We suggest that you shouldn’t focus too much on exactly how calm your mind gets while you’re meditating, or on how many insights arise. Nor on judging how ‘good’ your meditation was today. What really matters is your intention to align your actions with your highest intentions. Even one moment of settling your mind and heart is a moment of cultivating goodness, which in turn opens your heart and mind towards still more tenderness, love and wisdom. And at some point along the path, our practice starts to become inseparable from our life. Our practice becomes our life and our life becomes our practice.

A key tenet of Thay’s Buddhist tradition is that each one of us is already a Buddha—our enlightenment is inherent within us, and the practice of mindfulness is the tool to bring this truth to our full awareness. Thay writes: “We have the capacity of being compassionate, of being understanding. We have the seeds of forgiveness and joy and peace and liberation within us. That is the Buddha inside.” With the energy of mindfulness comes mindful consumption, mindful relationships, ethical livelihood, and social action. Thay shows us that we cannot separate mindfulness from mindful speaking, acting, working, and engaging in the world.

One important route for our sangha’s engaged practice over the last year has been through Love in Action, providing humanitarian support for those affected by the conflict in Ukraine. The project was established by the three sanghas in the Plum Village tradition in the DC area as a concrete manifestation of our engaged practice, along with five supporting sanghas. Last winter, we together raised $30,000, and this link takes you to a report explaining on how those donations were spent, including baby formula, toiletries, backpacks and school supplies. The war continues without an end in sight, and now the bitter cold of winter has returned. The all-volunteer team hopes that we will be able to make another contribution for this 2023/24 winter; can we together raise an additional $30,000, for the same basic humanitarian support? 

Some of us are involved in action over the climate crisis. Thay’s book Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet is a wonderful inspiration. One example of this earth justice engagement in the Plum Village tradition is the Earth Holder Community.

Some mentor people incarcerated in US prisons, helping inmates learn and apply Buddhist teachings to their lives through programs like this one. Others dig deep into engagement within their local community, visiting elder homes to offer friendship and comfort, running chores for neighbors, helping out in local schools and libraries. Within DC, Cleveland Park & Woodley Park Village is a practical example of an organization creating opportunities for older adults to be actively engaged, and supporting those who need it with volunteer assistance to help them live independently. There are many more examples like this.

Because WMC is based in the nation’s capital, there are often marches highlighting vital social issues which we participate in. Some examples in recent years have been the Women’s March, the Climate March, Ukraine rallies, and the MLK Annual Peace Walk. Some of us take inspiration and insight for action on issues of social injustice and internal biases through the powerful Making Visible online program, established through the Opening Heart Mindfulness Community in DC.

Our friends at Blue Cliff Monastery have compiled an excellent working list of resources for people addressing racial justice and implicit bias on their path of practice. They are working to develop connection between Sangha members doing this work across the country.

The term ‘Engaged Buddhism’ refers to Buddhists who are seeking to apply the insights from meditation practice and dharma teachings to social action, confronting situations of social, political and economic suffering and injustice. The Buddha taught a path of liberation; it is central to our practice. The term ‘engaged Buddhism’ was coined by Thay in 1954, when he and his sangha made efforts during the Vietnam war to respond to the suffering they saw around them. This included adopting the non-violence activism of Mahatma Gandhi and the Reverend Martin Luther King. Dr King subsequently nominated Thay for the Nobel Peace Prize; here is his nominating letter:

“Gentlemen:

As the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate of 1964, I now have the pleasure of proposing to you the name of Thich Nhat Hanh for that award in 1967. I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than this gentle Buddhist monk from Vietnam.

This would be a notably auspicious year for you to bestow your Prize on the Venerable Nhat Hanh. Here is an apostle of peace and non-violence, cruelly separated from his own people while they are oppressed by a vicious war which has grown to threaten the sanity and security of the entire world. Because no honor is more respected than the Nobel Peace Prize, conferring the Prize on Nhat Hanh would itself be a most generous act of peace. It would remind all nations that men of good will stand ready to lead warring elements out of an abyss of hatred and destruction. It would re-awaken men to the teaching of beauty and love found in peace. It would help to revive hopes for a new order of justice and harmony.

I know Thich Nhat Hanh, and am privileged to call him my friend. Let me share with you some things I know about him. You will find in this single human being an awesome range of abilities and interests. He is a holy man, for he is humble and devout. He is a scholar of immense intellectual capacity. The author of ten published volumes, he is also a poet of superb clarity and human compassion. His academic discipline is the Philosophy of Religion, of which he is Professor at Van Hanh, the Buddhist University he helped found in Saigon. He directs the Institute for Social Studies at this University. This amazing man also is editor of Thien My, an influential Buddhist weekly publication. And he is Director of Youth for Social Service, a Vietnamese institution which trains young people for the peaceable rehabilitation of their country.

 Thich Nhat Hanh today is virtually homeless and stateless. If he were to return to Vietnam, which he passionately wishes to do, his life would be in great peril. He is the victim of a particularly brutal exile because he proposes to carry his advocacy of peace to his own people. What a tragic commentary this is on the existing situation in Vietnam and those who perpetuate it. The history of Vietnam is filled with chapters of exploitation by outside powers and corrupted men of wealth, until even now the Vietnamese are harshly ruled, ill-fed, poorly housed, and burdened by all the hardships and terrors of modern warfare. Thich Nhat Hanh offers a way out of this nightmare, a solution acceptable to rational leaders. He has traveled the world, counseling statesmen, religious leaders, scholars and writers, and enlisting their support. His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity.'

I respectfully recommend to you that you invest his cause with the acknowledged grandeur of the Nobel Peace Prize of 1967. Thich Nhat Hanh would bear this honor with grace and humility.

 Sincerely,
Martin Luther King, Jr.”

MORE: Plum Village produces a wonderful podcast, The Way Out Is In. One inspiring, powerful episode is on the topic of engaged Buddhism; here it is from the Apple store, and here from Google (android).