Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire: A Buddhist Proposal for Peace

by Thich Nhat Hanh

In the original foreword, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton laments: “One of the great tragedies of our time is that in our desperate incapacity to cope with the complexities of our world, we oversimplify every issue and reduce it to a neat ideological formula.”

This is a book that deeply considers polarized violence, detailing historical contexts and contemporary realities to find a way through entrenched political dualisms so a peaceful solution might put an end to the mass killing of life.

The first training is to protect life, to decrease violence in oneself, in the family and in society. The second training is to practice social justice, generosity, not stealing and not exploiting other living beings. The third is the practice of responsible sexual behavior in order to protect individuals, couples, families and children. The fourth is the practice of deep listening and loving speech to restore communication and reconcile. The fifth is about mindful consumption, to help us not bring toxins and poisons into our body or mind.

One of the great tragedies of our time is that in our desperate incapacity to cope with the complexities of our world, we oversimplify every issue and reduce it to a neat ideological formula. Doubtless we have to do something in order to grasp things quickly and effectively. But unfortunately, this “quick and effective grasp” too often turns out to be no grasp at all or only a grasp on a shadow. The ideological formulas for which we are willing to tolerate and even to provoke the destruction of entire nations may one day reveal themselves to have been the most complete deceptions. Already, in the case of Vietnam, the American conscience is troubled by a sense of tragic ambiguity in our professed motives for massive intervention there. Yet in the name of such tenuous and questionable motives, we continue to bomb, to burn, and to kill because we think we have no alternative, and because we are reduced to a despairing trust in the assurances of “experts” in whom we have no real confidence: but who else is there to listen to?

Thien is an attitude or a method for arriving at knowledge and action. For Thien the techniques of right eating and drinking, of right breathing and right concentration and meditation, are far more vital than mere beliefs. A person who practices Zen meditation does not have to rely on beliefs in hell, nirvana, rebirth, or causality; they have only to rely on the reality of their body, their psychology, biology, and their own past experiences or the instructions of Zen masters who have preceded them. Their aim is to attain, to penetrate, to see; once they attained satori (insight), their action will conform by itself to reality.

Confucianism flourished and held a unique position for many generations, until the nineteenth century when the young and the intellectuals abandoned it for a Western educational system installed by the French and which promised “milk in the morning and champagne in the evening,” as the saying went.

Such Confucian ideas as loyalty and filial piety, humaneness, kindness, gratitude, courtesy, wisdom, and honesty have been taken over and assimilated by Buddhism and combined with their parallels in the latter’s philosophy.

Any organization, no matter when and where it exists, lives in danger of infiltration by undesirable elements who want to trade in influence.

The Buddhist clergy joined hands with the forces of patriotism and continued the resistance against the invaders. In 1898, for instance, the uprising of Vo Tru in Phu Yen province in central Vietnam galvanized the whole country. The French and the court at Hue called this uprising “The Monks’ War.”

The renaissance of Buddhism in Southeast Asia has coincided with the struggle for independence from the great Western powers by the small nations of that area. Opposition to communism within Buddhism has been a development of the past ten or fifteen years, but resistance to Western imperialistic domination is a matter of the past several centuries. The alliance of Buddhism with nationalistic patriotic forces resisting the French in Vietnam had its counterpart in similar alliances with nationalistic movements in other countries in Southeast Asia. The factor of nationalism in the small countries of Asia and Africa is an immensely important one, but it must be understood in its true character, as a manifestation of resistance on the part of these countries to conquest and domination by foreign powers, not as a form of extreme chauvinism.

According to the glorious history of our people, the Vietnamese have always desired to create their independent culture in order to resist the oppressive threat from the north. In this great and noble task of creating a national culture Vietnamese Buddhism played an important part. This is proved by the great achievements of Buddhism under the dynasties of Dinh Le, Ly, and Tran. The truth is that Vietnamese Buddhism is a national religion.

The education that is needed for the present time is one that can wash away from the innocent minds of the young generation all the dogmatic knowledge that has been forced upon them with the purpose of turning them into mere tools of various ideologies and parties. Such a system of education will not only liberate us from the prison of dogma but will also teach us understanding, love, and trust. These qualities: understanding, love, and trust are the prescriptions needed for the revival of our society that has been paralyzed by suspicion, intrigue, hatred, and frustration.

In fact, anyone with some elementary knowledge of the growth of the movement for the modernization of Vietnamese Buddhism must see that Buddhism is a great spiritual force in search of self-realization amid the chaotic disorders of a society in its utmost stage of disintegration because of the war and political intrigue.

The peasants see the present anti-American front as an extension of the anti-French front of the war of 1947–1954 and earlier, and this provides a legitimate outlet for their patriotic feelings. From time to time they hear of the evils of communism, but they do not in fact see these evils; what they see is the Viet Cong “fighting for national independence.”

These governments, corrupted by the dependence on the United States in the absence of any real power of their own, can only continue the war in the unintelligent fashion imposed upon them by the Americans. They cannot attract the people, but are in fact constantly at war with them, liquidating and eliminating all of those genuine leaders who speak against their policies, and using the money and blood of the people mercilessly, creating more social injustice as they deepen the suffering from the war itself. These governments are looked upon by the people as an extension of the American government, and their policies as an extension of American policies. The budgets and policies alike of the Saigon government are prepared in Washington, not in the Gia Long Palace.

By supporting elements with which the Vietnamese patriots do not identify, they let the whole power of nationalism slip from their hands and into the hands of the Communists. There are many fundamentally anti-Communist Vietnamese who know very well the Communist nature of the Front, but who still support it because it is the only alternative to the brutality and suppression of the government.

The cities are also the home of those who profit from anti-Communism and the war. They are comfortably housed and fed in relative safety and desire no changes in their way of life. They are opposed to all demonstrations that might lead to such change and live in what is for them the best of all possible worlds. Even their children escape the consequences of the war since they are able to buy them out of the draft. Since the war has become the national preoccupation of Vietnam, the various professions serving the war have become numerous and profitable. Literally hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese work at various services for the Americans, at their bases, on airfields, in their headquarter buildings, and in many other ways.

the war has destroyed not only human lives but all human values as well. It undermines all government structures and systems of society, destroys the very foundations of democracy, freedom, and all human systems of values. Its shame is not just the shame of the Vietnamese, but of the whole world. The whole family of humankind will share the guilt if they do not help to stop this war.

After twenty years of war and broken promises, all Vietnamese people have become suspicious of the promises of the big powers, East as well as West.

The war in Vietnam has already lost its meaning, and the longer it goes on, the deeper the hatred and frustration in the heart of the Vietnamese.

Usually the leaders of the movements do not officially refer to peace. Their reason is easy to understand: in Vietnam any reference to peace is immediately interpreted as “neutralism” and that in turn is equated with “communism.”

In reality the war in Vietnam cannot be ended by people who support either side. By doing so, what they really do is to help the war continue and help destroy the Vietnamese people. The most effective way is not to support either of the two sides, but rather to support those Vietnamese people who seek a third way of achieving peace in the way that I have suggested.

This is the surface impression of the war, but if one looks deeper one realizes that what has developed in Vietnam is an international, ideological war between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. This is true even though China has no troops in Vietnam. These two great powers are demonstrating their fears of each other. Each accuses the other of abusing the Vietnam situation in order to extend its own power. Each side says that it must stop the other in Vietnam, since if the other is successful in Vietnam, it will use the same methods in order to extend its power over the rest of Southeast Asia.