REMEMBERING THAY
(credit: Filmed By Marc J Francis)
Community as the gateway of transformation
Today, Thich Nhat Hanh passed from this world. When I heard the news, I braced myself for grief. And yet what arrived was not sorrow, but a deep serenity. Not because his leaving carries no loss, but because his presence—his teachings, his way of being—were already seeds scattered across the earth. His life was an act of planting. His death, the season for us to grow them.
Over the five years I filmed Walk With Me, and later as I recorded the Walk With Me in Sound audiobook, I was graced with many of his teachings. Perhaps the most luminous was his quiet refusal to be the central figure of the film. He insisted instead that the camera turn toward his monastic community.
He was showing us something radical: that the age of the lone hero must give way to the age of the collective. That transformation, if it is to come, will not be carried on the shoulders of a single man or woman, but through the body of a community. “The next Buddha,” he once said, “will not take the form of an individual but may take the form of a community—a community practicing understanding, loving-kindness, and mindful living.”
This is why, when his health waned, he did not name a successor. He trusted the Sangha itself—the river of monks and nuns, lay friends and seekers—to carry his vision onward. The hero, he taught us, is “us.”
Even in the matter of death, he guided with humility. When he heard that a temple in Hanoi had been built to honor his life, he sent word to Tu Hieu, the monastery of his youth:
“I said, don’t waste the land of the temple in order to build me a stupha. Do not put me in a small pot and put me in there. I don’t want to continue like that. It is better to put the ash outside to help the trees to grow. That is a meditation. I recommend that they make the inscription outside on the front:
“‘I am not in here’
If they do not understand, add a second line:
‘I am not out there either’
And if confusion still lingers, add a third:
‘I may be found maybe in your way of breathing or walking.’”
Such is the invitation of a true teacher: to find him not in monuments, but in the rhythm of our breath, in the way our feet kiss the earth.
Now that Thich Nhat Hanh has passed, I feel that his true legacy begins. It lives in the community that circles the globe, in each person who dares to practice a life of interbeing.
“You carry Mother Earth within you,” he once said. “When you wake up and you see that the Earth is not just the environment, the Earth is in you, you are the Earth, you then touch the nature of interbeing. At that moment you can have real communication with the Earth. We need a real awakening, a real enlightenment. We have to change our way of thinking and seeing things—and this is possible.”
Yes, Thich Nhat Hanh, it is possible. We will walk on.
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