Category: Vietnam

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…

Recent Reading

Sunday 11 April 2021 Dear Sarah, Thanks for your question about what I’ve been reading. Sometimes I make a plan, then other times I act entirely on instinct. So what follows are examples of each….

Roses and Garbage

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of Understanding: Commentaries on the Prajnaparamita Heart SutraParallax Press, 1988 A beautiful rose we have just cut and placed in our vase is immaculate. It smells so good, so pure,…

The Good News of Translation

1. Thanks to __________, I  Was Able to Read_______’s  _________  [Language]   Richard Fein, Yankev Glatshteyn, Selected Poems [Yiddish] Hillel Halkin, Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman [Yiddish] Nili Wachtel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Meshugah [Yiddish] Martha…

Vietnamerica

1967 Today’s Email: “Thank you for signing up for the [New York Times] Vietnam ’67 newsletter. Over the course of the next year, we’ll examine the participation of the United States in the long war…