14/10/2024
The Dharma Teacher's Council at Deer Park Monastery support me to offer what I hope will be a fun online course on our dear teacher Thich Nhat Hanh's life during this Rains Retreat, with a class once a week (come in person if you are local! 7:30 pm on Wednesdays), interactive Dharma sharing on Zoom, and access to interviews and a bunch of primary source material we've found in public archives and from old friends and students of Thay from the 60s and 70s.
Sister Dinh Nghiem asked me to work on an English version of the book Đi gặp mùa xuân (Encountering the Spring), a biography of Thay published in Vietnamese in 2022 at the 100-day ceremony after Thay's passing. In the course of that work over the past year-and-a-half, as we verified sources, we discovered so much new material–letters between Thay and Alfred Hassler of the Fellowship of Reconciliation when Thay was stranded in Hong Kong, Japan, and finally France; the original tape recordings of the late-night conversations between Thay and Daniel Berrigan that Jim Forest turned into the book The Raft Is Not the Shore in the early 70s (the cassettes had been sitting in Nancy Forest's attic!); Kristin Roep's report on the ground in Malaysia on the boats the World Conference on Religion and Peace had deployed under Thay and Sister Chan Khong's direction to save refugees from Vietnam stranded in boats in the South China Sea; and more. We also started conducting interviews with some of these folks--Stephen Headley, Thay's roommate at Columbia; Phuong Thao, who met Thay even before Sister Chan Khong and worked with the School of Youth for Social Service; Fred Eppsteiner, who encouraged Thay to bring the Order of Interbeing to the West; Masako Yamanouchi White, a Japanese activist who was perhaps the only non-Vietnamese person embedded in the School of Youth for Social Service; and others—that knew Thay when he was calling for peace in Vietnam, and I learned so much about the spirit of Thay's actions at that time. Additionally, we plan to interview a number of the senior monastics who were around early on in the life of Plum Village: Sister Chan Duc, Sister Dinh Nghiem, Thay Phap Dung, and others.
The team of us here have been having getting so much joy and inspiration looking through these materials we wanted to find a way to share it with others. The idea of doing a course was born.
Each week we will record the class live here on Wednesday, and the video team will try to make it available for viewing-on-demand by Friday. Other than that, we will make a video interview with someone from Thay's life available each week, for you to view on your own time. I plan to ask everyone to maintain a daily practice (cong phu) sheet during the course, to support your daily practice of mindfulness at home.
Wishing everyone a peaceful autumn,
Brother Phap Luu
