Thich Nhat Hanh’s return to Vietnam in May for a retreat followed by a United Nations conference was a triumph for his “engaged Buddhism.” Not only was his global influence evident at the conference, but he and 400 retreatant-delegates (most of us Westerners) were warmly received on a dramatic slow walk in the center of Hanoi.
We were sitting on bamboo mats in a dark pagoda built at the site of a former Khmer Rouge killing field on the highway from Siem Reap to Angkor Wat. Our Cambodian guide was struggling through a recitation on the life of the Buddha depicted traditionally in murals on the walls and ceiling. “Bodhi tree there, Buddha he enlighten, eightfold path. . .”
I watched a monk who had been sleeping on a canvas cot in a cool place by the altar shuffle to a doorway. He stood in the bright frame searching the folds of his saffron robe for something – a pack of cigarettes. He looked depressed. The guide was getting the eightfold path wrong. “Right talk, right think, not steal and lie, right sexual. . .” I focused my old Canon SLR. The monk stood smoking in the light, looking out toward the killing field with its plain monument, a windowed box half full of human skulls.
Monument of skulls on the temple grounds
What was this monk thinking? (more…)
In a Thai village off the Gulf of Siam about 40 years ago I was swept into an ordination ceremony that, as an Eastern Classics MA would teach me in later years, defined the difference between the two vehicles of Buddhism, Theravada and Mahayana.
Theravada, with its orthodoxy of stories about the Lord Buddha in colloquial Pali, is the official religion of Thailand and Sri Lanka. It is the unofficial religion of Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia. Buddhism elsewhere, including Zen, is Mahayana, the “larger vehicle,” which follows expansive texts in Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan. (more…)
