Category: Vietnam

Our Emanation Bodies

At the time I wrote that small book [The Miracle of Mindfulness], I could not have imagined the effect it would have in the world. It has been translated into twenty-five languages, reprinted many times,…

The Outgoingness of the Heart

In no Chinese poet’s works does compassion for human suffering play so large a part. The works of his maturity — the ballads, satires and petitions- — are largely grounded on pity, and even at…

Kindred Spirits

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed. But I try to work one day at a time. If we just worry about the big picture, we are powerless. So my secret is to start right away doing whatever…

From Fyodor Dostoevsky to Thich Nhat Hanh

“Compassion will give meaning and understanding to Rogozhin himself. Compassion is the chief and perhaps only law of being  for all mankind.”—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot Please call me by my true name,so that I can…

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. …