Monday, July 13, we will meet in person.
Go to calendar for our schedule
Address for OHMC meditation space:
3812 Northampton St. NW, Washington DC 20015
Please arrive a few minutes early so we can invite the bell on time. You may also arrive 15 minutes early to practice working meditation by helping us set up cushions.
Dear friends,
This week, we will meet Monday evening, July 13, from 7-8:30PM ET in person at our meditation space (3812 Northampton Street NW); Wednesday morning, July 15, from 7-8AM ET online; and Friday, July 17, 12-1PM ET online/in person (Hybrid).
This week, Annie will guide our meditation. She shares:
For this week, we will focus on the first half of the chapter “War and Exile” in the book At Home in the World, by Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay).
In this chapter, we read about some of Thay’s experiences living in Vietnam during the war with the French and then the American Vietnam War. He starts the chapter writing about his meeting with two different soldiers. In the first meeting, he starts to realize that the French (and later the American) soldiers were also victims of the war. They were all young men who didn’t know whether they would ever make it home to their families. He writes:
With this insight, I no longer had any anger toward the young soldier. Instead compassion for him arose within me, and I only wished him well.
He also saw how the war itself turned the soldiers into his enemies, and how this is the nature of war.
Under different circumstances, we could have become close friends, maybe even loving each other as brothers.
One day he met a French soldier who ran up behind him and spoke to him in limited Vietnamese. When Thay responded in French, the soldier was happy and they developed a meaningful relationship. The soldier was very interested in learning how the monks stay so still and quiet during meditation and what the benefit of meditation was. Thay became his meditation teacher and even later gave him the dharma name Thanh Luong (“Pure and Refreshing Peaceful Life”)
Thanh Luong shared a story with Thay about when he and five other French soldiers visited his temple:
“But when we entered the Bao Quoc Temple grounds, it was like entering a completely deserted place. The oil lamps were turned very low. We deliberately stomped our feet loudly on the gravel, and I had the feeling there were many people in the temple, but we couldn't hear anyone. It was incredibly quiet. The shouting of a comrade made me uneasy. No one replied. I turned on my flashlight and aimed it into the room we thought was empty – and I saw fifty or sixty monks sitting still and silent in meditation.” The soldier goes on to tell Thay, “I felt drawn to their calmness.”
These two men on seemingly opposite sides of a conflict developed a friendship. Thay told him a story about a Vietnamese soldier who had an insight when he encountered French soldiers. After seeing the two French soldiers sitting and talking, the Vietnamese soldier came in tears to Thay saying, “People can label me weak and soft; they can say that if all the Vietnamese fighters were like me, it wouldn’t be long before our whole country was overtaken. But for a moment I loved the enemy like my own mother loves me! I knew that the death of these two youngsters would make their mothers in France suffer, just as my mother had grieved for the death of my younger brother.”
Thay is offering us a deep teaching on Interbeing and wisdom on how to prevent war and create more peace. Man is never the enemy because we all are part of the same human family, and we all suffer in the same ways. When we stop following violent ways of thinking and acting that are inherent in most cultures and truly look deeply, we can see that truth.
During the war, Thay wrote his poem Recommendation, containing words which reflect his insight:
promise me: Even as they strike you down with a mountain of hatred and violence; even as they step on you and crush you like a worm, even as they dismember and disembowel you, remember brother, remember: man is not our enemy.
The only thing worthy of you is compassion – invincible, limitless, unconditional. Hatred will never let you face the beast in man. One day, when you face this beast alone with your courage intact, your eyes kind, untroubled (even as no one sees them), out of your smile will bloom a flower.
In the Metta Sutta (also known as the Discourse on Love), the Buddha offered the same teaching this way:
Just as a mother loves and protects her only child at the risk of her own life, cultivate boundless love to offer to all living beings in the entire cosmos.
Although I have not fought in a war, in my life there have been people I feel have destroyed aspects of my well-being. People I don’t really feel like loving and protecting in the same way that I love and protect my children. Something in me would rather punish them. I’m guessing that you have had people in your life who you feel deserve your condemnation as well. They may be former friends, family members, co-workers, or politicians.
How might we practice to experience the insight of compassion for our own so-called enemies? I start my practice by trying to take care of myself as if I were my own child. Thay writes in this chapter:
I also need to take the time to live, to get in touch with the refreshing and healing elements inside me and around me. As activists, we have a deep desire to succeed in our attempt to help the world. But if we don’t maintain a balance between our work and the nourishment we need, we won’t be very successful.
I also practice the insight of interbeing by looking very deeply at the world and seeing the way that every single thing in the cosmos is dependent on every other thing to manifest. The behavior of my “enemy” did not arise from themselves alone. Their actions were based on many (infinite) causes and conditions that were outside of their control. Like the French soldiers, they are simply responding to the conditions in which their life exists.
By practicing like this, we can enjoy the same insights that Thay did during the war. When we touch the reality of Interbeing, we naturally touch compassion for those we feel threatened by. The change that this creates may seem small, but our ability to hold compassion for all beings is something that changes our lives dramatically and, I believe, can change the world.
On Monday, after our meditation, we will read an excerpt from the book together, and then share our reflections on what we heard and what we may have read. As a sangha, we can support each other’s understanding of interbeing and share the ways we develop compassion for ourselves and for the people we think are our enemies.
With love,
Annie.