MINDFULNESS TALES FROM VIETNAM
These stories from an ambassador of peace and mindfulness healed my mind and body this week. Thich Nhat Hanh's stories took my breath away.
Before I begin talking about these stories translated from the Vietnamese in the most exquisite English, I must say that this writer is not your typical fiction writer. Yet, for those who have sought to read teachings and writings of a spiritual nature, “Thay,” as Thích Nhất Hạnh preferred to be called, is a household name.
Born in Vietnam in 1926, he became a Buddhist monk at the age of sixteen. A contemporary of Martin Luther King, Nhất Hạnh was nominated by King for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967 for his peaceful protests calling for the end of the Vietnam War. Nhất Hạnh efforts towards peace saw him in exile from North and South Vietnam for thirty years, and he eventually settled in France where he set up a Buddhist community.
I happened upon The Stone Boy and Other Stories when I was in Hanoi in February hunting for Vietnamese books in translation into English. Finally, in a travel-focused store called The Traveller's Bookshop run by a gentleman who escorts private tour groups in Vietnam, I was pointed to a shelf of books by this revered writer whose work I’d been unfamiliar with even though I had heard about him.
The owner of the store was not particularly keen on connecting with an irksome visitor that cold and rainy morning in Hanoi but I desperately needed to use the bathroom. Now that compelled us to have some civil exchanges. Have you noticed how often people connect over input and output? I’ve had some of the most enjoyable and genuine encounters inside bathrooms.
I thanked the gentleman profusely for allowing me to use his dinky bathroom and from that point on, we engaged in a productive conversation about books by Vietnamese writers. The owner seemed to appreciate that I had read several works in translation by local writers. As I stood inside the shop, the first few pages of The Stone Boy collection mesmerized me and I knew I was looking at a work that would force me to think about my life and my connection to the universe.
The opening story, The Ancient Tree, is a gem of a tale about an egg inside an old living tree, one that’s home to many birds and animals. The egg hatches after thirty years. Out of it flies a gorgeous white bird whose life ends one day just as it began—by a return to the old gargantuan tree that is now blazing in a forest fire. When the fire is put out by an unexpected torrent of rain, the tree is partially alive. The creatures cannot believe that life still exists, despite the decimation around them.
They looked everywhere throughout the forest, but they could not find the white bird. Perhaps it had flown away to live in a different forest. Perhaps it had been killed by the fire. The great tree, its body charred and scarred with wounds, did not say a word. The birds turned their heads to the sky, and then began to build new nests in the remaining branches of the great tree. Did the ancient tree miss the child, the child of sacred mountain air and the life energy of its own four thousand years? Dear bird, where have you gone? Listen to the monk: time has returned the bird to the love that is the source of all things.
This multi-layered story reverberated within me for several hours, while symbolizing a return to one’s “roots” or one’s beginnings. It’s a tale I would read to a child of four. I’d share it with a teenager. To my son and daughter who are now in their thirties, it would be a powerful story about life, purpose and death.
It reminded me also of the philosophy of yoga expounded in the Bhagavad Gita—one of the them being “karma yoga”. Of the classical paths to spiritual liberation in Hinduism, karma yoga is the path of unselfish action. It teaches that a spiritual seeker should act according to dharma, without being attached to the fruits or the personal consequences of one’s actions. I thought that the action of the bird in the story was a brilliant depiction of this philosophy. As an opening story, it truly sets the stage for the sort of book we are reading. Every story in this collection drives home a specific point about the significance of the short span of life we’re handed by an ineffable force in the universe.
In The Giant Pines, we receive a reminder to remain grounded. When we’re awash in fame, is it really necessary to swell in pride? It reminded me of something my son’s guru‘s mother told him on a day his concert didn’t go well enough: “Don’t gloat when you score, but don’t sink into an abyss when you flounder.” She told him to remember to show equanimity, no matter the circumstances. In this piece, we watch what characters reap their good karma and bad karma. We meet a monk who has achieved so much star power that one day he receives a correction that he recognizes, right away, and with horror, as the price for his folly.
In the eponymous title story, we meet Stone Boy, an adolescent who arrives into Tô’s life when she loses her father to the war. Tô’s life is racked by one crisis after another for even as the father dies in the war, Tô, is blinded by chemical warfare following which she loses her mother. Nhất Hạnh reminds us to be compassionate for all the poor souls fighting in the north and the south of the country who are simply playing out their parts. The author manages to describe unflinchingly the horrors of war while showing how in a war, everyone loses. There are simply no winners or losers.
Bullets whistled overhead and people threw down their belongings and ran wildly in every direction, fleeing for cover. Tô pulled Stone Boy to the ground and held her hand on the back of his head to keep him from looking up. Then the ground trembled from a huge explosion and debris fell everywhere. Tô and Stone Boy were covered with dirt. They heard tragic, painful screams, and Tô realized that a bomb had landed in the marketplace, wounding and killing many, many people.
Stone Boy is a powerful piece on war, on acute and protracted sorrow, on healing and on rejuvenation. In this story, I also saw the enormous resilience of the Vietnamese people and their ability to rise like the phoenix from the ashes. What I also received from these stories is the need to examine our own selves under the microscope, for it does not take long before a vanquisher turns around to become a subjugator.
In a brilliant tale titled The Pine Gate, we meet the student of a swordsman who takes leave of his teacher as he goes out into the world. As he takes his blessings, the master tells him “what to seek, what to avoid, and what to change.” He hands him a precious sword to subdue all evil and conquer ambition and desire. Then he gives him the me ngo glass to help distinguish the wholesome from the unwholesome. He warns him: “Sometimes it is called the ‘Demon Viewer,’ for looking through it, you will be able to see the true forms of demons and evil spirits.” The more the young swordsman uses it to vanquish the villainous people he encounters, the less he remembers that those same rules of conduct apply to him, too. One day, he turns around and puts himself under the lens. This is a moving tale about the importance of self-examination and, most importantly, of mercy and compassion.
In tales recounted in such a gentle and serene voice, I felt I was hearing the voice of wisdom from one whose soul had been forged by the protracted fires of an unnecessary war. One of the most poignant moments of The Stone Boy story is his meeting with an old and eccentric Taoist monk “whose hair was so long it covered both his ears.” The old man always kept with him a cage containing a cat and two mice and his manner of protest makes for such a memorable moment in this story.
People stopped and stared , and the old monk was only too happy to explain to anyone willing to listen. “I’m here to tell the government that if a cat can live in peace with two mice, why can’t we human beings live in peace together? We must stop killing one another today and start rebuilding our homeland.”
Thich Nhat Hanh was a world-renowned spiritual teacher and peace activist. Over seven decades of teaching, he published more than 100 books, which have sold more than four million copies in the United States alone. His teachings on Buddhism as a path to social and political transformation are credited with bringing the mindfulness movement to Western culture. He passed away in 2022 at the age of 95 at his root temple, Tu Hieu, in Hue, Vietnam.
Over seven decades of teaching, Thích Nhất Hạnh published a hundred books, which have been translated into more than forty languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide. While reading these short stories I felt as I did while reading a collection of fairy tales.
All of Nhất Hạnh’s tales have a mystical quality to them and we often find ourselves having to believe in life outside the realms of this earth. We are reminded, over and over, of the interconnectedness of the lives of all the living things that inhabit the earth.
In one of the stories, the writer takes us to the moon which, it turns out, we reach simply by clambering up a bamboo tree that has grown madly right by the hut of a young woman. Like the bamboo tree, this short story grows somewhat wildly, following none of the conventions typically followed by contemporary short stories. Yet, what do you know? Each story, so evocative of the lush Vietnamese landscape, opens a door into another world, with the entire collection being a treasure map with pointers to buried treasures and valuable secrets from the myriad stories of this endlessly beautiful universe.