Before Martin Luther King Jr was killed, he requested a number of of his mates to proceed his life’s work constructing what he known as “beloved community”. One of the folks he invited was the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, poet and mindfulness instructor Thich Nhat Hanh.
My new ebook, On Mindful Democracy: A Declaration of Interdependence to Mend a Fractured World is impressed by King and Hanh’s friendship. These two males bonded over the shared perception that how we present up for one another issues, as does how we advocate for social change. In his sermon “Loving Your Enemies” King introduced, “Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” Hanh taught: There isn’t any method to peace, peace is the way in which.“
At the heart of beloved community is true democracy. To be agents of change who do not add to the suffering of the world, people must learn to become more loving and peaceful people.
‘The real enemies of man’
Hanh was born in 1926 in central Vietnam. As a young Buddhist monk living in a nation confronted by colonialism, conflict and war, he developed the doctrine of “engaged Buddhism”, premised on the assumption that working to alleviate struggling on this planet is enlightenment.
During the mid-Sixties, amid the Vietnam War – Vietnamese name it the “American War” – Hanh based the School of Youth for Social Services to follow engaged Buddhism and assist these affected by the bombs raining down on their houses.
On June 1, 1965, Hanh wrote a letter to King to boost consciousness of the struggling of the Vietnamese folks. He additionally hoped to right some frequent misconceptions about Buddhism.
His overarching level was that Buddhists in Vietnam didn’t hate Americans. In truth, they didn’t hate anybody. Their objective was merely to deliver an finish to battle – and an finish to the delusions that led to battle. “Their enemies are not man. They are intolerance, fanaticism, dictatorship, cupidity, hatred and discrimination which lie within the heart of man,” he wrote. “These are the real enemies of man – not man himself.”
Hanh refused to take a facet throughout the battle. He stood for peace. His peace activism earned him a 39-year banishment from his homeland.
King’s dream
Marc Andrus, writer of the 2021 ebook Brothers within the Beloved Community, notes that King and Hanh met in particular person twice: as soon as in Chicago, on May 31, 1966, and a second time in May 1967, on the World Council of Churches Peace on Earth Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. In Geneva, King shared his understanding of the beloved group with Hanh, inviting him to take part in its building.
In between these two conferences, King nominated Hanh for the 1967 Nobel Peace Prize, writing in his nomination letter, “I know Thich Nhat Hanh, and am privileged to call him my friend.” No award was provided that yr, nevertheless, maybe to protest King’s option to make his nomination letter public. Nominations have been usually non-public, however King used his to name out the injustice of the Vietnam War.
Hanh was crushed when he discovered of King’s dying in 1968. “I was in New York when I heard the news of his assassination; I was devastated. I could not eat; I could not sleep,” he later recalled. “I made a deep vow to continue building what he called ‘the beloved community’ not only for myself but for him also. I have done what I promised Martin Luther King Jr. And I think that I have always felt his support.”
‘Beloved community’
In the years after King’s homicide, a part of Hanh’s life work was devoted to fulfilling King’s dream and constructing the “beloved community.”
Beloved group just isn’t an abstraction. It is a loose-knit world group composed of a large number of smaller, native communities dedicated to working towards peace, nonviolence, freedom, love and justice. Emerging from King’s activism and Hanh’s engaged Buddhism, these communities are additionally dedicated to social change.
In 1982, Hanh and his scholar Sister Chan Khong established the Plum Village monastery in southern France. In the years since, the Plum Village group has based dozens of monasteries world wide, together with three within the United States: Blue Cliff in upstate New York, Deer Park outdoors San Diego, and Magnolia Grove in Mississippi.
Hanh’s lay college students have established 1000’s of smaller Plum Village sanghas – communities – in North America and Europe. These monasteries and sanghas function follow facilities the place folks study to embody the beliefs of beloved group of their mindfulness follow and every day lives.
Since the time of the Buddha, folks dedicated to the trail of mindfulness have agreed to stay by plenty of “precepts.” These precepts, usually numbering 5, present an ethical basis for motion. Hundreds of 1000’s of individuals attending Plum Village retreats have agreed to stay by the up to date, secular model of the precepts that Hanh and his group wrote known as the Five Mindfulness Trainings. These embrace: reverence for life, true happiness, real love, loving speech and deep listening, and nourishment and therapeutic.
The Five Mindfulness Trainings are written to supply folks with a sensible path to constructing a shared life based mostly in love, compassion, pleasure and peace: the kind of life that each King and Hanh envisioned for all.
As Hanh informed the worldwide Plum Village group in a 2020 letter titled Climbing Together the Hill of the Century: “We have continued that aspiration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and every day, our practice is to generate brotherhood and sisterhood, to cultivate joy and the capacity to help people. This is a concrete way to realise and continue that dream.”
On MLK Day, their friendship and writings are a reminder that democracy rests on the power of residents to be current for one another, to recognise their interconnectedness, to embody loving kindness and to disagree with out resorting to violence.
Jeremy David Engels is Liberal Arts Endowed Professor of Communication, Penn State.
