Thich Nhat Hanh: Essential Writings.

Thich Nhat Hanh: Essential Writings
Edited by Sister Annabel Laity
Orbis, $15, 163 pp.

Nhat Hanh (Thich is a title for Vietnamese Buddhist monks) is, after the Dalai Lama, the best-known Buddhist monk in the West. In exile from his native Vietnam for more than thirty years, he now lives in France. He left Vietnam because of his involvement in antiwar activities in the 1960s but is still unwelcome by the current Vietnamese regime. I first became aware of him in 1966 through his friendship with Thomas Merton. In the last few years of his life, Merton used Nhat Hanh's poetry as subject matter for some monastic conferences which he gave on Sunday afternoons to the community at Gethsemani.

This volume excerpts readable selections from Nhat Hanh's more than twenty books. Readers may best know his work Living Buddha/Living Christ (1995) which gives a sympathetic portrait of Jesus from a Buddhist perspective. Nhat Hanh keeps an image of Jesus next to the Buddha on the altar in his hermitage in France where, in a place called Plum Village, he maintains a meditation center.

The essence of Nhat Hanh's teaching is to encourage the practice of mindfulness, awareness, or keeping the present moment (he uses all these terms) as a way of cultivating a life of peace and the quintessential Buddhist virtue of compassion. To cite one example: he insists that when we eat we should eat with an awareness of where food comes from, who gleaned it, who prepares it, and for what reason it is consumed. To exercise such awareness is to expand our conscious sense of the links which bind us to the earth, to others, and to needs. When faced with disagreement or harm from others or threats of violence a certain mindfulness helps us overcome anger in order to find peace. (The early desert ascetics in Christianity thought anger to be one of the worst of the "deadly" sins.)

Nhat Hanh's writing is deceptively simple. His constant thesis is that a meditative approach to quotidian life is found not only in the meditation hall--although he thinks such practice a good one--but in an alertness, a being awake in the ordinary course of life. His deep conviction is that such awareness is a path to greater amity and authentic inner peace.

The monk's teaching rests on his Buddhist acceptance of a metaphysics (I hesitate to use the word "theology") that is, in my estimation, incommensurable with Christian ideas. There is a profound gulf between the Buddhist doctrine of the "no-self" (anatta) and biblical notions of each human being made in the image and likeness of God. Similarly, the Christian doctrine of creation is very unlike the Buddhist concept of the rise and maintenance of the phenomenal world. Nor is Christian salvation simply equivalent to the Buddhist concept of liberation.

I note the caveats above not because these ideas are prominent in the anthology of texts in this volume but only as a salutary alert for those who think that one can transpose easily the worldview of another tradition into one's own. That being said, however, there are elements in Nhat Hanh's reflections which help us to deepen some elements in the Christian spiritual tradition. In terms of technique, Hanh's notion of mindfulness leading to compassion is similar to the Christian tradition of living in the presence of God emphasized by Lawrence of the Resurrection, De Caussade's "sacrament of the present moment," and Therese of Lisieux's practice of doing the ordinary in an extraordinary fashion. In fact, the more generic practice of reflecting on the unfolding of one's day is a contemplative exercise that goes all the way back to the desert tradition of monasticism. How enriched grace before meals would be, for example, if one not only spoke of gratitude but called to mind where food comes from and how it got to our table. Within such reflection one can find the faintest link between contemplation and action.

I read this volume mainly to be better acquainted with a person Thomas Merton admired. I found myself, in the end, admiring Hanh also. There are certain books in which one finds a ring of authenticity. This is one of them.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.