Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh was born in 1926. He is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who worked at the reconciliation between North and South Vietnam during the war. Martin Luther King, Jr. nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967. He lives in exile in a small community in France where he founded a retreat [Plum Village] where he teaches, writes about peaceful intervention, mindfulness and buddhism.

"If we are aware of our life, we will know how to make peace right in the moment..."
Thich Nhat Hanh

Living in exile.
In that year of 1966, Thich Nhat Hanh was banned by both the non-Communist and Communist governments for his anti war and political opinions.

A Budhist monk since the age of sixteen, Tha^y (ie.: teacher) championed a movement known as "engaged Buddhism," which intertwined traditional meditative practices with active nonviolent civil disobedience. This movement lay behind the establishment of the most influential center of Buddhist studies in Saigon, the An Quang Pagoda. He also set up relief organizations to rebuild destroyed villages, instituted the School of Youth for Social Service (a Peace Corps of sorts for Buddhist peace workers), founded a peace magazine, and urged world leaders to use nonviolence as a tool.

When Thich Nhat Hanh left Vietnam, he embarked on a mission to spread Buddhist thought around the globe. In 1966, Thich Nhat Hanh came to the United States for the first of many humanitarian visits, but he had experienced American culture before as a student at Princeton, and more recently as a professor at Columbia.

Hanh's Buddhist delegation to the Paris peace talks resulted in accords between North Vietnam and the United States, but his pacifist efforts did not end with the war. He also helped organize rescue missions well into the 1970's for Vietnamese trying to escape from political oppression. Even after the political stabilization of Vietnam, Thich Nhat Hanh has not been allowed to return home. The government ironically still sees him as a threat.