Blue Cliff Monastery, Pine Bush, NY
August 28th, 2013
When I was a young monk,
I also had a dream, a wish...
much smaller than the dream of Martin Luther King.
It was very dear to me.
I wanted to build a sangha...
where there is a brotherhood, sisterhood, living together.
Because I had the intuition
that you cannot do anything, cannot realize anything without a sangha.
And we know that the Buddha himself, Shakyamuni, after enlightenment...
the first thing he tried to do was to go and build a sangha.
Without a sangha, a buddha cannot do much.
Even a buddha cannot do much.
So my dream is to build a sangha - a real sangha, a true sangha
where there is harmony and happiness.
And my conviction is that
if the sangha has unity, harmony and happiness, it can do everything it wants.
We do not precise something like
national independence, equality, freedom, jobs...
We did not have precise ideas like that,
but there is a deep conviction that if there is a sangha, a community...
where harmony, brotherhood, sisterhood and happiness is,
then we can do a lot of things.
50 years ago, Martin Luther King gave that famous speech
in Washington D.C., "I have a dream"
and today is exactly 50 years after.
I went through many wars.
The first one was between the Vietnamese and the French,
and the second was between the Vietnamese and Americans.
And I saw a lot of destruction.
The fact that I'm still sitting here today is a miracle
because many of us have died during the war
including monks and nuns.
Many of us tried to serve in the non-violent movement,
trying to help refugees set up...
refugee camps,
helping people to survive during the war,
caring for the victims of war,
and helping people who are so poor.
We had the School of Youth for Social Service,
where young monks, nuns and lay people...
learn and try to help in a situation of war.
And many of us got killed.
Many students of my monks, nuns and lay people got killed during their service.
They threw a grenade to my room.
And I was not killed. The curtain...
pushed it back to the next dorm.
My dream was to build a sangha...
and when the country was divided into north and south,
the north was communists, the south was anti-communists.
That's when the United States of America became involved in Vietnam.
There was a lot of confusion in the mind of young people...
including the monks and nuns.
They didn't know where to go
because there were two kinds of ideologies, opposing each other:
capitalism and communism.
And where... where do we have to stand?
So in that state of confusion
the administration of the Buddhist institute asked me to come and help.
And I had the first occasion to organize a sangha according to my vision.
And I continued...
to reflect on the art of building a sangha.
During the war
workers of the School of Youth of Social Services...
had to engage themselves in very dangerous situation.
And we tried to set up a center of practice...
so that after a few months of work,
they could have a chance to withdraw and rebuild themselves,
recover their peace, heal themselves in order to be sent again to serve.
We knew that the practice center is very important for our social workers.
And many of us have died. Many of us have...
been deeply wounded by the war.
In June the 1st 1965, I wrote to Martin Luther King a letter.
That was when I was working in the School of Youth for Social Service.
I had built the first Buddhist university in Vietnam, Vạn Hạnh University.
Vạn Hạnh is the name of a zen teacher
in the eleventh century.
I wrote to King about the self-immolation of the monks in Vietnam.
Because both warring parties wanted to fight to the end,
we were caught in the middle. We didn't want the war.
What we wanted was the cessation of hostilities.
And we did not have a voice.
We did not have magazines, radio, television...
so our voice was lost
in the bombs and in the...
in the anger, in the fear.
and that is why sometimes we had to burn ourselves alive.
in order to get the message across.
Thích Quảng Đức burned himself
to say that we want peace, we want the stopping of the killing.
And only when we burn ourselves like that,
the New York Times, the Associated Press, writers will write about that.
And that is why from time to time we had to burn ourselves
as a means for communication.
We did not have newspaper. We did not have radio.
So I wrote to King explaining...
the meaning of the self-immolation.
That is not an act of violence.
That is an act of sacrifice in order to help...
awakening of the world about the suffering of the people in Vietnam.
And I told him that our struggle for peace in Vietnam...
has the same nature as the struggle in America for human rights, for civil rights.
And exactly one year after I wrote that letter...
I wrote the letter on June 1st '65,
and June 1st '66 I met King in Chicago.
Cornell University invited me to come and give...
a series of talks about the situation in Southeast Asia,
and I had a chance to tour in America to talk about...
the suffering of Vietnamese people:
"We do not want the war. We want peace."
The police officer, when giving me the passport, said:
"Don't say anything about peace!"
And my only purpose of going to America was to talk about peace.
So I just kept silent.
And we conversed with each other in Chicago...
and he came out after that against the war in Vietnam.
The last time we met was in Geneva...
in the conference for peace, for Pacem in Terris, "peace on earth."
He stayed on the 11th floor of the building, and I was on the first floor,
invited me to come the next day for breakfast,
and that morning I was caught by a few journalists,
so I came late and he kept the breakfast warm for me.
That is our last meeting before he got killed.
And I was able to tell him that the people in Vietnam...
admire him and call him a bodhisattva, a great being.
He was pleased to hear that.
And we discussed... sangha building
because we knew that without sangha we cannot go very far.
The expression that he used is the Beloved Community.
I was in New York when King was assassinated. I was angry...
And I got sick after that.
I told myself that King is gone but I have to continue.
So I vowed that I would continue the work of sangha building
because without the sangha we cannot do much.
We follow the example of the Buddha.
And...
I couldn't go home because I had spoken out for peace,
and they did not allow me to go home anymore.
I had to be in exile for 40 years.
40 years in exile.
I was evicted out of my sangha.
And it's like a cell in the body taken out of the body.
If I did not practice well, I would dry up like a bee without the beehive.
Since Vietnam was at war with America, I could not take refuge in America.
So I asked for political asylum in France.
So I started to be with a sangha.
We started in an office working for peace,
and we began the practice of sitting, walking meditation, and so on.
Our office was on rue de la Goutte d’Or in Paris.
In the beginning we didn't have a place to practice sitting meditation.
We had to ask the Quaker Center in Paris to allow us to use it
to use it for sitting meditation.
I was prevented from going back to Vietnam.
There was one time when I was in America touring the country
speaking about peace,
someone from the Baltimore Sun
came to me and said, "Do you know something, Thay?
the government of Vietnam just informed...
France, the United States of America, and Great Britain...
that my passport is no longer valid. They should not...
they should not honor that passport anymore."
They invalidated my passport
so that I cannot go around and speak about peace anymore.
And that journalist asked me whether I'd like to go on hiding... hide myself.
Sister Chan Khong was in Costa Rica
doing the same thing, speaking about peace.
I asked her to to come...
and prepare so that when I land in Paris...
they won't deport me to Vietnam to go to jail.
so we arranged so that I could take political asylum in France.
During the 40 years in exile,
I tried my best to be with sangha.
And now there is a monastic sangha of about eight or nine hundred,
and the lay sangha, we don't know how many.
You are part of my sangha.
There are more than 1,000 communities of mindful living across the continents.
And we have trained monastic Dharma teachers,
have trained lay Dharma teachers,
and we have practice centers in many places, and...
the work of sangha building has not stopped since that time.
Now the practice of mindfulness began to penetrate into the mainstream.
We have trained many school teachers
so that they can bring that practice into school
and help the students to suffer less.
Doctors, nurses, social workers, psychotherapists...
many of them have been using the practice in order to improve their practice.
And we have elaborated the practice of global ethics
so that everyone, regardless of religion and nationality, can make use of it...
how to release the tension in the body,
how to produce a feeling of joy, of happiness,
how to handle a painful feeling, painful emotion,
how to restore communication and reconcile...
All these kinds of things can be done...
without asking someone to become a Buddhist, also.
So this is what the sangha has done in the last many years.