Vietnamese Buddhist Quotes

Twenty years ago at a conference I attended of theologians and professors of religion, an Indian Christian friend told the assembly, “We are going to hear about the beauties of several traditions, but that does not mean that we are going to make a fruit salad.” When it came my turn to speak, I said, “Fruit salad can be delicious! I have shared the Eucharist with Father Daniel Berrigan, and our worship became possible because of the sufferings we Vietnamese and Americans shared over many years.” Some of the Buddhists present were shocked to hear I had participated in the Eucharist, and many Christians seemed truly horrified. To me, religious life is life. I do not see any reason to spend one’s whole life tasting just one kind of fruit. We human beings can be nourished by the best values of many traditions.

We Vietnamese have two philosophies to sustain us. The Confucian tells us how to behave when fate grants us peace and order. The Buddhist trains us to accept our fate even when it brings us blood and chaos.

The trains [in a country] contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Ceylonese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks, Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes, Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive, and on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar. The railway bazaar with its gadgets and passengers represented the society so completely that to board it was to be challenged by the national character. At times it was like a leisurely seminar, but I also felt on some occasions that it was like being jailed and then assaulted by the monstrously typical.

I thought about the garden tended by a monk living in mindfulness. His flowers are always fresh and green, nourished by the peace and joy which flow from his mindfulness. One of the ancients said, When a great Master is born, the water in the rivers turns clearer and the plants grow greener. We ought to listen to music or sit and practice breathing at the beginning of every meeting or discussion. *The Vietnamese Buddhist Peace Delegation has carried on a program of raising financial support for families within Vietnam who took in orphans.

Thich Nhat Hanh. a venerated Vietnamese Buddhist, speaks of a solution that is so utterly simple it seems profane. Be, body and mind, exactly where you are. That is, practice a mindfulness that makes you aware of each moment. Think to yourself, "I am breathing" when you're breathing; "I am anxious" when you're anxious; even, "I am washing the dishes" when you're washing the dishes. To be totally into this moment is the goal of mindfulness. Right now is precious and shall never pass this way again. A wave is a precious moment, amplified: a dynamic natural sculpture that shall never pass this way again. Out interaction with waves - to be fully in the moment, without relationship troubles, bills, or worries - is what frees us. Each moment that we are fully with waves is evidence of our ability to live in the here and now. There is nothing else in the universe when you're making that elegant bottom turn. Here. Now. Simple, but so elusive. A wave demands your attention. It is very difficult to be somewhere else, in your mind, when there is such a gorgeous creation of nature moving your way. Just being close to a wave brings us closer to being mindful. To surf them is the training ground for mindfulness. The ocean can seem chaotic, like the world we live in. But somehow we're forced to slice through the noise - to paddle around and through the adversities of life and get directly to the joy. This is what we need for liberation.

The trains in any country contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Singhalese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks, Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes, Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive, and on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar. The railway bazaar, with its gadgets and passengers, represented the society so completely that to board it was to be challenged by the national character.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk who has been called the “world’s calmest man,” has spent a lifetime exploring how to live in kairos, albeit by a different name. He has taught it as mindfulness or maintaining “beginner’s mind.” He has written: “Mindfulness helps you go home to the present. And every time you go there and recognize a condition of happiness that you have, happiness comes.”2 This focus on being in the moment affects the way he does everything. He takes a full hour to drink a cup of tea with the other monks every day. He explains: “Suppose you are drinking a cup of tea. When you hold your cup, you may like to breathe in, to bring your mind back to your body, and you become fully present. And when you are truly there, something else is also there—life, represented by the cup of tea. In that moment you are real, and the cup of tea is real. You are not lost in the past, in the future, in your projects, in your worries. You are free from all of these afflictions. And in that state of being free, you enjoy your tea. That is the moment of happiness, and of peace.” Pay attention through the day for your own kairos moments. Write them down in your journal. Think about what triggered that moment and what brought you out of it. Now that you know what triggers the moment, try to re-create it. Training yourself to tune into kairos will not only enable you to achieve a higher level of contribution but also make you happier.

The spiritual growth of my family and friends has been painfully marked with dreadful cataclysms, and all the mysterious powers until now tumultuously hidden in the Collective Unconsciousness of my people broke out violently. And this breaking out stirs us up to the depths of my being; it brings out many forms of intense struggle, which is the permanent impact of two conflicting forces, each evidently trying to get the upper hand of the other. Hence, fiercely, here in America ensues a bloody struggle between the traditionalists and modernists, Communists and the Capitalists, the Americans and the Vietnamese, the homo-sexuals and the non-sexuals, sports enthusiasts and artists, so-called Buddhists and so-called Catholics, spiritualists and the materialists, social and selfish, Love and Hate, between War and Peace, truth and falsehood, or, more tragically, between men and women, fathers and mothers, between brothers and sisters.

There is no way to happiness—happiness is the way.” –THICH NHAT HANH Vietnamese Buddhist monk and Nobel

1963 when President Diêm passed a law prohibiting his people from celebrating the Buddhist national holiday, many Vietnamese have understandably associated Christianity with foreign attempts to establish political and cultural domination.

As the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, poet, and writer Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us, “Our own life is the instrument with which we experiment with truth.

The mainstream of Chinese Ch'an provided the background tradition for Buddhism in Vietnam, particularly Vietnamese Zen Buddhism. An Indian monk and student of the third patriarch of Chinese Ch'an, Sêng-ts'an, a Chinese monk and disciple of the prominent master Pai-chang, and a second Chinese monk and follower of the famous Hsüeh-t'ou founded the first three schools of Zen Buddhism in Vietnam. Other schools of Buddhist philosophy and practice were also introduced to the country, and various indigenous sects grew up around celebrated Vietnamese masters. In the later development of Vietnamese Zen, the Lâm-Tế (C. Lin-chi, J. Rinzai) branch of practice came to the country and found firm basis for its growth through the innovations of a talented Vietnamese master, so that today most Buddhist monks, nuns, and laymen in Vietnam belong to the Lâm-Tế Zen tradition.

Though Vietnam is a Mahāyāna Buddhist country, due to geographical location and historical connections, Hīnayā-na Buddhism deeply influences the disciplines and religious activities of the Vietnamese

Although Hīnayāna disciplines and traditions continue to exert their influence in the daily activities of Vietnamese Buddhists, Zen comes closest to expressing the Vietnamese character, and as such, their attitude in all walks of life can best be described as a “Zen outlook.

Throughout the history of Buddhism in Vietnam many distinguished monks, both foreign and native, contributed to the nation's welfare and enriched Vietnamese culture through their Buddhist activities, often serving as national masters or advisors to the king on important matters, compiling or writing various Buddhist works, and excelling in literary accomplishments.

At present the most popular method of practice is meditation during recitation and recitation during meditation—meditation and recitation being one and the same for Vietnamese Buddhists. This is the doctrine of Thiền- Tinh Nhất-trί 禪淨—致, the union of Zen and Pure-Land recitation.

The trains in any country contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Ceylonese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive, and on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar.

The world first began to give real consideration to the Vietnamese problem and the role of the Buddhists only after the Venerable Thich Quang-Duc burned himself on Phan-dinh-Phung Street in Saigon on June 11, 1963, to call the attention of the world public to the sufferings of the Vietnamese people under Ngo Dinh Diem's oppressive regime.

Many outsiders tend to regard as useless and harmful to the country the contemporary agitations that are connected with the Buddhist Church. This judgment is far too simple. These upheavals must be accepted with the pains that necessarily accompany the current revolution in Vietnamese society. They are the necessary disorders which naturally attend the development of a nation to maturity. If we fail to see these simple things, we may come to believe the widely propagated calumny that Vietnamese Buddhism is not a force in itself but is a mere tool of the Communists or the National Liberation Front.

Because "anti-communism" has taken on a mystical, nonrational, almost religious character in the United States and some other Western countries, I want to explain that I do not use it in these terms in referring to my own attitude or that of Vietnamese Buddhist or other nationalist leaders. Communism has a base of social and personal idealism, and recruits thousands of people who are passionately concerned to eliminate the exploitation and inequality that have characterized much of Western society, and to create a form of social organization whose slogan will be "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." This is an objective that is theoretically consistent with the best in most of the world's great religions, and with which religious people can have no quarrel. Moreover, the economic organization of society in socialist terms, meaning a society in which the means of production are operated for the good of the people generally rather than for the profit of a minority, is consistent with the needs of a country like Vietnam. Few Vietnamese Buddhist or nationalist leaders could believe that their country could adopt a Western-type capitalism, even if they thought it was a moral form of social organization. Vietnamese anti-communism stems from the methods that organized communism uses to attain its ends: the suppression of all significant dissent and debate; the liquidation of even the most sincere and committed opponents, violently if need be; the assumption of omniscience on the part of the party, which is a form of fanaticism that is stultifying to a never-ending search for truth—to which Buddhists, for example, are committed; and the willingness to sacrifice the very existence of a small country like Vietnam to the "larger" interests of the Communist side in the cold war between the great powers. This is not theorizing for Vietnamese non-Communist nationalists, who have found themselves and their organizations repressed with the same ruthlessness north and south of the seventeenth parallel, by the North Vietnamese-NLF-China coalition as well as by the Diem-Ky-US grouping. I do not mean to imply that all Vietnamese nationalists who are also anti-Communist share exactly the same view. Some of them undoubtedly are far to the right, politically. Many would oppose the Communist tactics on the quite simple grounds that they believe in their own goals for Vietnam and want to work for them. For many of us, however, for whom the stated objectives of communism are largely acceptable, the opposition we feel grows from our conviction that when such methods are used to attain these "good" ends, the ends themselves become unattainable because the methods used corrupt the whole struggle. If humanistic religion has any meaning at all, it is that humanistic ends cannot be achieved by inhuman and depersonalizing means.

Objective conditions in Vietnamese society have compelled the Buddhist religion to engage itself in the life of the nation.

In its essence, the Mother Goddess religion is a vehicle for incorporating the worship of diverse indigenous Vietnamese Goddesses into a single cosmogonic framework, thereby giving these indigenous cults something akin to the institutional structure of Daoist or Buddhist worship. Below the four principal Goddesses are ten Mandarins who are agents of the Goddesses, twelve Ladies, who are earthly incarnations of the Mothers, ten Princes who are mostly the spirits of famous historical generals (a category of spirit also popular in Chinese and Korean polytheist traditions), twelve Princesses, who are handmaidens of the Mother Goddesses, ten or twelve Young Princes, who are child spirits, and a number of animal spirits, Tiger Mandarins of the forest and Holy Snakes of the waters.