Thich Nhat Hanh

As a young monastic, Nhat Hanh was a careful student and practitioner of monastic discipline; he worked diligently at mastering mindfulness by noting carefully the movements of his mind and body, meditating, and memorizing the gathas (short verses to focus the mind on present moment awareness) of Master Doc The.

But Nhat Hanh was a visionary early on, and felt the monastic curriculum could be improved by including subjects such as western science, philosophy, and literature. His attempts at reform were met with resistance by the more conservative elders, and eventually he and some friends left the monastery and settled in an abandoned temple in Saigon. It was during this time he began his career as a writer and publisher, including editing the journal of the Buddhist General Association, writing articles that promoted the idea of a humanistic, unified Buddhism. His ideas were met with disapproval, and the Association discontinued the journal.

While still in his 20s, Nhat Hanh established the first Buddhist high school in Vietnam, which offered an alternative to the French colonial education system. He also founded a monastery in central Vietnam, Phuong Boi. By the 1960s, the Buddhist hierarchy recognized the genius of the curriculum Nhat Hanh had developed, and invited him to help found Van Hanh Buddhist University in Saigon.

In his 30s, Nhat Hanh was invited to teach comparative religion in the United States at Columbia and Princeton. After only two years abroad, however, events in his war-torn land drew him back to help his colleagues and students work for peace. In 1963, he wrote "Engaged Buddhism", coining the term that would be famous later in describing the movement for peace and social justice. A year later he founded the School of Youth for Social Service, which continues to this day. Within ten years, the school had attracted 10,000 members who went out into the countryside to provide education and health care, and – as the war escalated – to care for the wounded and to help rebuild villages destroyed by the fighting.

In 1966, Nhat Hanh returned to the United States at the invitation of Cornell University and the Fellowship of Reconciliation to educate Americans about the effects the war was having on his country and to appeal for an end to the fighting. The next year, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize by Martin Luther King, Jr, whose meeting with Nhat Hanh prompted King to begin speaking out against the war. Nhat Hanh's outspokenness earned him the exile from his country which continues today.

Following the war, Nhat Hanh spent much of the 1970s developing an underground network of Buddhists who risked imprisonment to provide parcels of food to hungry children in ietnam, and he organized from Thailand efforts to rescue the boat people fleeing Vietnam. From his hermitage in southern France, he encouraged the documentation of human rights abuses in the land of his birth.

He returned to the United States again in the early 80s, where he found a lively interest in Buddhism among Americans. Later, he established monasteries in Vermont, California, and New York State, and many sanghas (congregations) have sprung up across the country and around the world to support the practice of his teachings. From Plum Village, the monastic community which he founded in 1982 in southern France, he has continued to teach, write, garden, and to work to help refugees worldwide. He conducts retreats throughout the world on the art of mindful living, and has conducted special retreats for American Vietnam War veterans, psychotherapists, artists, environmental activists and children.