How Zen Can Help Save the Planet

caused by war, hunger, and illness. We will learn
to appreciate and enjoy our own presence and the
presence of the cosmos. With these wholesome
energies we can help reduce the number of natural disasters like floods, storms, earthquakes, and
tsunamis.
Dear Mother, there have been times when your
children suffered greatly as a result of natural disasters. We know that when we suffer, you also
suffer in us. At these times, we have turned to you,
dear Mother, and asked you whether or not we
could count on you, on your stability and compassion. You did not answer us right away. And then,
looking at us with great compassion, you said,
“Yes, of course, you can count on your Mother.
I will always be there for you. But, dear children,
you must ask yourselves whether your Mother can
count on you.” Dear Mother, we have passed many
nights without sleeping because of this koan given
to us. Today, our faces covered in tears, we come to
kneel before you, compassionate and holy Mother,
to tell you that, “Yes, Mother, you can count on us.”
1 In Taoist cosmology, the world of man and Heaven.
2 In Buddhist psychology, one of the eight parts of
consciousness; a field in which every kind of seedpotential can be planted—such as seeds of suffering,
sorrow, fear, happiness, or compassion; in Western
psychology, the unconscious mind.
This is an excerpt from A Love Letter to the Planet,
published by Parallax Press.
Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh is one of the most revered
and influential teachers in the world today. Born in Vietnam in 1926, he became a Zen Buddhist monk at the age
of sixteen. Over seven decades of teaching, he published
more than one hundred titles on meditation, mindfulness,
and Engaged Buddhism, as well as poems, children’s stories, and commentaries on ancient Buddhist texts. After
his exile from Vietnam in 1966, he became a pioneer in
bringing Buddhism to the West. He founded the Plum Village tradition of meditation practice, which today has ten
monasteries and dozens of practice centers in the United States, Asia, Australia, and Europe, as well as more
than 1,500 local mindfulness practice communities. He
built a thriving community of over seven hundred monks
and nuns worldwide, who, together with his tens of thousands of lay students, apply his teachings on mindfulness,
peacemaking, and community-building in schools, workplaces, prisons, politics, and businesses throughout the
world. Our beloved teacher passed away peacefully on
January 22, 2022, at Từ Hiếu Temple in Huế, Vietnam, at
the age of ninety-five.

How Zen
Can Help Save
the Planet
B R O T H E R P H Á P D U N G
An excerpt from a Dharma talk
shared by Brother Pháp Dung in
the Zen and the Art of Saving the
Planet (ZASP) online course, a
transformative learning journey
to cultivate insight, compassion,
community, and action in service
of the Earth.

We have different kinds of energy that we can have
access to and that can help us in our daily lives—in
the work that we need to do and in our service to
humanity and the planet.
In the title Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet
… the word Zen is a Japanese word, and it means
meditation. It’s a translation from the Sanskrit
word dhyāna, which means meditation or cultivation. So meditation is not the exact translation of
Zen; the word cultivation is even more appropriate. Here we are cultivating the mind, cultivating
our lives, and cultivating a certain kind of energy.
So the word Zen can be kind of like a cultivated
person: someone whose mind is developed, who
is matured, and who has been trained in a certain
way. And the energy we use is mindfulness, right?
This energy is a very internal, spiritual energy.
When I learned about meditation, especially
in the Vietnamese tradition, the word used for Zen
was thiền. If you’ve trained enough in meditation
or in the monastery, people look at you, whether
you’re a meditator, a monastic, or a practitioner,
and they say you have the thiền vị—the flavor, the
taste, of Zen. So someone can have a Zen flavor.
In our work—whether in our lives, in our service,
in activist work, or in our engagement for social
change—when we look at the current situation, we
need more of that Zen flavor. That’s why I like the
word Zen in the title of this course. It asks: How can
we bring more of a Zen flavor to the work of bettering our environment, bettering our humanity, and
bettering our relationship with Mother Earth?
Brother Pháp Linh (Brother Spirit) and I had
a chance to attend the COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland. What we brought there was our practice. We
brought our practice in the way we walked and
the way we participated—a kind of Zen energy. It
was a way of being at the conference. And it was
quite a contrast: there were a lot of people rushing
around, working to organize and recalculate our
relationship in terms of carbon footprint or to find
other ways to help lower our impact on our planet.

There was a lot of stress, a lot of anger, and a lot
of confrontation. We felt a lot of tension in people,
both in their bodies and in their minds.
And so my brother and I, we led meditation
every morning. And that is to bring that sense of,
yes, we need work, and there is important work
that needs to be done, but how do we do it? Does it
have a flavor of Zen? The flavor of Zen here is a kind
of lightness. Yes, it’s dire. Yes, it is urgent, this situation that we and our planet find ourselves in. Yes,
it is important for us to do the work we need to do.
But how do we do it? Do we sacrifice our relationships, sacrifice the present moment, to achieve our
goal? To have the Zen flavor in our work is to be at
ease and to be free. In our approach, we don’t sacrifice the present moment or sacrifice our relationships in order to achieve our goal. The kind of mentality that has brought us into trouble is this very
striving and tense approach. What it means to have
the Zen flavor is a kind of core spiritual energy.
The energy of a meditator can support a sense
of clarity. When we are still, we are less reactive. We
have clarity about what is happening in the room
and what is happening with our planet. We are
not fooled by misinformation. This is the power of
meditation. We are not moved to react to information and news too quickly. When something touches us and makes us suffer or feel pain, we don’t react right away; we come back to our breathing. In
the Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet course, we
learn ways to stop, ways to calm ourselves, to take
care of our feelings and our body.
Brothers Pháp Linh and Pháp
Dung at COP26; photos
and the Plum Village app
How can we bring more of a Zen flavor to the work of bettering
our environment, bettering our humanity, and bettering our
relationship with Mother Earth?

In our work as activists, or in our work in society, this energy of meditation can help us have
more stillness. This is the Zen flavor: someone who
is very still. Whatever is happening at work with
our colleagues, with the environment, or with the
news, we are not too quick to react to our emotions
like sadness or anger. When you look at someone,
you can see Zen flavor: they are still, and they’re
very clear. When they share, their words come
from a place of insight. What is this insight? When
we can look, we can touch more deeply the reality of non-separation. A lot of us experience separation in our work, the dualistic idea of an enemy.
We are fueled by this view, and we don’t see deeply
that we’re all victims. As a meditator, we begin to
see more nondualistically or nondiscriminatively.
When we move from this place of less discrimination, we are more cooperative. We see that those
causing harm are also victims.
The insight cuts through our illusion of separation, which we’ll learn more about [in the Zen
and the Art of Saving the Planet online course] as
we study the Diamond Sutra and these concepts
as well as the ideas we have about ourselves,
other people, the planet, and other living beings.
The energy of meditation can support insight that
will help us to avoid othering people—different
groups, different people, and different ways. The
planet and the environment as well. We stop seeing things as separate from us.
This insight, when we have time to meditate,
can really fuel us, it can give us energy. This is the
“diamond” of a meditator. It’s what we cultivate,
it’s what we mine for. The diamond is the insight
that helps us break through our suffering and our
pain, that allows us to see the pain and the suffering in the world. This insight moves us to action.
Do you have a deep sense of care for the Earth and
want to find ways to bring mindfulness to your climate
response? This new online course harnesses the wisdom
of Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh to teach us how to face
these challenging feelings and create a sense of freedom
and possibility. It is a seven-week course and offers talks
and practices to enjoy at your own pace as well as small
sharing groups and a series of interactive events with
monastics. The course is designed to empower the human
resilience we need to face our current situation.
Find out more via plumvillage.org/zasp.
Screenshot of the ZASP
online course