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Table of Contents

OTHER BOOKS BY THICH NHAT HANH

Anger
Going Home
Fragrant Palm Leaves
Being Peace
The Blooming of a Lotus
Breathe! You Are Alive
Call Me By My True Name
Cultivating the Mind of Love
For a Future to Be Possible
The Heart of Understanding
The Long Road Turns to Joy
Love in Action
The Miracle of Mindfulness
No Death, No Fear
Old Part, White Clouds
Peace Is Every Step
Present Moment, Wonderful Moment
The Sun My Heart
Taming the Tiger Within
Touching Peace
Transformation and Healing

Riverhead Books, New York

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright 1995, 2007 by Thich Nhat Hanh

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or
electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy
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RIVERHEAD is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The RIVERHEAD logo is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Nht Hanh, Thch.

Living Buddha, living Christ / Thich Nhat Hanh.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-1-101-00721-1

BR128.B8N43 1995

294.337dc20 95-24014 CIP

http://us.penguingroup.com

Version_2

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to my friends Martin Pitt, Mobi Warren, and Arnold Kotler for their valuable time and energy in helping to transcribe tapes and edit this book, making it into a wonderful instrument for dialogue.

FOREWORD

Twice in this book Thich Nhat Hanh puts before us a powerful image of Christian legend: In midwinter, St. Francis is calling out to an almond tree, Speak to me of God! and the almond tree breaks into bloom. It comes alive. There is no other way of witnessing to God but by aliveness. With a fine instinct, Thich Nhat Hanh traces genuine aliveness to its source. He recognizes that this is what the biblical tradition calls the Holy Spirit. After all, the very word spirit means breath, and to breathe means to live. The Holy Spirit is the breath of divine life.

This conjures up the Bible story of creation: In the beginning, the Spirit of Godalways feminine in the Biblehovers like a mother bird over the lifeless chaos, brooding and bringing forth life in all its forms and degrees. For the Spirit of the Lord fills the whole universe and holds all things together ... (Wisdom 1:7) At the end of this creation myth, we see God, in a touching image, breathe life into the nostrils of the still-lifeless human figure formed out of earth in Gods own image. And so we humans come alive. From the biblical perspective, there has never been a human being who is not alive with Gods own life breath.

We Christians have no monopoly on the Holy Spirit: All those who are led by the Spirit of God are [daughters and] sons of God. (Romans 8:14) No wonder, then, that a Buddhist who is not afraid of the pain it brings to be truly alivebirth pain, growing painshould recognize the Holy Spirit as the ultimate source of all aliveness. The Spirit blows where she wills. (John 3:8) And no wonder that alive Christians recognize their sisters and brothers in the Holy Spirit anywhere.

Nhat Hanh is my brother, wrote Thomas Merton. We are both monks, and we have lived the monastic life about the same number of years. We are both poets, both existentialists. I have far more in common with Nhat Hanh than I have with many Americans. That was written when the two peacemakers confronted together the catastrophe of the Vietnam War. It was at that time that I myself had the privilege of meeting Thich Nhat Hanh, known to friends and students as Thy (teacher), and I recognized in him a brother in the Spirit.

Great was my joy to find on the very first page of this book a reference to Thys sharing the Eucharist with Dan Berrigan. On one occasion, this took place in the small students room I occupied at Columbia University. As one of the sacred readings that evening, Thy recited the Heart Sutra, the most important Zen scripture, in Vietnamese. It was on April 4, 1968. How could I forget that date! Afterwards we went to listen to a lecture by Hans Kng, but the event was interrupted by the shattering news that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated.

The ritual we had celebrated earlier that evening had once again been reenacted in history: Greater love no one has but to lay down ones life for ones friends. (John 15:13) Jesus had done this 2,000 years ago; Martin had done it today; and Thy, in risking his own life to speak out uncompromisingly for peace in Vietnam, was allowing himself to walk in the same direction. Nhat Hanh is a free man who has acted as a free man in favor of his brothers, moved by the spiritual dynamic of a tradition of religious compassion, Thomas Merton wrote. We cannot let him go back to Saigon to be destroyed while we sit here cherishing the warm humanitarian glow of good intentions and worthy sentiments. In the end, Thy was spared. Although unable to return to Vietnam, he has lived in exile ever since. The roots of Living Buddha, Living Christ go back to that time when, in the face of death, human hearts were most alive.

It is safer to approach God through the Holy Spirit than through theology, Thy writes. And yet he is a theologian in the deepest sense: He speaks of God out of his own living experience. And he speaks with enthusiasmwith the voice of the divine Spirit in his own heart. If we listen attentively, we will hear traditional truths expressed in startling new ways. And we might be surprised by Thys sure sense for essentials. For Christian readers, it would be a great loss to overlook this voice of insight and compassion, insisting instead on academic niceties and theological precision.

Discussing God is not the best use of our energy, Thich Nhat Hanh writes. If we touch the Holy Spirit, we touch God not as a concept but as a living reality. With a gentle but firm hand, this monk leads us again and again from theory to practice. He has deep respect for concepts, but as a means, not an end. The Zen tradition has developed a rich and nuanced terminology, but its emphasis on practice makes it less likely that one will get stuck in notions. Thy insists: Reality is free from all notions.... It is our duty to transcend words and concepts to be able to encounter reality.

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