The Communist and the Buddhist

[Nikolay] Valentinov … recorded his shock at Lenin’s certainty not only that Marx and Engels were absolutely correct, but that no fundamental principle they enunciated, about anything, could ever be changed.  “Nothing in Marxism is…

A Letter from 2009

Thursday 26 February 2009 Dear Blair, Sorry it has taken so long to respond to your simple question—but as you are a teacher, I can probably count on your understanding. You wrote: “From everything you’ve…

Paradise and Inferno

The World War I poet Ivor Gurney wrote: “There are strange Hells within the minds War made.” If a new Vietnam War poem is ever written in America, it will be a descent into that…

Thuy

I first met Thuy Khuu in 2006 when she took my Social Justice class at Saint Louis University.  Born in Vietnam, she moved to the US at the age of eight with her parents,  sister and brother. …

Power Versus Love

Robert Topmiller, The Lotus Unleashed: The Buddhist Peace Movement in South Vietnam, 1964-1966 We are not savages; we are people with an ancient culture, and we are sick in our bones of war. I do…

Why Did All Those People Die?

W. D. Ehrhart, The Madness of It All: Essays on War, Literature, and American Life [2002] This is a collection of the Vietnam veteran and poet’s prose pieces up till 9.11.  Some are quite short…

Start Small

In The Art of Living class, we just finished considering Chan Khong’s classic work of engaged Buddhism, Learning True Love. I shared with my friends at the beginning of the course, “The Rules” of the…