and the true names

After 1975 Plum Village—then still the small Sweet Potato community—received hundreds of letters each week from the refugee camps of South-East Asia. In 1978 one arrived telling the story of a twelve-year-old girl, a passenger on one of the boats fleeing Vietnam, who was raped by a Thai pirate; the girl threw herself into the sea and drowned. Thich Nhat Hanh said his first reaction was anger at the pirate, and that in meditation he understood that, had he been born in the pirate's village, with its poverty and lack of education, he might himself have become that pirate. After a long meditation he wrote the poem “Please Call Me by My True Names”, in which he is at once the girl and the pirate, the mayfly and the bird that devours it, the member of the Politburo and the prisoner in the re-education camp. At the time he was running from Singapore, with Sister Chân Không, a clandestine operation to rescue boat people in the Gulf of Siam; when the government discovered it the police seized their passports and gave them twenty-four hours to leave, a deadline the French ambassador's intervention stretched to ten days. The poem, recited in Being Peace and later set to music, is his best-known text.

Origin of the story: The author's own account in Being Peace (1987) and on the poem's official page at plumvillage.org; the rescue operation and the expulsion from Singapore are documented in the official biography.

Source: Plum Village. «Please Call Me by My True Names (song & poem)», con la explicación del propio autor sobre su origen.

Documented2005–2007

The return: Từ Hiếu, 2005

On 12 January 2005 Thich Nhat Hanh landed in Hanoi with an entourage of about a hundred monastics and lay practitioners. Thirty-nine years earlier he had left Vietnam for a few weeks and had been unable to return: Saigon refused him entry in 1966 for calling for peace, and after 1975 Hanoi banned his books, which for decades were smuggled into the country. The long-negotiated visit included public talks, the publication of four titles in Vietnamese and, above all, the return to his root temple of Từ Hiếu in Huế, which he had entered as a novice in 1942. Dissidents of the Unified Buddhist Church, whose leaders remained under house arrest, reproached him that his trip served as propaganda for a government that denied religious freedom; he replied that he had come to teach, not to do politics, and in 2007 he presided over great chanting ceremonies for all the war dead of every side, even though the authorities forced him to drop the words “praying equally” from the title. The episode illustrates the tension that ran through his whole public life: refusing to take sides cost him exile with some and the suspicion of accommodation with others.

Origin of the story: International press coverage of 2005 and 2007 and the official Plum Village biography; the controversy with the UBCV is recorded with statements from its spokesmen.

Source: Wikipedia (en). «Thích Nhất Hạnh». Consultado como índice de hechos y fechas, contrastado con s2.

Documented2015–2022

“I am not in here”: the stupa he refused

A Vietnamese disciple proposed building a stupa for his ashes, with a plaque reading “Here lies my beloved teacher”. Thich Nhat Hanh recounted, in a 2015 book, that he told him not to waste the temple land. If they insisted, the plaque should say “I am not in here”; and in case people did not get it, a second one: “I am not out there either”; and, if still needed, a third and last: “I may be found in your way of breathing and walking”. The joke was the most condensed form of his teaching on continuation: a cloud does not die when it becomes rain, and a teacher is not in an urn but in the gestures he passed on. When he died in the early hours of 22 January 2022, in the Deep Listening Hut at Từ Hiếu, unable to speak since the 2014 stroke, the community quoted that passage in place of last words that did not exist. After five days of funeral rites and the cremation of 29 January, when the forty-nine days were complete his ashes were divided between the root temple and the Plum Village centres, with no stupa.

Origin of the story: Passage published by the author himself in 2015 (quoted in the 2022 obituaries, including PBS/AP) and the Plum Village community's announcement of 22 January 2022.

Source: PBS NewsHour / Associated Press. «Influential Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh dies at 95», 22 de enero de 2022 (recoge el comunicado de Plum Village).

Teachings

The notions that structure their thought, explained in context.

Interbeing (tiếp hiện)interser

A neologism with which he rendered into English—and then into every language—the teaching of dependent arising (pratītyasamutpāda) and emptiness (śūnyatā) as read by the Avataṃsaka and the Heart Sutra. Nothing possesses separate existence: a sheet of paper “inter-is” with the cloud that gave the rain, the tree, the logger, the sun and the wheat the logger ate for breakfast. To say something is “empty” is not to say it does not exist, but that it is empty of an independent self and, precisely for that reason, full of everything else. The Vietnamese term tiếp hiện, which names his order, combines “to continue” (tiếp) and “to make present, to realise” (hiện): interbeing is not only a metaphysical thesis but a programme of action, since if I am also the other, their suffering is mine. From it derive the poem of the “true names” and his ethics of non-duality between victim and perpetrator. It is his most recognisable conceptual contribution and the one that has most permeated the contemporary vocabulary of Western Buddhism and of ecology.

Mahāyāna; Heart Sutra, Avataṃsaka, Huayan school; a modern reformulation of Nāgārjuna's emptiness.

Source: Nhat Hanh, Thich. The Heart of Understanding: Commentaries on the Prajñaparamita Heart Sutra. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1988.

Mindfulness (chánh niệm)chanh-niem

A rendering of the Pali sati and Sanskrit smṛti—the seventh factor of the Eightfold Path—which he made the axis of his whole teaching and, with The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975), an everyday English word. He understands it neither as a concentration technique nor as relaxation but as the energy of being present to what happens, inside and out, as it happens: breathing knowing that one breathes, walking knowing that one walks, washing the dishes in order to wash the dishes. Its canonical source is the Sutra on the Four Establishments of Mindfulness (body, feelings, mind, mental objects), which he translated and commented on in Transformation and Healing, and the Ānāpānasati, the sixteen exercises of conscious breathing. Two features distinguish it from later clinical versions: mindfulness is inseparable from ethics (the Five Mindfulness Trainings) and from community (the sangha), and its purpose is not better performance but touching life and transforming suffering. The forms he created—the bell that stops all activity, walking meditation, the gathas for each gesture—are ways of making it daily.

Satipaṭṭhāna and Ānāpānasati suttas; Vietnamese Zen tradition (Lâm Tế / Liễu Quán); direct precedent of secular mindfulness programmes.

Source: Nhat Hanh, Thich. The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation. Trad. Mobi Ho. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975 (ed. revisada 1987; ISBN 9780807012390).

Engaged Buddhismbudismo-comprometido

A term coined in 1967 in Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, though the idea—đạo Phật đi vào cuộc đời, “Buddhism enters life”—already structured his Vietnamese essays of 1964. It arises from a concrete question: when bombs fall on the village, does one go on meditating in the temple or go out to help? His answer is that the choice is false: meditating and acting are a single movement, and the calm of the meditator is the only thing that prevents action from reproducing the violence it seeks to cure. He embodied it in the School of Youth for Social Service (1964), a neutral corps of volunteers rebuilding villages without taking sides, and in the fourteen precepts of the Order of Interbeing (1966), which include not avoiding contact with suffering and not accumulating wealth while millions go hungry. He paid with thirty-nine years of exile for refusing to align with either side. The term has named an international movement (Sulak Sivaraksa, Bernie Glassman, the Buddhist Peace Fellowship) and academic programmes; in its original use it designated less a current than an obligation.

Vietnam War; the Vietnamese Buddhist renewal of the 1950s and 1960s; bodhisattva ethics applied to social action.

Source: Nhat Hanh, Thich. Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire. Prólogo de Thomas Merton. Nueva York: Hill and Wang, 1967. Digitalizado en Internet Archive (préstamo).

The Five Mindfulness Trainingscinco-entrenamientos

A reformulation of the five lay precepts of Buddhism (not to kill, steal, engage in sexual misconduct, lie or take intoxicants) as positive “trainings” rather than prohibitions: reverence for life, true generosity, true love, loving speech and deep listening, and mindful consumption. Each is phrased as an awareness of the suffering its violation causes and a commitment to cultivate the opposite; the fifth in particular extends the notion of intoxication to what is consumed through the eyes and ears—news, films, conversations—and is one of the first Buddhist formulations of a media ethics. Those who receive them in a transmission ceremony formally enter the Plum Village community of practice; the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings of the Order of Interbeing are their expanded version for committed members. Their purpose is to keep mindfulness from remaining a technique: without ethics, he says, attention can serve the sniper as well as the monk.

Pañcaśīla; bodhisattva vows; applied Mahāyāna ethics.

Source: Nhat Hanh, Thich. The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1998 (ISBN 9780938077817).

No-birth, no-death (continuation)no-nacimiento-no-muerte

A reading of the Heart Sutra's teaching (“not born, not destroyed”) through an image he used for forty years: the cloud does not die when it becomes rain, it changes form; the sheet of paper that burns continues as heat, ash and smoke. Birth and death are useful notions in the “historical dimension” but do not reach the “ultimate dimension”, where nothing comes from nothing or becomes nothing. Hence his preference for the word “continuation” over “rebirth” or “immortality”: what we are goes on in our actions, words and thoughts, in children, in disciples, in the reader. The teaching is developed in No Death, No Fear (2002) and embodied in the story of the stupa he refused: “I am not in here; I am not out there either”. It connects with the contemplation of impermanence as a source of possibility—if nothing were impermanent a seed could not become a flower—and with his way of consoling the bereaved, an important part of his teaching in the West.

Heart Sutra, Prajñāpāramitā; two-truths doctrine; Mind-Only psychology.

Source: Open Library (Internet Archive). Registros de autor «Thích Nhất Hạnh» y de ISBN de cada edición citada.

Store consciousness and the seeds (tàng thức)conciencia-deposito

A pedagogical adaptation of Yogācāra or Vijñaptimātra psychology (Vasubandhu, Xuanzang), which he studied and taught at Vạn Hạnh University. Consciousness has two levels: mind consciousness, where things manifest, and store consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna), a basement where all mental formations—anger, fear, jealousy, joy, compassion—lie as seeds inherited from ancestors and sown by experience. Each time a seed manifests it is watered and strengthened. Practice therefore consists in “selective watering”: avoiding the consumption that waters the seeds of violence, cultivating what waters those of joy and, when a painful formation rises to the mental level, holding it with mindfulness as a mother picks up a crying child, neither suppressing it nor being carried away. It is the theoretical foundation of his teaching on anger, on reconciliation with one's parents (“your father is in every cell of your body”) and on transformation “at the base”. He set it out in fifty verses of his own in Understanding Our Mind.

Yogācāra / Mind-Only (Vasubandhu, Xuanzang); Fa-hsiang/Duy thức tradition in Vietnam.

Source: Open Library (Internet Archive). Registros de autor «Thích Nhất Hạnh» y de ISBN de cada edición citada.

Deep listening and loving speechescucha-profunda

A development of the fourth training (right speech) into a two-sided practice. Deep listening—which he associates with Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva “who listens to the cries of the world”—means listening with the sole purpose of relieving the other's suffering, without interrupting, correcting or judging for that time, even if what one hears is full of wrong perceptions; correction will come later, at another moment. Loving speech is its counterpart: telling the whole truth, but in a way the other can receive. He framed both as political instruments and not merely intimate ones: he proposed them to US legislators, to Israelis and Palestinians at Plum Village and to police officers, convinced that terrorism and war arise from wrong perceptions that only listening can dismantle. In couples he made them concrete in the “four mantras” (“Darling, I am here for you”…) and in the “peace treaty” both partners sign for when anger arises. It is the practice to which he devoted his most-watched interview, with Oprah Winfrey in 2010.

Right speech of the Eightfold Path; Avalokiteśvara of the Lotus Sutra; non-violent communication.

Source: Nhat Hanh, Thich. True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart. Boston: Shambhala, 2004 (ISBN 9781590301883).

Retreats

Retreats and centres

Places and gatherings linked to their teaching. We put you in touch with the organisers.

Thénac (Dordoña), Nueva Aquitania · Francia
Plum Village (France): mindfulness retreats
Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism
Plum Village is the monastery Thich Nhat Hanh founded in south-west France in 1982 and the heart of the practice community that bears its name. Its hamlets welcome lay visitors from around the world alongside the monks and nuns who live there. The day revolves around sitting and walking meditation, silent meals, Dharma talks, total relaxation and small-group sharing. It is the place where his understanding of practice is most tangible: not an isolated technique but a way of living each everyday gesture in community, with mindfulness as the thread running through work, rest and meals.
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En línea · Internacional
Plum Village: online retreats and courses
Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism
For those who cannot travel to France, the Plum Village community offers online retreats and courses led by its monks and nuns. They cover the foundations of the practice Thich Nhat Hanh taught: conscious breathing, walking meditation, caring for strong emotions and deep listening. Alongside them is the free Plum Village App, with guided meditations and recorded talks by the teacher himself. It is a sober entry point that stays faithful to the lineage, designed to support practice at home and, if one wishes, to prepare a later visit to one of the community's monasteries.
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Pine Bush, Nueva York · Estados Unidos
Blue Cliff Monastery (New York)
Blue Cliff Monastery – Plum Village Tradition
Blue Cliff is the Plum Village tradition's monastery in the north-eastern United States, in the Hudson Valley about two hours from New York City. Thich Nhat Hanh founded it in 2007, and a monastic community lives there and opens its doors to lay people for retreats, days of practice and stays. Its programme reproduces the way of life the teacher taught: breathing and walking mindfully, eating in silence, listening to the Dharma and sharing experience in small groups. It is an accessible option for people on the East Coast who wish to practise within the lineage.
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Waldbröl, Renania del Norte-Westfalia · Alemania
European Institute of Applied Buddhism (EIAB)
Europäisches Institut für Angewandten Buddhismus (EIAB)
The EIAB is the centre Thich Nhat Hanh established in Waldbröl, Germany, in 2008, with the aim of applying Buddhist practice to education, healthcare, business and family life. Part of the Plum Village tradition, it houses a monastic community and offers retreats, courses and mindfulness training for lay people. Its approach of applied Buddhism reflects one of the teacher's central insights: that meditation is not separate from social life but is placed at its service. It is the lineage's main reference point in Central Europe, drawing practitioners from across the German-speaking world and beyond.
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Escondido, California · Estados Unidos
Deer Park Monastery (California)
Deer Park Monastery – Plum Village Tradition
Deer Park is one of the Plum Village tradition's monasteries in the United States, founded by Thich Nhat Hanh in 2000 in the hills of southern California. A community of monks and nuns welcomes lay practitioners for retreats, days of mindfulness and longer stays. Practice follows the same framework as in France: sitting and walking meditation among oaks and boulders, silent meals, Dharma talks and mindful work. It is a reference point for anyone seeking the teacher's direct lineage on the American continent, with activities offered both in English and in Vietnamese for the wider community.
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Videos

Recordings, interviews and documentaries. Videos play from YouTube; they are not hosted here.

Where Do We Go When We Die? | Thich Nhat Hanh, 2002.07.22 (Plum Village, France)
Original recording· EN· 2002
Plum VillageOfficial channel
Practicing in a Stressful Environment | Dharma Talk by Thich Nhat Hanh, 2004.02.08
Original recording· EN· 2004
Plum VillageOfficial channel
Through the Insight of Interbeing | Dharma Talk by Thich Nhat Hanh, 2012.10.11
Original recording· EN· 2012
Plum VillageOfficial channel
The Practice of Compassion | Dharma Talk by Thich Nhat Hanh, 2013.11.03
Original recording· EN· 2013
Plum VillageOfficial channel
The Silence of Life | Dharma Talk by Thich Nhat Hanh, April 17, 2014
Original recording· EN· 2014
Plum VillageOfficial channel
Living Deeply - Dharma Talk by Thich Nhat Hanh | Barcelona Educators Retreat, 2014.05.10
Original recording· EN· 2014
Plum VillageOfficial channel
Thich Nhat Hanh - Rare Interview - 1972 Conference on The Human Environment
Interview· EN· 1972
Soundings Mindful Media
Thich Nhat Hanh on Compassionate Listening | SuperSoul Sunday | Oprah Winfrey Network
Interview· EN· 2010
OWN
Cita con la vida. Charla de Thay, Thich Nhat Hanh, del 6 de julio de 2014
Original recording· ES· 2014
TnhSpain
Le lâcher-prise des notions - Enseignement de Thich Nhat Hanh sous-titré Français
Original recording· FR
Village des PruniersOfficial channel
Smettere di Correre - Insegnamento di Thich Nhat Hanh
Original recording· IT
Plum village ItaliaOfficial channel
Tình Yêu Chân Thật | Thiền sư Thích Nhất Hạnh (30-07-2004, Làng Mai)
Original recording· VI· 2004
Làng Mai OfficialOfficial channel

Gallery

Images with verified licences. Each keeps its authorship and attribution.

Connections

Influences, discipleships and affinities. Documented relations are distinguished from similarities identified by analysis.

Disciple of
Thanh Quý Chân Thật
His root teacher at Từ Hiếu from 1942; from him he received the lamp transmission on 1 May 1966.
Documented relation
Influenced by
Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha
His whole work is a re-reading of the Buddha's discourses; he devoted to him the novelised biography Old Path White Clouds (1988).
Documented relation
Met
Thomas Merton
They met at Gethsemani Abbey in May 1966; Merton wrote “Nhat Hanh Is My Brother” in his defence.
Documented relation
Contemporary of
The 14th Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso)
They met at interfaith gatherings; the Dalai Lama wrote the foreword to Peace Is Every Step (1991) and sent condolences on his death. Thich Nhat Hanh's remarks on Tibet on Italian television (2008), according to his followers, precipitated the Bát Nhã crisis.
Documented relation
Influenced by
Bodhidharma
A lineage relation, not a historical one: the Lâm Tế (Linji) school in which he was ordained traditionally traces its genealogy to Bodhidharma. Recorded as tradition, not as documented fact.
Similarity identified by analysis
Ideas akin to
Pema Chödrön
Both teach holding difficult emotions without suppressing them or being carried away; no documented meeting.
Similarity identified by analysis
Ideas akin to
Eckhart Tolle
Both centre the present moment, though Tolle belongs to no tradition while Thich Nhat Hanh teaches from the Buddhist canon and the sangha.
Similarity identified by analysis

Linked from other profiles

Sources

Bibliography and catalogues consulted for this profile.

Wikidata, «Thích Nhất Hạnh», QID Q310913 (VIAF 87670142; LCCN n50006399).
Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism. «Thich Nhat Hanh: Biography». plumvillage.org (biografía oficial).
Wikipedia (en). «Thích Nhất Hạnh». Consultado como índice de hechos y fechas, contrastado con s2.
Nobel Prize Nomination Archive. «Nomination for Nobel Peace Prize, 1967, number 48»: nominee Thich Nhat Hanh, nominator Martin Luther King Jr.
Nhat Hanh, Thich. Being Peace. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1987. ISBN 9780938077008.
Nhat Hanh, Thich. The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation. Trad. Mobi Ho. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975 (ed. revisada 1987; ISBN 9780807012390).
Nhat Hanh, Thich. Fragrant Palm Leaves: Journals 1962–1966. Trad. Mobi Warren. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1998 (reed. 2020, ISBN 9781946764720).
Nhat Hanh, Thich. Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire. Prólogo de Thomas Merton. Nueva York: Hill and Wang, 1967. Digitalizado en Internet Archive (préstamo).
Plum Village. «Please Call Me by My True Names (song & poem)», con la explicación del propio autor sobre su origen.
Merton, Thomas. «Nhat Hanh Is My Brother» (1966), recogido en Faith and Violence. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968.
Open Library (Internet Archive). Registros de autor «Thích Nhất Hạnh» y de ISBN de cada edición citada.
PBS NewsHour / Associated Press. «Influential Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh dies at 95», 22 de enero de 2022 (recoge el comunicado de Plum Village).
Nhat Hanh, Thich. The Heart of Understanding: Commentaries on the Prajñaparamita Heart Sutra. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1988.
Nhat Hanh, Thich. Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life. Nueva York: Bantam Books, 1991 (ISBN 9780553351392).
Nhat Hanh, Thich. True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart. Boston: Shambhala, 2004 (ISBN 9781590301883).
Nhat Hanh, Thich. The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1998 (ISBN 9780938077817).
Nhat Hanh, Thich. At Home in the World: Stories and Essential Teachings from a Monk's Life. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2016 (ISBN 9781941529423).
Editorial Kairós. Página de autor «Thich Nhat Hanh» (catálogo en español).
Wikimedia Commons, API imageinfo (licencia, autor y fecha de cada fichero citado en images[]).
Plum Village, canal oficial de YouTube (ID de canal UCcv7KJIAsiddB2YRegvrF7g); canales hermanos «Làng Mai Official» (vietnamita), «Village des Pruniers» (francés), «Plum village Italia».
Buddhistdoor Global. «Martin Luther King Jr.'s nomination for Thich Nhat Hanh as the Nobel Peace Prize recipient» (transcripción de la carta del 25 de enero de 1967).
Nhat Hanh, Thich. Living Buddha, Living Christ. Nueva York: Riverhead Books, 1995 (ed. 10.º aniversario 2007, ISBN 9781594482397).
Nhat Hanh, Thich. Call Me by My True Names: The Collected Poems. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1993 (ISBN 9780938077619).
Parallax Press. Catálogo de obras de Thich Nhat Hanh (editorial fundada por el autor y la comunidad de Plum Village).
Open Library: búsqueda por autor y fichas de edición por ISBN (comprobado el 2026-10-25).
Plum Village. «Ceremonies to Spread Thay's Ashes» (crónica de la recepción de las cenizas en Upper Hamlet y de la ceremonia de dispersión del 13 de marzo de 2022).
Human Rights Watch. «Vietnam: Sharp Backsliding on Religious Freedom», 18 de octubre de 2009 (expulsión violenta de los monásticos de Plum Village del monasterio de Bát Nhã, 27–28 de septiembre de 2009).
Wikipedia (vi). «Thích Nhất Hạnh», sección «Tác phẩm» (bibliografía en vietnamita por géneros, con editorial, año y seudónimos). Consultada como índice bibliográfico.
Penguin Random House (distribuidor de Parallax Press y de Shambhala). Fichas de libro por ISBN de las obras de Thich Nhat Hanh (comprobado el 2026-10-25).

Rights holder: Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism (antes Unified Buddhist Church), a través de su editorial sin ánimo de lucro Parallax Press; derechos vigentes (fallecido en 2022)
Official site: plumvillage.org

Pending confirmation

What this profile has not yet been able to settle. We would rather say so than fill it in.

Comprobar sobre un escaneo la redacción exacta de la carta de nominación de M. L. King (25-01-1967): las transcripciones difieren en «I do not personally know» / «I do not know».
Ediciones en ruso: ni Open Library ni Google Books (cuota cero sin clave) devolvieron registros con ISBN verificable para «Чудо осознанности» u otros títulos; queda sin edición rusa catalogada.
Ediciones italianas (Ubaldini: «Il miracolo della presenza mentale», «La pace è ogni passo», «Essere pace»): existen en comercio, pero no se localizó ISBN en catálogo abierto; solo se incluye «Vita di Siddhartha il Buddha» (Ubaldini, 1992), verificada.
Duraciones de los vídeos: la API oEmbed no las devuelve; quedan en null.
Localizar página/capítulo exactos de las citas marcadas «probable» (Peace Is Every Step, True Love, Living Buddha Living Christ) sobre el texto impreso.
Confirmar en catálogo la edición de Zenith de «El milagro de mindfulness» (ISBN 9788408180753, 2019) frente a la de Kairós de 2019 que cita un distribuidor (9788499887210 corresponde en Open Library a «Cómo luchar»): posible confusión del distribuidor.
Las URL de Parallax Press y Shambhala responden 403 a clientes automáticos; verificadas solo como dominios oficiales, no página a página.
Obras: publicó más de cien títulos; los libros en vietnamita sin traducción (editados por Lá Bối y por la comunidad de Plum Village) no se han inventariado uno a uno. Catálogo de referencia: Parallax Press (s24) y la bibliografía de plumvillage.org.
Obras: no se registran como obras los productos derivados (calendarios, barajas, cuadernos y tarjetas de caligrafía, audiocursos de Sounds True como «The Present Moment» o «Mindfulness and Psychotherapy»), ni las antologías de citas que reempaquetan libros ya listados (Be Still and Know, The Pocket Thich Nhat Hanh, Wisdom from Peace Is Every Step).
Obras: quedan por revisar títulos menores localizados en Open Library sin contenido verificado: «The Pine Gate» (White Pine Press, 1988), «A Joyful Path» (1994), «The Hermit and the Well» (2001), «Where Is the Buddha?» (2021), «Lay Bodhisattva, Monastic Bodhisattva» (2023), «Peacemaking» y «Looking Deeply».
Obras: «Joyfully Together», «Inside the Now» y «The Mindfulness Survival Kit» registran año aproximado; Open Library solo muestra reediciones.
Obras vietnamitas registradas en la bibliografía de vi.wikipedia sin año ni datos suficientes para describirlas con rigor, que quedan fuera de works: Tương lai văn hóa Việt Nam, Tương lai Thiền học Việt Nam, Tuổi trẻ tình yêu lý tưởng, Bưởi, Tố (Lá Bối, s. f.), la versión en prosa de Truyện Kiều (Văn hóa Sài Gòn, s. f.), Những con đường đưa về núi Thứu, Làng mai nhìn về núi Thứu, Sen búp từng cánh hé y Con gà đẻ trứng vàng (2018). Localizar año y contenido en un catálogo vietnamita (Thư viện Quốc gia) antes de añadirlas.
Programas de audio con charlas (Sounds True y otros: The Art of Mindful Living, Mindful Living, The Ultimate Dimension, Looking Deeply, Peacemaking, Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, Drops of Emptiness, Classic Dharma Talks) no se han registrado como obras; decidir si entran con type «audiobook».
«How to Heal» (Ebury, 2023, ISBN 9781846046551 / 9781473581708 en Open Library) no se ha podido confirmar como título de la serie Mindfulness Essentials ni localizar en el catálogo de Parallax; no se ha añadido.
Sala de lectura: ninguna obra entra. El autor murió en 2022 y toda su obra (y la de sus traductores) tiene derechos vigentes en EE. UU., la UE y España; reading_texts queda vacío a propósito.

Researched on 2026-10-22

Biography

The boy who drank from the well

A Buddhism that goes out into the street

Thirty-nine years away

Plum Village

Continuation

A life, year by year

Birth in Huế

Essential works

Complete works (135)

Essential ideas (editorial summary)

What their work answers

Affinities and tensions

Thinks most like

Thinks most unlike

Anecdotes and stories

The hermit's well

Gethsemani: “Nhat Hanh Is My Brother”

Martin Luther King's letter to Oslo

The girl on the boat and the true names

The return: Từ Hiếu, 2005

“I am not in here”: the stupa he refused

Teachings

Retreats and centres

Videos

Gallery

Connections

Sources