Thich Nhat Hanh

Nguyễn Xuân Bảo was born in Huế on 11 October 1926 and ordained as a Zen monk as a teenager, taking the name Thích Nhất Hạnh. He was trained in the Linji (Rinzai) stream as it lives in Vietnam, and in the 1950s and 1960s he became a teacher who would not separate meditation from the war in front of him. He called this engaged Buddhism: the monastery is not a bunker.

During the Vietnam War he organised relief, rebuilt villages, and argued for peace in a way that pleased neither Saigon nor Hanoi. In 1966 he met Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King Jr; King later nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Exiled, he settled in France and founded Plum Village, a practice community whose language was deliberately simple: breathing, walking, smiling, stopping when the bell sounds.

He taught interbeing — nothing exists by itself — and a mindfulness that was not a performance of calm. Peace is every step, he said, because the step is the only place peace can actually occur. The books (The Miracle of Mindfulness, Peace Is Every Step, and many others) made this available to millions who would never sit a traditional sesshin. The practice remained physical: come back to the breath, walk as if kissing the earth, look deeply at the person in front of you.

After a stroke in 2014 he was largely silent. In 2018 he returned to the root temple, Từ Hiếu in Huế, and died there on 22 January 2022. The instruction is still the next breath. You have already arrived. The work is to notice that, and not to abandon the present for a better somewhere else.