Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926 to 2022) was a Vietnamese Zen master, poet and peace activist. Plum Village, the community he founded, calls him Thay, Vietnamese for “teacher”. He entered Tu Hieu Temple in Hue as a novice monk at sixteen and, as a young monk in the early 1950s, took part in the movement to renew Vietnamese Buddhism.

During the war in Vietnam he held that monks and nuns should both keep up their meditation and help people suffering around them, and he coined the term Engaged Buddhism in his book Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire. In 1966 he founded the Order of Interbeing and, according to Plum Village, received the lamp transmission from Master Chan That at Tu Hieu Temple. After a 1966 trip to the United States and Europe calling for an end to the war, he was denied the right to return by both North and South Vietnam, and spent 39 years in exile.

He set up a community near Paris in 1975 and moved in 1982 to a larger site in south-west France that became known as Plum Village. Plum Village describes it as now the largest Buddhist monastery in the West. The community later opened practice centres in several countries, among them Thailand, where Thai Plum Village stands in Pak Chong.

His teaching is built on everyday mindfulness: walking, sitting, eating and working meditation, and the practice of stopping, smiling and breathing. Plum Village presents his Five Mindfulness Trainings as a modern code of ethics for daily life. He published more than 100 books, among them The Miracle of Mindfulness and Being Peace.

He died on 22 January 2022 at Tu Hieu Temple in Hue, aged 95.