Monday, January 24, 2022

Thich Nhat Hanh - Peace Activist and Master of Mindfulness

Thich Nhat Hanh, Monk, Zen Master and Activist, Dies at 95

A monk with global influence and an ally of Martin Luther King, he championed what he called “engaged Buddhism,” applying its principles in pressing for peace.

Credit...Linh Pham for The New York Times

By Seth Mydans

Jan. 21, 2022

Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who was one of the world’s most influential Zen masters, spreading messages of mindfulness, compassion and nonviolence, died on Saturday at his home in the Tu Hieu Temple in Hue, Vietnam. He was 95.

The death was announced by Plum Village, his organization of monasteries. He suffered a severe brain hemorrhage in 2014 that left him unable to speak, though he could communicate through gestures.

A prolific author, poet, teacher and peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh was exiled from Vietnam after opposing the war in the 1960s and became a leading voice in a movement he called “engaged Buddhism,” the application of Buddhist principles to political and social reform.

Traveling widely on speaking tours in the United States and Europe (he was fluent in English and French), Thich Nhat Hanh (pronounced tik nyaht hahn) was a major influence on Western practices of Buddhism, urging the embrace of mindfulness, which his website describes as “the energy of being aware and awake to the present moment.”

In his book “Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life,” he wrote, “If we are not fully ourselves, truly in the present moment, we miss everything.”

His following grew as he established dozens of monasteries and practice centers around the world. The original Plum Village, near Bordeaux in southwest France, is the largest of his monasteries and receives visits from thousands of people a year.

In 2018, he returned home to Hue, in central Vietnam, to live out his last days at the Tu Hieu Temple, where he had become a novice as a teenager.

Thich Nhat Hanh dismissed the idea of death. “Birth and death are only notions,” he wrote in his book “No Death, No Fear.” “They are not real.”

He added: “The Buddha taught that there is no birth; there is no death; there is no coming; there is no going; there is no same; there is no different; there is no permanent self; there is no annihilation. We only think there is.”

That understanding, he wrote, can liberate people from fear and allow them to “enjoy life and appreciate it in a new way.”

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with Thich Nhat Hanh at a news conference in Chicago in 1966. Dr. King nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize the next year. — Credit...Edward Kitch/Associated Press

His connection with the United States began in the early 1960s, when he studied at Princeton University and later lectured at Cornell and Columbia. He influenced the American peace movement, urging the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to oppose the Vietnam War.

Dr. King nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967, but the prize was not awarded to anyone that year.

“I do not personally know of anyone more worthy than this gentle monk from Vietnam,” Dr. King wrote to the Nobel Institute in Norway. “His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity.”

Thich Nhat Hanh was born Nguyen Xuan Bao in Hue on Oct. 11, 1926. He joined a Zen monastery at 16 and studied Buddhism there as a novice. Upon his ordination in 1949, he assumed the Dharma name Thich Nhat Hanh. Thich is an honorary family name used by Vietnamese monks and nuns. To his followers he was known as Thay, or teacher.

In the early 1960s, he founded Youth for Social Services, a grass-roots relief organization in what was then South Vietnam. It rebuilt bombed villages, set up schools, established medical centers and reunited families left homeless by the war.

Thich Nhat Hanh began writing and speaking out against the war and in 1964 published a poem called “Condemnation” in a Buddhist weekly. It reads in part:

Whoever is listening, be my witness:
I cannot accept this war.
I never could I never will.
I must say this a thousand times before I am killed.
I am like the bird who dies for the sake of its mate,
dripping blood from its broken beak and crying out:
“Beware! Turn around and face your real enemies
— ambition, violence hatred and greed.”

The poem earned him the label “antiwar poet,” and he was denounced as a pro-Communist propagandist.

Thich Nhat Hanh took up residence in France when the South Vietnamese government denied him permission to return from abroad after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973.

He was unable to return to Vietnam until 2005, when the Communist government allowed him to teach, practice and travel throughout the country. His antiwar activism continued, and in a talk in Hanoi in 2008 he said the Iraq war had resulted from fear and misunderstanding in which violence fed on itself.

“We know very well that airplanes, guns and bombs cannot remove wrong perceptions,” he said. “Only loving speech and compassionate listening can help people correct wrong perceptions. But our leaders are not trained in that discipline, and they rely only on the armed forces to remove terrorism.”

Thich Nhat Hanh during a ceremony in Ho Chi Minh City in 2007. He had lived in exile for decades. — Credit...Associated Press

In 2013, on one of his many visits to centers of influence in the West, he spoke at Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, bringing his message of quiet contemplation to the forefront of the high-energy digital age.

“We have the feeling that we are overwhelmed by information,” he told the assembled workers. “We don’t need that much information.”

And he said: “Do not try to find the solution with your thinking mind. Nonthinking is the secret of success. And that is why the time when we are not working, that time can be very productive, if we know how to focus on the moment.”

Monday, November 29, 2021

Jakucho Setouchi, Author of The Tale of Genji

Setouchi, Jakucho

Jakucho Setouchi (b. Harumi Mitani, May 15, 1922, Tokushima, Japan – d. November 9, 2021, Kyoto, Japan), formerly Harumi Setouchi, was a Japanese Buddhist nun, writer, and activist. Setouchi wrote a best-selling translation of The Tale of Genji and over 400 fictional biographical and historical novels. In 1997, she was honored as a Person of Cultural Merit, and in 2006, she was awarded the Order of Culture of Japan.

Setouchi was born Harumi Mitani on May 15, 1922 in Tokushima, Tokushima Prefecture, on the southeastern Japanese island of Shikoku, She was the second daughter of Toyokichi and Koharu Mitani. Her father was a cabinetmaker, her mother a homemaker. In 1929, her father was adopted by an aunt’s family and took their surname, Setouchi, for his own family.

Setouchi studied Japanese literature at Tokyo Woman's Christian University before her marriage in 1943. She moved with her husband after the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent him to Beijing, and gave birth to their daughter in 1944. In 1945, her mother was killed in an air raid, an event which influenced her for the rest of her life. She returned to Japan in 1946, settled with family in Tokyo in 1947, and in 1948 left her husband and daughter for a relationship with another man.

In 1950, she divorced her husband and serialized her first novel in a magazine. She continued to have sexual relationships, including affairs with married men, and some of her novels were semi-autobiographical. In 1957, she won her first literary award for her novel "Qu Ailing, the Female College Student". She then published Kashin ("Center of a Flower"), which was criticized for the sexual content, and to which she responded, "The critics who say such things all must be impotent and their wives frigid." Publishing her work was difficult for several years afterwards, and critics called her a "womb writer".

She began to shift her novel writing focus to historical female writers and activists, eventually including Kanoko Okamoto, Toshiko Tamura, Sugako Kanno, Fumiko Kaneko, and Ito Noe. In 1963, she was awarded The Women's Literature Prize (Joryu Bungaku Sho) for her 1962 book Natsu no Owari ("The End of Summer"), which became a best-seller. In 1968, she published the essay Ai no Rinri ("The Ethics of Love").

In 1973, Setouchi began training to become a Buddhist nun within the Tendai school of Buddhism, and received her name Jakuchō, which means "silent, lonely listening." From 1987 to 2005, she was the chief priestess at the Tendaiji temple in Iwate Prefecture. Setouchi also became a social activist, built a center for women, and became a spiritual advisor. She was a pacifist and participated in anti-war protests, as well as anti-nuclear rallies in Fukushima after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. She also opposed capital punishment.

Setouchi received the Tanizaki Prize for her novel Hana ni Toe ("Ask the Flowers") in 1992, and was named a Person of Cultural Merit in 1997. Her translation of The Tale of Genji from Classical Japanese took six years to complete and was published in ten volumes in 1998. She considered Prince Genji to be a plot device for the stories of the women of the court, and used a contemporary version of Japanese for her translation. The novel sold more than 2.1 million volumes by mid-1999. After the book was published, she gave lectures and participated in discussion groups organized by her publisher for more than a year.

Setouchi received the Japanese Order of Culture in 2006. She also wrote under the pen name "Purple", and, in 2008, revealed she had written a cell phone novel titled Tomorrow's Rainbow. In 2016, she helped found the nonprofit Little Women Project, to support young women experiencing abuse, exploitation, drug addiction, or poverty. In 2017, she published her novel Inochi ("Life").

Setouchi died of heart failure in Kyoto, Japan, on November 9, 2021, at the age of 99.

Thursday, March 8, 2018

Eido Shimano, Buddhist Leader Who Resigned in Scandal

Eido Shimano, Buddhist Leader Who Resigned in Scandal, Dies at 85

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He led a New York group and built a monastery in the Catskills, but for years rumors circulated that he was having sex with his female followers.

Eido Tai Shimano, who as abbot, or head spiritual teacher, of the Zen Studies Society in New York established a substantial following for his branch of Japanese Buddhism, only to resign in a sex scandal, died on Feb. 18 in Gifu, Japan. He was 85.

His death was announced on the society’s Facebook page. No cause was given. The notice said he had just given a lesson at a junior college.

Mr. Shimano helped fuel interest in Zen Buddhism in New York and beyond in the 1960s and ’70s, a time of alternative lifestyles and spiritual searching. But years later it was found that he had also been having sex with a number of women who had come to him to be taught, revelations that raised ethical questions that roiled Western Buddhism.

Although Mr. Shimano continued to have devoted followers after the scandal broke in 2010, he became a pariah to many.

Mr. Shimano was born in Tokyo in 1932. His given name was Eitaro; he adopted Eido — his so-called Dharma name — when he became a monk. He practiced the Rinzai Zen school of Japanese Buddhism, which emphasizes seated meditation, among other characteristics.

Mr. Shimano went to Hawaii in 1960 under the sponsorship of Robert Aitken, who had established a Zen center there. In late 1964, Mr. Shimano relocated to New York.

According to “The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side,” an investigative e-book by Mark Oppenheimer published by the Atlantic in 2014, Mr. Shimano was pressured to leave Hawaii as a result of questionable behavior with two female Zen students.

Mr. Shimano’s own story of his relocation was more charming. He told of arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport on New Year’s Eve with virtually nothing and proceeding over the ensuing weeks and months to attract followers in the most basic of ways.

“All I did was simply walk Manhattan from top to the bottom,” he told Mr. Oppenheimer, a former religion columnist for The New York Times, adding, “in my Buddhist robe.”

“Every single day I picked up two or three people who were curious,” he said. “And that was the beginning of the sangha” — his community of followers.

He quickly became the abbot of the Zen Studies Society, a Manhattan organization that had been founded in the 1950s but was not particularly active by the mid-’60s. Among his growing group of followers were well-off people like Dorris Carlson, a philanthropist who provided much of the money that enabled him to create the Dai Bosatsu Zendo, a monastery opened in 1976 on 1,400 acres in the Catskills.

Countless people made the trek there to meditate, study and be taught. Rumors that Mr. Shimano, who was married, was having sex with some of those who had come to him for enlightenment circulated for years, so much so that Mr. Aitken tried to raise concerns.

“Over the past three decades, we have interviewed many former students of Shimano Roshi,” he wrote to the Zen Studies Society board in 1995, using the Japanese honorific that means teacher. “Their stories are consistent: trust placed in an apparently wise and compassionate teacher, only to have that trust manipulated in the form of his sexual misconduct and abuse.”

The matter flared into the open when, at a group dinner at the Catskills monastery in 2010, a woman rose and announced that she had been having an affair with Mr. Shimano for two years. Until that moment, some board members had thought that any questionable behavior by Mr. Shimano had been in the distant past.

He resigned from the board in July of that year. Two months later, he resigned as abbot as well.

“Over time, I took your kindness for granted and arrogance grew in my heart,” he wrote in a letter to his followers at the time. “As a result, my sensitivity to feel the pain of others decreased. Now, as I reflect on the past, I realize how many people’s feelings and trust in me were hurt by my words and deeds.”

The scandal, along with similar ones involving other Buddhist leaders, like Joshu Sasaki, prompted debate about what standards, if any, should be applied to Buddhist teachers, the difficulties in adapting Eastern ideas to the West, and whether the dynamic between teacher and follower is inherently coercive.

“Eido Shimano Roshi was clearly one of the great Zen teachers of his generation of immigrants who fed the hunger in the American counterculture for an ‘authentic’ teaching from the East,” Mr. Oppenheimer said by email. “Unfortunately, he was also one of the generation’s worst predators.”

When the allegations about him, Mr. Sasaki and others came to light, people spoke out — a “me too” moment before that phrase came to be associated with sexual abuse. “But many Buddhist communities are still organized around the principle of the charismatic master,” Mr. Oppenheimer noted, “and that’s so often a recipe for abuse.”

There was no immediate information on Mr. Shimano’s survivors.