Thich Nhat Hanh

practitioners are most familiar with.  Currently a resident of the Plum Village meditation in South West France, Thích Nhát Hanh hails from Vietnam and his story is an interesting one.

Born in 1926 in Quang Ngai province in Vietnam, his original, pre-zen name was Nguyên Xuân Bâo but this changed when he  enrolled at the Từ Hiếu Temple at Hué to study under the auspices of Master Thanh Quý Chân Thật.  When his initial studies were complete, he moved on to graduate from the Bao Quoc Buddhist Academy, being now familiar with Zen and Mahayana Buddhism.  He was ordained as a monk in 1949.

In 1960, Nhat Hanh moved to the United States to study religion at Princeton and then became a lecturer on Buddhism at Columbia University.  This was the early years of the Vietnam War and in 1963 he returned to his home country to join the efforts to promote peace.  The situation was still calm enough to enable him to teach at the Van Hanh Buddhist University in Saigon but by 1966 he had returned to the United States to continue the push for a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

A little known fact from this era is that Nhat Hanh was in contact with Martin Luther King Jr. and is known to have urged him to speak out publicly against the Vietnam War.  King Jr. promptly did this in his famous Riverside Church speech in New York in 1961.  King Jr. would later nominate Nhat Hanh for a Nobel Peace Prize.

By this time Nhat Hanh had risen to such prominence that he attended the Paris Peace Accords which begun in 1969 and were eventually completed in 1973.  At this point the South Vietnamese government refused him re-entry to his country of origin and he chose to settle in France.

Plum Village

Plum Village, where he now resides, grew out of the formation in France of the Unified Buddhist Church (1969) and then the Sweet Potatoes Meditation Centre (1975).  Plum Village was founded in 1982 in the Dordogne and there are now sister centres in New York, California and Mississippi.

Not until 2005 was Nhat Hanh able to return to Vietnam to partake in a lecturing tour and promote his various books.  He made another trip in 2007 and has been a regular visitor ever since.  Nhat Hanh’s popularity in the West has been supported by his willingness to embrace Western philosophy along with Mahayana and Theraveda Buddhism.

Without resorting to a detailed Chinese history lesson, the fortunes of Zen (Chan) grew and receded over the next fifteen hundred years.  During the Tang dynasty (618 – 907), rural schools grew in stature as those in city areas declined somewhat.  These rural schools became the Five Houses that most Zen derivations throughout the world trace their lineage to.  This period is regarded as the golden age of Chan and a famous saying from that period runs as follows:

Look at the territory of the house of Tang -

The whole of it is the realm of the Chán school

The fifty years of disorder between the fall of the Tang dynasty and start of the Song dynasty (960 – 1297) ultimately led to Chan becoming the central tenet of Chinese Buddhism.  The bureaucratic centralised nature of the Song meant temples were drawn into the government structure.

Zen master Hsu Yun

The Ming Dynasty (1368 – 1644) brought Chan somewhat closer to the Pure Land Buddhism which traditionally dominated Buddhism (and still does today) and this preceded the Qing dynasty (1644 – 1912) under which Chan saw a gradual decline in influence and popularity.  However it underwent something of a revival in the early 20th century after the intervention of Hsu Yun, an almost legendary Zen master who constantly traveled around much of Asia, teaching and earning as he went.  Yun was also a devotee of Pure Land Buddhism and lived to the ripe old age of 119.

Many of today’s Zen Buddhist masters trace their interest and influence back to Hsu Yen and many of Asia’s and in fact the world’s Buddhist teachings are based on those of this Zen wanderer.

Bodhidharma

Practitioners of Zen Buddhism may find this guide a little simplistic but it’s really an attempt to provide an easy to read outline of where it all started and how it emerged from the shadow of Mahayana Buddhism.  There are far more in-depth websites available for those who already possess some knowledge on the subject.

We’ve mentioned Bodhidharma in previous articles and this monk appears to have been the developer of what we now regard as Zen Buddhism.  He lived sometime in the 5th or 6th centuries and he finished his journey in China.  His travel began in either South India (where he was said to have been the son of a king) or Persia.  He would have taken what was a well worn road between either Persia or India to China – the network of well established trading routes known as the Silk Road.

The first mentions of Bodhidharma from his contemporaries come in 547 and The Record of the Buddhist Monasteries of Luoyang. Luoyang is in central China and Bodhidharma is said to have been struck by the golden domes of the Yongning temple in Luoyang.  Bodhidharma seems to have come to China to teach Mahayana Buddhism, to travel around the country to preach to others.  While here, he began to develop Chán, what would later become known as Zen.  The word Chán is actually derived from the Sanskrit word dhyana,  which means ‘meditation’ or ‘meditative state’.

Bodhidharma is also reliably credited with the writing of The Treatise of  the Two Entrances and Four Practices, a text which specifies the guiding principles of Zen.  The two entrances refer to:

• The entrance of principle
• The entrance of practice