New Every Morning

“The will of God may lie very deeply concealed beneath a great number of possibilities. The will of God is not a system of rules which is established from the outset; it is something new and different in each different situation in life, and for this reason a man must ever anew examine what the will of God may be. The heart, the understanding, observation and experience must all collaborate in this task. It is not longer a matter of man’s own knowledge of good and evil, but solely of the living will of God; our knowledge of God’s will is not something over which we ourselves dispose, but it depends solely upon the grace of God, and this grace is and requires to be new every morning.”

Bonhoeffer’s theological views were deepening, even as he searched for what his practical role as a Christian in Nazi Germany should be. At a Confessing Church meeting in October 1938, he described Judaism using the same terminology as he did for Christianity: he spoke of the equivalence, in God’s eyes, of “church and synagogue,” of the Jews as “brothers of Christians” and “children of the covenant.”  These were radical statements at a time when the leaders of the German Evangelical Church were denying all links between Christianity and Judaism (culminating in the establishment, in 1939, of the “Institute for the Research and Removal of Jewish Influence on the Religious Life of the German People.”)

On November 9, 1938, when the synagogues burned throughout Germany, his students began debating the theological significance of the Kristallnacht. As one later recalled, several of the students “spoke of the curse which had haunted the Jews since Jesus’ death on the cross.” Bonhoeffer rejected this vehemently, stating that the pogrom was a case of “sheer violence” that only revealed Nazism’s “godless face.”

Bonhoeffer’s response to the November 9 pogrom reflected his growing conviction of the significance, for Christians, of the persecution of the Jews. In the margin of his Bible, he wrote the date November 10, 1938 (it is the only date marked in his Bible) next to the words of Psalm 74, verse 8: “They said in their hearts, let us plunder their goods! They burn all the houses of God in the land . . . O God, how long is the foe to scoff? How long will the enemy revile your name?”

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906 –1945) was a German pastor, anti-Nazi dissident, and key founding member of the Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer was known for his staunch resistance to Nazi dictatorship, including vocal opposition to Hitler's genocidal persecution of the Jews. He was arrested in April 1943 by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Tegel prison for one and a half years. Later Bonhoeffer was transferred to a Nazi concentration camp.

He was quickly tried, and then executed by hanging on 9 April 1945 as the Nazi regime was collapsing. The SS doctor who witnessed Bonhoeffer’s death later recalled a man “devout . . . brave and composed… I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.” Bonhoeffer sent one final message, to George Bell in England: “This is the end, for me the beginning of life.”

Connection

"I have been responding to last year’s election in the ways that people often behave while grieving. I began in a tailspin, with a deep sense of betrayal and disbelief, of abandonment and lost possibilities. I was stuck in a state of incredulity for a while, in the useless parsing of untruths and hypocrisies issued by this new administration. And then slowly, in ebbs and flows, my anxiety is dissipating, and I’ve begun to have moments where I am again conscious of overwhelming beauty and goodness: the miracle of tiny birds at the feeder with small furnace-like hearts, apparently oblivious to the winter, my 4-year-old son’s detailed description of the Stingray truck named Flowery he has built from Legos, the wide-open, watchful gaze of a friend’s baby.

The latest evolution of this grief has been a kind of tenderness that reminds me of first coming to faith, when all of the plans and identities by which I defined myself were stripped away. And what was left was cleaner and simpler, a slightly better reflection of love and mercy in the Divine. A short surah from the Qur’an describes this moment perfectly:

Have We not opened up thy heart,
And lifted from thee the burden
that had weighed so heavily on thy back?
And [have We not] raised thee high in dignity?
And, behold, with every hardship comes ease: Verily, with every hardship comes ease!
Hence, when thou art freed [from distress], remain steadfast,
And unto thy Sustainer turn with love.
–Surah 94, al-Inshirah (“Solace”)

And all the while I have been trundling away, as activists do, in every way I can. Early on in the election season this involved writing, speaking, and, both before and after the election, protest. I am fortunate to have a local community of very engaged mommas looking to leave a world and an American democracy intact for their babies. It turns out that fear, anxiety, and parenthood all have their place in motivating the intentional and necessary work of resistance. I have found an unexpected niche in drafting expanded, sanctuary-style non-discrimination policies, one of which has found its way to passage in Bloomington, Connecticut, and several more of which I hope to see passed locally.

I’m striving to get to a place that allows me to be in the world but not of it, to do the hard work that is before me but also to surrender the great breadth of work that is beyond me, to accept my limitations with some humility, and to recognize the grace that is always present with hardship."

~ Sofia Ali-Khan is a public interest lawyer, community activist, writer, and mom. Her recently viral post “Dear Non Muslim Allies," the subsequent series, and other writings can be found at sofiaalikhan.com.

"Although I have never seen a president like the one we’ve just elected, all of this seems quite familiar to me because of my Zen training. Trump, you could say, is my new koan.

A koan is a story you internalize much as you would a mantra or a prayer. But instead of restoring your serenity as a prayer or mantra might, koans have the opposite effect, because they can evoke, often subliminally, some of your deepest fears and anxieties. Generally, your first reaction is to run away, but you train yourself to stay still until you can enter deep samadhi, a state in which self-referencing diminishes. Then you can start to concentrate on the here and now without your usual projections and emotional conditioning.

I’m really struck by your account, Sofia, because of the parallels to Zen. Working with a koan often involves a process much like the one you describe. At first, you can feel something approaching despair: as you put it, “a deep sense of betrayal and abandonment.” In that preliminary state, it can seem that any trust you’ve had in life has shattered.

Then the world starts to come together again, but in a different way. The surah you cite involves an opening of the heart, and this is just what happens with a koan, too. Something deeper changes everything—we would call it the buddhanature in ourselves. Now awareness seems “cleaner and simpler” because the thing that caused you to contract has become completely empty. You can see through it to a bigger view, and that restores your trust.
In 40 years of Zen training, I’ve undergone this process again and again. I wish Trump hadn’t been elected, but I feel, in a strange way, that I’ve been preparing to confront him all my life."

~ Kurt Spellmeyer is a Zen priest and directs the Cold Mountain Sangha in New Jersey. He teaches English at Rutgers University and is the author of Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening from a Culture of Destruction.

SAK: I find the very notion of “clash of civilizations,” that humans are driven to warfare because of a difference in culture or identity, deeply ahistorical. We have a great deal of information about what has driven warfare across history. Overwhelmingly, this information suggests that warfare, especially in complex societies, is the prerogative of the elite and serves very specific purposes, mostly to do with the maintenance and expansion of personal power, access to resources, and, in the age of the nation-state, the maintenance of a specific world order.

However, elites need the assent of their people to sustain warfare. They require funding and—especially—committed soldiers. So some other narrative needs to be cultivated, something that makes warfare seem useful to a majority of people in a society, and that narrative, today, is the “clash of civilizations.”

Still, the vast majority of people, even in those regions, would rather not be dragged into the politics of global elites. They, like us, simply want to feed their children, and they dream of the luxury we have to contemplate matters of faith...

KS: I’m very glad our exchange has taken this turn. When Donald Trump said recently of Iraq, “We should have taken the oil,” he was just expressing openly what many of our leaders have been saying to themselves for the last 50 years.
But let’s not overlook a crucial point. As early as March 1975, Harper’s Magazine ran an article, “Seizing Arab Oil,” arguing the United States should do exactly that without the slightest hesitation. The article was meant as a trial balloon, but the outcry against it became so strong the instigators had to take a step back. Most Americans condemned the idea...
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Well, if dependent co-arising holds true of flesh-and-blood individuals and also their systems of belief, why wouldn’t it apply also to the big selves we call “civilizations”? Whether or not one can accept the notion that people are like holograms, the survival of all our societies depends on our ability to overcome our in-group narcissism. We don’t owe our ultimate loyalty to the United States, Judeo-Christianity, the West, or any other abstraction. We owe it to the person who needs our help, whoever he or she might be.

SAK: This question reminds me immediately of the passage in The Autobiography of Malcolm X where he describes making hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca, and seeing the incredible diversity of humanity together, united in faith and reflection. He describes it as the moment when Islam became something with a purpose and meaning apart from (although continuing to inform his commitment to) black liberation. And also a moment in which he realized that the racial politics of America were not inevitable, not a human problem, but a particularly American problem. Interestingly, hajj is incumbent upon all Muslims, men and women, with the means to travel—and many spend their lives preparing and saving for the journey. We are meant to converge from all corners of the Earth; we are meant to confront both our limitations and our potential by experiencing the other...

If we accept our astounding diversity, the common language that remains is love of God, love of the message and the messenger, and our striving to do good. May this becomes the template for how we encounter the great kaleidoscope of beings, great and small, all around us.

KS: Today, millions of people want to go back to a time before our cultures started to converge—a challenge like no other we’ve had to face. After all, once there are Muslims on your street, where you can watch them working hard, loving their children, and mowing their lawns, it becomes much harder for you to believe that the Creator’s one true name is God, and not HaShem, Ram, Allah, or something else. And it becomes harder, as well, to assume that you, and those like you, enjoy a special place in the Creator’s grand design.

When that recognition sinks in, many of us grow angry and afraid. Others undergo a kind of death, even if they try to keep up appearances. Some of the most powerful people, I suspect, are closet nihilists of this kind. I’m certain it’s the case with our current president, along with many Wall Street titans. And we should probably add to the list a fair number of religious leaders. On some level, they’ve realized it’s all a game—the biblical prophets, Buddha’s enlightenment, the Sermon on the Mount, Muhammad’s ascending into heaven.

I understand their situation very well because it’s exactly where I found myself when I finished college. I had no idea what I should do next because I no longer believed in anything. I still don’t, in a certain way, but everything has changed for me.

The change didn’t come from reading sutras or from the many gifted teachers I’ve met. Instead, I was changed—I was set free—by emptiness itself: specifically, Zen meditation on “Mu,” which can be translated as “nothing.” You might spend many years sitting with Mu, and until the change happens, you’re trapped. You can’t go forward and you can’t go back. You have to become the emptiness, but when you do, there’s a big surprise: a boundless compassion emanating from you...

Whether we meditate or not—and most of humanity never will—what really matters is gratitude. That’s the heart of spirituality. And gratitude connects us: it lets us see that we are all connected. Any goodness we encounter in the world is a gift from people now and in the past—a handful of people we know by name, and millions of others whose names we’ll never know. For their countless acts of generosity, we owe them our deepest gratitude. Our job is to take the lantern from their hands and carry it a little farther down the road."

Stop

“… When I met Papaji, it was as if he was parenting me in a way that my parents weren’t equipped to, and I did look up to him. I mean, I still do. I did revere him, and I recognized that what he was offering was precious. So that is present, but it doesn’t mean that I saw him as having to be infallible in some kind of idealistic way. I recognized that he could be a full human being and yet what he offered me was so huge that I was at his feet. I don’t allow people to be at my feet – we’re in a different culture – but I think the respect that comes from receiving a true teaching or a true transmission is valid and important, so that you don’t trivialize it… because it’s something that is extraordinary... We are human beings, and because we are human beings and we have minds we reconstruct reality at a safe distance, but once it has been penetrated, we also know that at a deeper place...

We were sitting on the bed laughing, and just reveling in our good fortune at meeting Papaji and just speaking of the dharma and one of the wonderful conversations, but really just overflowing in love and recognition of good fortune and then there was just a, I couldn’t, it was not in time awareness, it was less than an instant, and there was just, I didn’t even know it was there, but there was a removal of self-doubt, there was something that, to even say that it fell away, puts it in time, like there was some progression. It was just, pop! And all of a sudden I really recognized without a doubt that it is impossible for me to be separate from anything that I am aware of, anything that I am experiencing. And it just was an incredible moment and the reverberations of that moment are still present…

In my meeting Papaji… my mind was at ease. I wasn’t trying to figure anything out… I said “So, how do I get freedom?” And I really was expecting him to give me some teaching or some mantra or some special practices, I didn’t know what he said to people. And he said, “Stop.” And at first I took that in pretty superficially. I thought he meant like a vipassana retreat, or something – just don’t move. And then it was clear it was something deeper than that, and finally that very word just stopped, turned my attention to the activity of my mind and I saw, I recognized, and more deeply over time, that my mind – my thinking mind – was going… it was really a search for ‘who am I?’
In an instant my mind stopped… my thinking mind. My thoughts stopped. A consciousness was fully here, and that was the beginning …

The example I love to give, is if you are kissing somebody, if you are thinking, you are not really kissing. And when you are really kissing, you don’t need to think. And that’s true with life. If you are embracing and being embraced by life, you don’t need to think. Thought clearly has a place, but in our Western culture we’ve given thought primacy, and as a result we are trying to think our way to enlightenment. Think our way to peace. Think our way to freedom. And with that we are just accumulating more knowledge and fighting ideas of ourselves that conflict with that knowledge. And so really Papaji was inviting me in transmitting this possibility to throw away the measuring stick, throw away the knowledge and recognize who you are… Just close your eyes and allow the kiss...

I do still throw beanbags at someone who is too involved in their story… the stories that are dysfunctional are the ones we tell about who we are, and the most dysfunctional ones are the ones we tell about who we are, and the most dysfunctional ones are the ones we don’t know we are telling about who we are...
Usually our story is where there’s the inner sanctum story or proficient story, some attempt to make sense of that or to control that or escape that, and so the invitation to inquiry is to actually open to that, because that is the life force, it’s consciousness discovering itself as being and in that direct discovery there is an abundance of joy...

I often speak of Papaji telling me, “Stop” and how important that is and really what I feel I am here to say to people is that you can trust yourself. And when I say yourself, I am not thinking of your thoughts, which aren’t trustworthy, or your emotions, which aren’t trustworthy, and they also aren’t the problem, but your Self. The truth of who you are from the initial arising of this either recognition or desire for a bigger life, a freer life, an enlightened life, however defined, this is trustworthy. It is your own Self calling you home… Honor this, listen to this. Put your full attention on this and it delivers everything that is necessary.”

~ Gangaji travels the world speaking to seekers from all walks of life. A teacher and author, she shares her direct experience of the essential message she received from Papaji and offers it to all who want to discover a true and lasting fulfillment. Through her life and words, she powerfully articulates how it is really possible to discover the truth of who you are and to be true to that discovery.

Selfless

"To the extent that the fire of truth wipes out all fixated points of view, it wipes out inner contradictions as well, and we begin to move in a whole different way. The Way is the flow that comes from a place of non-contradiction—not from good and bad. Much less damage tends to be done from that place. Once we have reached the phase where there is no fixed self-concept, we tend to lead a selfless life. The only way to be selfless is to be self less — without a self. No matter what it does, a self isn’t going to be selfless. It can pretend. It can approximate selflessness, but a self is never going to be selfless because there is always an identified personal self at the root of it.

Being selfless isn’t a good, holy, or noble activity. It’s simply that when there is no self, selflessness happens. This selflessness is very different from having a moralistic standpoint. When action is selfless, it tends to do no harm. It tends to be the salvation, the secret alchemy that awakens and removes conflict. It’s a byproduct of not having a self. It just so happens that reality is overflowing with goodness and love.

~ Adyashanti

Radical Emptiness

Pema & K. D.

Pema Chodron: "During the breakup of my marriage, a friend told me two things. First, he said, “Whatever you’re experiencing, don’t try to make it go away.” That was a mind-stopper, but I knew it was true. Then he said, “Whatever you learn from this, that’s what you’ll have to pass on to other people.”

That’s been so important to me. Working with adverse circumstances, not avoiding them or trying to distract myself from them, has helped me to wake up more in my life, to be more there for other people, and—this is always a big seller—to be happier. [Laughter]

When I’m talking about tough times, I don’t mean just outer circumstances. I’m talking about what they bring up in your heart and mind. Not running away from the pain, learning to accept it as part of the human condition, has taught me everything.

I’m at an age when people drop dead left and right. But death won’t seem like a tragedy to me, because I feel like I’ve learned so much from my life and it’s brought me such deep happiness. I don’t feel I got cheated or anything like that. Many people think they’re getting a bum deal in life, but that’s the very material of the path. This is very much a Buddhist tenet. I’ve learned a lot from my teachers and all the study and meditation I have done, but the painful aspects of life, the really hard times, have been my main teachers."

Tami Simon: k.d., your Buddhist teacher was Lama Chödak Gyatso Nubpa, who died in 2009. Could you tell us how you met him?

k.d. lang: Actually, he was married to my product manager at Warner Brothers Records. One day I was griping to her about the fact that my record sales had plummeted. I said, there seem to be obstacles in my path to success, and she went, “Obstacles? You need to meet my husband!”

So she took me to meet Lama Gyatso and that was it. The first thing he said to me was, “What’s your motivation?” I’m still thinking about what that means, but I think it’s about being in service. Being in service to others in everything that you do.

Tami Simon: What are the parallels between the meditative process and the creative process?

k.d. lang: That’s some heavy stuff right there. [Laughter]

I think it’s exactly the same thing. It’s about getting rid of the chatter. It’s the gap. Not The Gap. Maybe we could get a sponsorship from The Gap now. [Laughter, applause]

It’s the gap, because I think real creativity comes from getting the heck out of the way. Creativity is not about creating big conceptions and stirring the pot so much that you just gotta throw up on the canvas or write, write, write, write. I think it’s about being so bored and being so empty and being so… gapacious.

Tami Simon: Gapacious, yeah!

k.d. lang: That’s where I think creativity comes from. I’m not a great meditator but I think that’s probably what meditation is about. It’s about getting out of the way of your true nature, which is stillness I think.

Pema Chödrön: All spiritual teachings come from that place of not being caught up in yourself. When you get out of the way, that is the gap experience, the pause experience, the stillness experience. It’s the experience of strong, direct communication with the world, and that’s when all real communication happens. Otherwise, it’s just you laying your trip on other people.

When you kind of get over yourself, even briefly, that’s when creativity happens. That includes being able to speak in a way that communicates to the heart and minds of people. Something changes because of the basic goodness of people connecting with each other. So whether it’s you singing, or someone teaching the dharma, anything that stops your mind connects you with the best of yourself. When a ballet dancer leaps beautifully through the air, or a singer hits a note—I bet you’ve had this experience, k.d.— everybody stands up and applauds because of this universal experience of something touching you so deeply that it’s inexpressible—because it’s… gapacious! [Laughter] May I use that?

k.d. lang: Yup. It’s my offering to you.

K. D. Lang: "It’s a common approach in Western society to gather pieces from all different religions. That’s not wrong, but there’s a beautiful image I’ve been taught that addresses this. There’s a river we need to cross in our spiritual lives and we need to get to the other side. We have a far better chance of getting across the river if we get in one boat, as opposed to straddling two or three.

For me, devotion was about meeting Lama Gyatso Rinpoche. I was in his life for eight or nine years, and he gave everyone who came into contact with him enough to do for this life and lives to come. He was a great teacher and gave us great instructions.

Pema Chödrön: I think that finding a teacher is so much like falling in love—you can’t pretend. Right? So you met your teacher and had that strong feeling immediately. For me, it was slower with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. He was a really challenging man, in terms of his lifestyle and so forth. But when I came to him with my human neuroses and problems and obstacles, I never found anybody else who knew exactly what was going on and could address them in such a modern way. It was always breathtaking. From that point, my devotion grew more and more.

I realized over the years that he never gave up on anybody. He never gave up. Sometimes it was pretty radical and uncomfortable, but he would do whatever he could to help us let go of being caught up in the small world of me and robbing ourselves of the gapaciousness.

When you feel that you are caught in fixed ideas or prejudices, you want to find a way to expand when you feel contracted, to open when you feel closed. When I think of Chögyam Trungpa and other great teachers, I feel that sense of gap and expansiveness. I just think of his face and I feel it."

Peace Officer

"Breathing in, I know my duty is to provide safety & protection to all beings.
Breathing out, I am humbled and honored by my duty as a peace officer.
Breathing in, I choose mindfulness as my armor & compassion as my weapon.
Breathing out, I aspire to bring love and understanding to all I serve...

It’s often hard for us to recognize, admit, or remember that our hearts may have stopped quivering in response to the suffering of others...

Any one of us can make a difference in a similar way as we move forward in the wake of tragedy. Any one of us can be the person who, rather than exacerbating pain and violence, transforms it by the way we bear witness and respond to it."

-- Cheri Maples was ordained a dharma teacher by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, her long-time spiritual teacher. For 25 years Cheri worked in the criminal justice system, as an Assistant Attorney General in the Wisconsin Department of Justice, head of Probation and Parole for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, and as a police officer with the City of Madison Police Department, earning the rank of Captain of Personnel and Training.

Cheri passed away July 27, 2017, from suspected injuries sustained in a road traffic accident in September 2016.

Sister Khong

“You have a good heart,” Chan Khong’s first Buddhist teacher told her. “With all the generous work that you do, you will be reborn into a wealthy family. Perhaps you will be a princess… You need to study scriptures more and work to become enlightened. After you are enlightened, you will be able to save countless beings.” Chan Khong didn’t want miraculous powers or to be a man, and to her this enlightenment smacked of both sexism and irrelevance...

Chan Khong attended a course Thich Nhat Hanh was teaching in Saigon. She felt she’d never before heard anyone speak so beautifully and profoundly. The following year, Chan Khong began corresponding with Nhat Hanh… According to Nhat Hanh, it was possible to find enlightenment helping those in need—or doing any other activity—as long as it was done mindfully. He believed that Buddhism had a great deal to contribute to society, and he promised to support Chan Khong in her efforts...

Inspired by his teachings and encouragement, Chan Khong organized seventy friends to help her in Saigon’s slums, and they did work such as taking the sick to hospital, establishing adult literacy classes, treating underprivileged children to new clothes, a meal at a restaurant, and a trip to the zoo. At the same time, Chan Khong continued to study the dharma with Nhat Hanh. She and a dozen others took a class with him and they became the “thirteen cedars,” a sangha devoted to social change...

Meanwhile, the Diem regime in South Vietnam was warming up for a religious crackdown in which they’d try to squelch Buddhism and convert the population to Catholicism. The situation came to a head when the regime forbade displaying the Buddhist flag and celebrating Wesak, the Buddha’s birthday. Peaceful protests sprang up and were met with a violence. The authorities ordered tanks to advance on demonstrators, and tortured suspected protest instigators...

A monk named Thich Quang Due immolated himself. “No one had informed me that he was going to do this, but just at the moment he set himself on fire, I happened to be driving by the corner of Phan Dinh Phung and Le Van Duyet Streets on my motorbike, and I witnessed him sitting bravely and peacefully, enveloped in flames. He was completely still, while those of us around him were crying and prostrating ourselves on the sidewalk. At that moment, a deep vow sprang forth in me: I too would do something for the respect of human rights in as beautiful and gentle a way as Thay Quang Due.”

It seemed like real change was possible, and then the bombs fell — the Vietnam War was in full and violent swing. Tra Loc, a new experimental village, was heavily damaged. The SYSS helped the villagers to rebuild each house, the medical center, the agricultural center, the school. But again the village was bombed. This happened over and over—the village was bombed and rebuilt, bombed and rebuilt. Frustration tempted the workers to take up arms. Meditation, however, kept them calm. “People think that engaged Buddhism is only social work, only stopping the war. But, in fact, at the same time you stop the war outside, you have to stop the war inside yourself.”

Over her lifetime, Sister Chan Khong has learned the importance of not making peace, but rather being peace, being understanding, being love—and to embody this way of being twenty- four hours a day. “When your body and mind are not one, you do not see deeply. You are in front of your brother, but your mind is on many other things, so you don’t really see your brother. Maybe he is having some trouble, but you don’t see it, not even when you share the same room. But mindfulness brings you there, to the present, and then you see. Train yourself all day long to bring your mind to your body and to be present with your food, your friends, your work, everything, because the more you concentrate, the deeper you will see.”

The precepts for monastics were formulated more than two millennia ago and Thich Nhat Hanh saw they needed to be revised. He crafted fourteen new precepts, which he felt were both true to the deepest teachings of the Buddha and appropriate for the modern world. Then he invited Chan Khong and the five other leaders of the SYSS to receive them. This ordination made these six the first members of what Nhat Hanh termed the Order of Interbeing, a community committed to service and mindfulness…

Nhat Chi Mai, a close friend of Chan Khong’s, was one of the original six members of the Order of Interbeing. Nhat Chi Mai set herself on fire. Chi Mai’s poems and letters urged Catholics and Buddhists to work together for peace and after her death they were widely read, inspiring many people. Still, for Chan Khong, losing Chi Mai was one of the greatest sorrows of her life.
A monk friend of hers was abducted in Binh Phuoc Village, along with seven other social workers. Their bodies were never found. It is presumed they were killed. Working for the poor was considered a communist activity and the social workers had many enemies. Luck prevented Chan Khong from not being made the ninth victim. She had been in the Village but had left that night to visit her mother...

When Chan Khong boarded a flight to Hong Kong, she planned to be gone for five days. She never imagined it would be almost forty years before she again set foot in her homeland.
In Washington, Nhat Hanh presented a proposal urging Americans to stop bombing and to offer reconstruction aid free of political or ideological strings. The South Vietnamese nationalist government declared him a traitor, making it too dangerous for him to go home, so he moved to Paris. By 1968, however, he wanted to know whether his friends and colleagues in Vietnam needed him to risk returning. Was it more important for him to be on the ground in Vietnam or to be in the West promoting peace? This was not something that could be addressed freely in letters entering and leaving his country — they were too heavily monitored by the government. So Nhat Hanh asked Chan Khong to meet him in Hong Kong.

There, over cups of oolong tea, they unanimously agreed. Nhat Hanh should not return; his skill in communicating with the West was too valuable. Nhat Hanh decided that to more effectively spread the word about what was going on in Vietnam, he needed an assistant. Would Chan Khong be willing to take on that role? At first, she said no. But after reflecting further, she decided Nhat Hanh was right. She would be able to effect more change in her homeland while living abroad...

In January 1969, Chan Khong joined her teacher in France, and they got involved with organizing a conference to present the views of Vietnam’s voiceless majority — those people who were neither communist nor anticommunist, who just wanted peace. Out of this conference, came the Vietnamese Buddhist Peace Delegation, and Nhat Hanh was nominated to be the chair. For her part, Chan Khong was to help with the administration, and she both lived and worked out of the delegation’s modest office, a rental in a poor Parisian neighborhood. The projects that they took on included raising money for orphans in Vietnam and producing a newsletter in French, English, and Vietnamese. Chan Khong traveled throughout Europe and the United States speaking about the need for an immediate ceasefire...

Finally, in 1975, the war came to an end. The suffering, however, did not. Terrified of communist rule, refugees began risking everything to flee Vietnam. If the government caught them trying to escape, they were either imprisoned or shot. If they succeeded in making it to sea, they were prey to pirates. And if they reached a foreign shore, they were often turned away—their rickety boats pushed back out into the water.

Chan Khong’s despair was intense. There seemed to be nothing she could do to save her compatriots from the raping and robbing and killing. After months of meditation, however, she determined her path of action and initiated a rescue project. Chan Khong rented a fishing boat in Thailand, dressed up like a fisherman, and went out to sea to “fish” the boat people. Every time she and her team came across a refugee boat, they gave them food, fuel, and directions to the nearest refugee camp. Chan Khong said: “Meditation allowed me to transform the garbage, the suffering, in me into a mercy fishing boat. On the seas, I was fearless, even when faced by pirates, and I was even joyful because I knew I was going in the direction of beauty.”

In 1988, Chan Khong formally ordained as a nun. “Shaving the head, all attachments are cut off,” Thich Nhat Hanh said as he snipped her hair. Chan Khong has written: “I do not carry undernourished babies in my arms, but teenagers and adults do cry silently as they share the stories of their childhoods of sadness and abuse. By listening attentively to their pain and helping them renew themselves, I am able to help heal many of these wounded ‘children,’ and this is very close to my ideal of holding the village children in my arms. I am grateful to be able to help in this way.”

As a nun in the West, Chan Khong has played a key role in developing Thich Nhat Hanh’s international community. In 1982, they moved to what is now known as Plum Village, two bucolic parcels of farmland in France. For the center’s first retreat, the 107 attendees used wooden planks as beds and sleeping bags for blankets, and they did not have a sufficient number of restrooms. Chan Khong said: “There was only one restroom for the entire Lower Hamlet, one for both showering and using the toilets! It was the same at the Upper Hamlet. Seeing the situation, the male retreatants took up shovels and dug two ‘combat’ latrines.”

Yet attendees were not put off by the conditions, and at subsequent retreats the numbers grew exponentially. Today Plum Village is less rustic, but still simple, and people from all over the world go there to practice. They also go to other centers in the Plum Village tradition: Deer Park Monastery in California, Blue Cliff Monastery in New York State, and the European Institute of Applied Buddhism in Germany...

In 2005, the Vietnamese government permitted Sister Chan Khong and Thich Nhat Hanh to visit their homeland for the first time since the sixties. While there, they traveled the country accompanied by members of their sangha and made connections with the Vietnamese people, especially the young. Two more visits were permitted — one in 2007 and the other in 2008. Since then, however, they have not been welcome. The Vietnamese government felt threatened by the large number of educated youth drawn to Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings...

According to Nhat Hanh, Chan Khong came to him as a student but she also has been a teacher for him. When the Vietnam War was raging, Nhat Hanh was so preoccupied with how to stop the fighting that it became difficult for him to eat. One day, Chan Khong was preparing herbs to serve with rice noodles, when she asked Nhat Hanh if he could identify them. “Looking at her displaying the herbs with care and beauty on a large plate, I became enlightened. She had the ability to keep her attention on the herbs, and I realized I had to stop dwelling only on the war and learn to concentrate on the fine herbs also.”

~ Andrea Miller