About Velcrow Ripper

Filmmaker Velcrow Ripper reports on Thich Nhat Hanh’s historic return to Vietnam, where tens of thousands gathered with him to revive Buddhist practice and to heal the wounds of war. The mind can go in a thousand directions, but on this beautiful path, I walk in peace. With each step, the wind blows. With each step, a flower blooms. —Thich Nhat Hanh Deep in the heart of darkness, in a time of napalm, carpet-bombing, and Agent Orange, a flower bloomed in the form of a young Buddhist monk named Thich Nhat Hanh. Instead of closing his heart to the horrors of the Vietnam War, he did the opposite: he opened up to the ultimate source of strength. He opened up to true love, and in doing so, he inspired what has become a worldwide movement of politically engaged Buddhists. Thay, as he is affectionately known, recognized that true love begins with looking deeply, with emptying the heart of preconceptions and allowing spaciousness to occur. With this empty heart, empty of all illusion, comes compassion, comes courage, comes joy, comes wisdom. Comes true love. With a lived understanding of how all life interconnects—what he calls “interbeing”—Thich Nhat Hanh went beyond mere thought or contemplation and took action. In the midst of the Vietnam War, he founded the Order of Interbeing, started an important peace magazine, and launched Youth Social Services, a group of committed practitioners who saw the Buddha’s teachings as a truth that required them to be “lotuses in a sea of fire.” He gave birth to “Engaged Buddhism,” a movement that would spread around the world from its small base in Vietnam. In 1966, at the age of forty, Thich Nhat Hanh was exiled from his beloved Vietnam. His crime was to see the suffering of the Communist and the nationalist, the soldier and the civilian, the victim and the perpetrator as interdependent. He was considered a traitor by the power brokers on both sides for acknowledging the humanity of everyone entangled in that awful web of war. During his four decades of exile, Thay did not rest. He traveled throughout the world, offering his message of reconciliation and peace. After the war’s end, he brought together Vietnam War vets and Vietnamese refugees to help them find reconciliation and healing. He worked in prisons, led peace walks, and spread the dharma, going wherever his wisdom was needed. Once, when Thay was returning from his first visit to prisoners at the Maryland Correctional Institution (which would become the basis for his book Be Free Where You Are), he said he would much rather be in prison than in the Pure Land, because it is in the places of the greatest suffering that the greatest opportunities to practice compassion exist. But in the long years away from his beloved Vietnam, as he rose to worldwide prominence as a Buddhist teacher, Thay always heard the call of his homeland. Again and again he asked for permission to return but was denied. Finally, in 2005, Thich Nhat Hanh was allowed to go home. He and members of his sangha traveled throughout Vietnam, working to reinstate the Buddhist monastic tradition that had been fractured by years of war and Communist rule. In the spring of 2007, Thich Nhat Hanh brought members of his community with him on a second tour, and I accompanied the party as a filmmaker and chronicler of this historic return. While I was there, I had the good fortune to interview Thich Nhat Hanh, who talked at some length about his reasons for returning to Vietnam and what he was doing there. “The tour is an opportunity to go back to Vietnam and practice with people,” he told me. “For forty years, I was unable to offer teaching and practice to the people of Vietnam. So my only purpose is to be with the people, to meet with them, and to offer them retreats, days of mindfulness, dharma talks, and walking meditation. Most of the people who participate were born during my absence. Yet when I see them, I can recognize their patterns. They are the continuation of their parents and they continue the practice. The younger generation is very inspired by the fact that Buddhism has been able to be renewed, so that they can receive the teachings, understand the practice, and take it up.” But Thay said there was something else he wanted to do on this visit: make a relationship with the war dead and help heal the wounds that people still suffer from the war. “We will conduct ceremonies to pray for victims of the war on both sides,” he said. “This is the first time such ceremonies have been allowed. They are very traditional rites, but they are also like a festival, in a way. The people who are still alive come together and think of the dead people. They pray for them and reconcile. The war has left many wounds within each person, and there has been no chance to reconcile the warring parties. This is a collective practice of healing. If we don’t transform the suffering and the wounds now, they will be transmitted to the next generation. They will suffer and they will not understand why. It’s better to do something right away to transform the suffering and the injustice that we have experienced.” What follows is the story, as I experienced it, of Thich Nhat Hanh’s 2007 return to Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh City. Thay has a packed three-month schedule of retreats, teachings, and ceremonies to heal the wounds of war, talking to crowds in temples filled beyond capacity, leading groups of up to 10,000 on meditation retreats, and bringing those of us blessed to be around him on a journey into the depths of mindfulness. Although restrictions on religious freedoms have recently been relaxed in Vietnam, one can still be considered anti-Communist for worshipping at a Buddhist temple. But the walls are slowing coming down, and Thay is stepping into the opening by focusing on reconciliation, on helping to transform the lasting suffering of war from pain into love. I land at Tan Son Nhat airport on the day the tour begins and find Thay seated on a bench surrounded by smiling monks and nuns, looking very happy. A bespectacled monk named Thich Phap An, one of his senior monks, approaches, and I explain that I am the Canadian filmmaker who has been invited on the tour to gather footage for my feature documentary, Fierce Light: When Spirit Meets Action, which chronicles the rising tide of spiritual activism across the globe. I am three months into my journey, searching the world for contemporary stories of what Gandhi called “soul force,” what Alice Walker calls “the human sunrise,” and what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “love in action.” I began this leg of the voyage in New Zealand, visiting a Maori peace village whose early nonviolent civil disobedience inspired Gandhi. In Kenya, I attended the World Social Forum, the largest gathering of grassroots change-makers in history. In South Africa, I visited the Phoenix Ashram, where Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement was born. In India, I visited with the Dalits (formerly, “untouchables”), who are in a period of change and empowerment similar to the American Civil Rights movement, and in Sri Lanka, I filmed the Sarvadoyan community, the largest contemporary Gandhian movement in existence. And now I find myself in Vietnam, with the monastics of Plum Village and Deer Park (Thay’s monastery in southern California), along with a collection of international sangha members, stepping into the heartland of Engaged Buddhism. Our first stop is Ho Chi Minh City, renamed after what could be called either “the fall of Saigon” or “the rise of Ho Chi Minh,” depending on your perspective. It always comes down to perspective. Ho Chi Minh City’s wide streets are lined with red banners and swarming with mopeds and pedestrians. Crossing the chaos seems impossible at first, but watching the locals at work, I can see the buzzing bikes part like a school of fish in the face of a pedestrian. All that’s required is trust. After a silent, meditative breakfast with the other international sangha members in our hotel restaurant, we take a bus to the Phap Van temple, the base for Thay’s Engaged Buddhism back in the sixties. A swarm of cameras greets the stately arrival of Thich Nhat Hanh, who leads us on a slow, calming, walking meditation. Then we gather in the dining hall to receive our robes and alms bowl. I’ve always been drawn to the simplicity and focus I’ve witnessed in monastics, particularly in the joyous Plum Village sangha, and I’m thrilled with this opportunity to be a semi-monk for a month. I look around at my new traveling companions—seventy foreigners from around the world—all dressed up in light blue robes, tentative and slightly awed by this sudden transformation. We are no longer civilians. For the Vietnamese people, the presence of the international sangha is very important. Many Vietnamese have rejected their traditional Buddhist culture, partly because of the religious repression under Communism but also out of a lack of self-esteem. The West is considered a paradise, as seen on satellite TV—a world of big cars and flashy products and seemingly endless wealth. The sight of a large group of robed Westerners practicing Vietnamese Buddhism offers them a sense of pride in their own culture. After a delicious vegetarian lunch, eaten out of our new monk’s bowls, we slip off our shoes and gather under a canvas awning set up in front of the main temple. There we are greeted by Sister Chan Khong, who has long been Thay’s closest assistant. As a fourteen-year-old, Chan Khong (“True Emptiness”) was struck by the unfair gap between rich and poor and began going from door to door in her neighborhood, saying, “Consider me like the bird pecking at your rice pot. Give me one handful of rice, that’s all, for those who don’t have enough.” Early on, she knew that her role in life was to express her love in action. She became the St. Clare to Thich Nhat Hanh’s St. Francis. Sister Chan Khong was one of the first six members of Thay’s Order of Interbeing, and during the war she worked...

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