Walking in Thầy's Footsteps

Mitchell at the iconic three-entrance gate
of Từ Hiếu Temple, Thích Nhất Hạnh’s
root temple. Photo courtesy of Evermind
Media. All other photos by Mitchell Ratner.

In 2019, Sister Định Nghiêm told me about an
idea that had been growing in her heart. She felt
that many of the non-Vietnamese monastic and
lay students of Thầy would better understand his
teachings and practices if they were more familiar
with the rich Buddhist history of Vietnam and with
the events and places that had shaped Thầy’s life.
Sister Định Nghiêm and I then began initial planning for a pilgrimage tour. Because of the COVID
pandemic and Thầy’s declining health, however,
the first In the Footsteps of Thầy pilgrimage was
delayed.
After Thầy’s passing in 2022 and the easing of
COVID concerns, Sister Định Nghiêm, working with
Sister Tuệ Nghiêm, planned a pilgrimage for January
2023. The group of pilgrims met on January 6th in
the spacious Hà Nội home of Vietnamese friends of
Plum Village to begin an eighteen-day pilgrimage
tour; some of us were able to participate in all of
it, and others only in part of it. There were thirty
of us—just the right number to comfortably fit in a
Vietnamese tour bus. In the initial gathering there
were eight Plum Village monastics (from Vietnam,
France, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia), two
Korean abbots, and about twenty lay practitioners
(from the United States, Spain, France, Germany,
Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Malaysia,
and Singapore). Sisters Định Nghiêm and Tuệ
Nghiêm, senior monastics from the New Hamlet
of Plum Village, France, were at times our hosts,
guides, historians of Thầy’s life, translators, and
mother hens.
During the pilgrimage we spent nights in Hà
Nội, Thanh Hóa, Đà Lạt, Huế, and Yên Tử Mountain,
as well as one night on an overnight train. During
our days we often traveled by bus to visit places
important to Thầy’s development as a person and
as a teacher. The pilgrimage was at various times
a practice retreat with sitting and walking meditation; a study group with our organizing sisters
and local guides offering presentations about the
importance of places we would be visiting; and a
container for multi-day, heart-to-heart conversations about our lives and our practice of Engaged
Buddhism. It was, in a word, intense!
Five encounters touched me especially deeply and helped me understand Thầy in new ways:
Thanh Hóa and Na Mountain, Chùa Dâu (the first
Buddhist monastery in Vietnam), the enlightened
kings of the Trần Nhân Dynasty, Yên Tử Mountain,
and Từ Hiếu Temple.
T H AN H H ÓA AN D N A M O UN TAI N
One of our first destinations was the city of Thanh
Hóa, where Thầy’s family moved when he was five
years old. We arrived late in the morning and had a
simple lunch at a small vegetarian restaurant in the
old part of town, which happened to have a quote
from and photo of Albert Einstein next to the cash
Walking in Thầy’s Footsteps
Dharma teacher Mitchell Ratner
reflects on his pilgrimage tracing
Thích Nhất Hạnh’s life and lineage
in Vietnam, granting him deeper
understanding of Thầy
and himself.

register. In the afternoon a visit to an archeological
museum stimulated my interest in the history of
Vietnam and in how it had shaped Thầy’s life and
teaching—a way of looking at the world influenced
by my training and work as a social anthropologist.
Prior to the pilgrimage, almost everything I knew
about Vietnamese history took place in the twentieth century.
The primary focus of the archaeological
museum in Thanh Hóa was the Dong Son culture,
which arose around three thousand years ago in
the Red River Valley and Delta, roughly coterminous
with contemporary North Vietnam. The Dong
Son were proficient in cultivating rice and skilled
in casting bronze tools. In time a geographically
extensive,
hierarchical,
state-like
structure
arose, led by hereditary rulers who created and
maintained hydraulic systems for agricultural
cultivation and flood protection, managed trade,
and prevented attacks and invasions. Between the
years 43 and 299 CE, the agriculturally productive
Red River Valley area was part of an administrative
district called the Jiaozhi Commandery (Quận
Giao Chỉ). Although the population was primarily
Vietnamese-speaking, they were ruled by Chinese
dynasties.
Our hotel in the modern center of Thanh Hóa
was ten-stories high and bland, with few other
guests. However, the emptiness of the lobby was
helpful that night because an attached dining area
offered the hotel’s strongest Wi-Fi signal. At 9 p.m.
Vietnam time, which was 9 a.m. in the Eastern
United States, I participated in an in-person and
online ceremony transmitting The Five Mindfulness Trainings to practitioners in the Washington
DC area. Logging into the internet at the hotel and
remembering the Einstein quote at our lunch, I
was struck by how much more worldly Thanh Hóa
was today from the provincial town Thầy knew in
the 1930s.
The next morning we traveled by bus to Na
Mountain, one of the three most sacred locations
in Vietnam. Thầy visited the mountain on a school
trip as an eleven-year-old. He had hoped to meet
a hermit who his teacher had told him lived on the
mountain. Going off on his own, Thầy found the
hermit’s simple hut, but not the hermit. Then he
found something else that changed the course of
his life. Thầy called it his first spiritual experience.
In At Home in the World he writes:
As I walked deeper into the forest, I heard
the sound of dripping water. It was a
beautiful sound. I started to climb in the
direction of that sound, and soon I found
a natural well, a small pool surrounded
by big rocks of many colors. The water
was so clear that I could see all the way to
the bottom.… The water tasted so good. I
had never tasted anything as good as that
water. I felt completely satisfied; I did not
need or want anything at all—even the
desire to meet the hermit was gone. I had
the feeling that I had met the hermit.1
Our group sat in meditation by a feng shui
shrine at the top of the mountain. The hermit’s
hut was long gone. However, we were able to walk
down the mountain to gather around the well and
taste its water.
Thầy’s visit to Na Mountain contributed to his
aspiration to become a monk. When he was sixteen
he traveled by overnight train from Thanh Hóa to
Huế to become a novice at Từ Hiếu Temple, accompanied by his older brother, who was already
a monk there. Our pilgrimage group replicated
Thầy’s journey by taking an overnight train to Huế.
I shared a sleeping compartment with the Korean
abbots, both of whom exuded a joyful settledness
that drew me and others to them. Although neither of them spoke English well, and their female
translator was in a different compartment, we
managed that night and the next morning to have
some delightful exchanges using gestures and
Google Translate.
CH ÙA DÂU AN D M AST E R TĂN G H ỘI
Later in the pilgrimage we drove thirty miles from
Hà Nội to visit Chùa Dâu, the first Buddhist temple in Vietnam. It was built between 187-226 CE in
what was then Luy Lâu, the capital of the Jiaozhi

Commandery. Because of its prominent role in the
sea trade between India and China, Luy Lâu was
often visited by Indian monks and traders, and
the area became a regional hub for the study and
teaching of Mahāyāna Buddhism.
For Thầy, Chùa Dâu was especially important
because Master Tăng Hội, who died in 280 CE, studied and taught there. In 2007, after his second trip
home after his exile from Vietnam, Thầy explained:
The meditation that I share in the West
has its roots in Vietnam of the third
century. We had a very famous Zen
master, Master Tăng Hội, whose father
was a soldier from India and his mother
a young Vietnamese woman. When his
parents passed away, the child Tăng Hội
went to a temple in northern Vietnam
to become a monastic. He translated
commentaries on the sutras in that
temple in Vietnam, then went to China
where he became the first Zen master
teaching meditation in China—three
hundred years before Bodhidharma. I
wrote a book about Zen Master Tăng Hội,
and I said that Vietnamese Buddhists
should worship this Zen master as our
first Zen master of Vietnam.2
Pilgrimage group photo in the front courtyard
of Chùa Dâu Pagoda, originally named Pháp
Vân Temple, the oldest Buddhist monastery in
Vietnam. The first Zen Patriarch, Tăng Hội, lived
and taught meditation there in the third century.

In light of the significance of Chùa Dâu to Thầy,
our visit to the temple unfolded in a surprising
way. The temple seemed unfrequented and somewhat neglected. Although there were statues of
Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, there were many more
statues honoring local deities, Chinese mandarins,
and guardian spirits. Our local guides enthusiastically told us fanciful stories, including one about
a young woman who had been transformed into
a tree by a dishonorable monk, then centuries later was released by a wise local lord who had the
fallen tree made into a yellow-robed statue that
now towered over the Buddha in the central altar.
Throughout our tour of the temple, the guides never mentioned Master Tăng Hội.
Later, away from the guides, Sister Định Nghiêm
explained that Vietnamese Buddhism continues
to coexist with many folk beliefs and practices involving local deities, mother goddesses, ancestral
gods, shamans, and animal spirits. In some temples, such as this one, these other perspectives
play a much more prominent role.
Our visit to Chùa Dâu helped me appreciate
Thầy’s spiritual connection with Vietnam’s twothousand-year-old Buddhist heritage. Because of
his fluency in Vietnamese and Sino-Vietnamese,
if there was something a Vietnamese-Buddhist
teacher had written, he could read it. Thầy, however, was not only a historian and aficionado of Vietnamese Buddhism; he was also a spiritual revolutionary. Beginning in his teens, Thầy had a deep
desire to renew and revitalize Buddhism in Vietnam. He wanted to move the Buddhist community away from the superstitions and folk beliefs we
brushed up against at Chùa Dâu and to offer more
nourishing spiritual practices, like those Tăng Hội
had contributed to the Buddhist tradition.
Thầy began monastic training at Từ Hiếu in 1942,
in the midst of the Second World War. Japanese
control and subsequent occupation caused many
hardships for Từ Hiếu and for all of Vietnam, especially the Great Famine of 1945 when an estimated 600,000 to 2,000,000 Vietnamese people died.
Thầy’s biography notes:
Stepping out of the temple [Thầy] saw
bodies out in the streets of those who
had died of hunger and witnessed trucks
carrying away dozens of corpses. When
the French returned to reclaim Vietnam
in 1945, the violence only increased.
Although many young monks were
tempted by the Marxist pamphlets’ call
to arms, Thầy was convinced that Buddhism, if updated and restored to its core
teachings and practices, could truly help
relieve suffering in society and offer a
nonviolent path to peace, prosperity, and
independence from colonizing powers,
just as it had during the renowned Lý and
Trần dynasties in medieval Vietnam.3
To learn more about the medieval emperors
that so inspired Thầy, our pilgrimage group traveled to Yên Tử Mountain, seventy miles east of Hà
Nội. The first three Trần Dynasty emperors, who
ruled from 1226 to 1314, especially impressed
me because they were effective military leaders,
compassionate rulers, supportive mentors to their
sons, and fully committed Buddhist practitioners.
After the decisive defeat of the Mongols armies,
Trần Nhân Tông, the third Emperor of the Trần
Dynasty, focused on rebuilding his country and
reducing the burden on the poor. When he was
thirty-two, he abdicated in favor of his son. Trần
Nhân Tông had wanted for years to devote himself
to spiritual awakening. After officially becoming
the “Retired Emperor,” he left the palace to practice Buddhism on Yên Tử Mountain, ordaining as a
monk in 1295.
In the preface to his historical novel Hermitage
Among the Clouds, Thầy writes about Trần Nhân
Tông:
[He] abdicated his throne to become
a monk and live in the little hermitage
“Sleeping Clouds” on Mount Yên Tử. He
was known as the “Noble Teacher of
Bamboo Forest” and was the founder of

the “Bamboo Forest School of Zen Meditation.”

Before becoming a monk … he ruled
as king over the land of Viet. He repelled
the invading Mongol army at the end of
the thirteenth century. From the day he
was ordained a monk, he lived an ascetic
life—wearing coarse cloth, sleeping under
a roof of leaves, and going everywhere
barefoot. Even as a monk, he continued
his work to establish justice and morality
in the culture of his people. He traveled to
the land of Cham in hopes of establishing
a foundation of lasting friendship and
peace between the two countries.4
Several days before his death, Trần Nhân Tông
inscribed a poem on a temple wall:
Life’s length is one breath,
Moonlight on ocean waves.
Why worry about Mara’s realm?
My Buddha land is the springtime sky.5
YÊN TỬ MOU N TA I N
Our group’s time on Yên Tử Mountain was divided between two very different environments. We
stayed overnight and ate most of our meals in a
recently-built resort complex created to resemble a twelfth-century Vietnamese monastery or
town. The complex included a five-star hotel for
“royalty” as well as modest rooms containing four
bunk beds for “villagers” (including our group).
The whole town, and especially the five-star hotel,
were meticulously crafted and luxurious. Although
there were many gorgeous landscaped views and
lovely architectural details, the overall effect felt to
me discordant with the natural simplicity of Yên Tử
Mountain and the Bamboo Forest School founded
by Trần Nhân Tông.
The other environment we experienced was
Yên Tử mountain: rugged, wild, and full of Buddhist
and Taoist temples and sacred spots. We climbed
Yên Tử in a biting wind with the temperature
around fifty degrees Fahrenheit. A few monastics
and lay practitioners climbed for three hours on
stone stairs and heavily rooted paths. The rest of
us accepted the assistance of gondolas on two segments. Even then, the way up was arduous. Along
the way, we did prostrations and walking meditation at a fourteenth-century stupa containing the
relics of Trần Nhân Tông. The view from the peak
was a spectacular panorama of multiple ranges of
cloud-covered mountains. We stayed for an hour,
resting, sharing snacks and reflections, and singing Plum Village songs.
Later, when I talked with friends about the
early Trần emperors, one asked me how their
teachings and practices might be applicable today. What sort of reforms or strategies might such
enlightened rulers advocate? My sense is that it is
not about specific reforms or strategies, but about
leaders nourishing in themselves and others an
aspiration to be loving, compassionate, and fully
awake. If that perspective is present in many, positive changes will occur. Thầy said something very
similar in a Dharma talk:
In Buddhism we speak of the Three Jewels: Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. But when
we look at the Sangha, the third Jewel,
we see that it contains the two other Jewels. A good Sangha, a good community,
is made of people who practice mindfulness, concentration, and insight. …

So in a Sangha, in the body of the
Sangha, because we have a good Sanghakaya (Sanghabody), there are many
cells. Each of us is a cell of the Sangha.
And each of us can generate the energy of
mindfulness, concentration, and insight.
And if every one of us practices properly,
then the collective energy produced by
the Sangha will be very powerful.

I think that we can save this planet,
reduce violence, and end war with that
kind of energy. No matter how talented
our political leaders are, if they do not
have that kind of energy, they cannot
help.… Martin Luther King Jr. saw that

very well. He was devoted to Sangha
building. He talked about the Sangha as
a beloved community. Unfortunately he
was assassinated and could not continue
the work of Sangha building. We should
continue his work, because Sangha
building is very crucial. It is by the work
of Sangha building that we can create
the kind of power, the kind of energy,
that helps us to deal with the enormous
difficulties we are now facing.6
T Ừ HIẾU TEMPL E
Thầy lived at the Từ Hiếu Temple in Huế for five
years as an aspirant and novice and returned there
for the final four years of his life. Our pilgrimage
made two multi-day visits to Từ Hiếu to participate
in the ceremonies honoring the first anniversary of
Thầy’s passing and, later, to celebrate Tết with the
monastic community. I had practiced at Từ Hiếu in
prior years and have warm feelings for it because
of its connection to Thầy, because of the kindnesses I have received from the monastics who practice
there, and because of its engaging history.
The story of Từ Hiếu begins in the midnineteenth century. National Teacher Master Thích
Nhất Định was the esteemed abbot of a temple in
Huế and also an advisor to the Nguyễn Dynasty
court. When he was fifty-nine years old, he retired
and moved to a straw hut in the pine woods outside
Huế. Some time later his elderly mother, whom he
cared for at his hermitage, became ill and doctors
recommended a diet of fish soup. Although as a
Buddhist monk he was a committed vegetarian,
Thích Nhất Định dutifully walked to the market
every morning to buy fish. When people began
to spread rumors about his dietary laxness, Nhất
Định did not respond.
In time the story reached the court of Emperor Tự Đức, a learned and kind leader who was a
strong follower of Confucian ethics. He investigated and realized Nhất Định’s actions were prompted by his love for his mother. In 1848, the year after
Nhất Định’s death, the emperor honored the faithful monk by building a major temple at the site of
Sister Định Nghiêm outside the wall of the Huệ Quang
Golden Stupa in Hoa Yên Temple in the Yên Tử Mountain,
which contains relics of king Trần Nhân Tông who became a
monk, lived on Yên Tử Mountain, and founded the Bamboo
Forest School of Vietnamese Buddhism.
Sister Tuệ Nghiêm leading a song on the top of Yên Tử Mountain.

the straw hut. He named the temple Từ Hiếu, “Merciful Filial Piety.”
I envision the monastery as exquisite and well
maintained in its early years, but its appearance
and finances were probably much reduced by 1942
when Thầy came to Từ Hiếu as an aspirant monk.
Even though the physical conditions were difficult,
Thầy remembers Từ Hiếu fondly in his memoir, My
Master’s Robe:
Of course you did not practice sitting
meditation all day when you entered the
temple. For months and sometimes years
you had to take care of the cows, collect
dry twigs and leaves, carry water, pound
rice, and collect wood for the fire. Every
time my mother came to visit from our
village, which was far away, she would
regard these things as being the challenges of the first stage of practice. At first my
mother was concerned for my health, but
as I grew healthier, she stopped worrying
about me. As for me, I knew that these
were not challenges—they were themselves the practice. If you enter this life,
you will see for yourself. If there was no
taking care of the cows, no collecting of
twigs and leaves, no carrying water, no
growing potatoes, then there would be
no means for the practice of meditation.7
During the Tết celebration our group met one
morning for meditation at “Thầy’s Hut,” where Thầy
lived his final years. Thầy’s presence was palpable.
Then we went to the Buddha Hall to pay our
respects to the Buddha and to the Từ Hiếu Temple
lineage. I remember standing, spellbound, in front
of two portraits framed together in the ancestors’
room. One portrait was of Thầy’s teacher, Abbot
Thích Chân Thật (1884-1968), and to the right
was Thầy’s teacher’s teacher, Abbot Thích Tuệ
Minh (1861-1939). The portraits led me to reflect
Elders celebrating Tết at the Nguyễn family shrine
in the village of Thành Trung, near Huế, where
Thầy’s father, Nguyễn Đình Phúc, was born.

on the transmission of the mindfulness teachings
from generation to generation, beginning with the
Buddha and continuing to Thầy and the many lives
he touched and transformed.
The portraits also reminded me that the essence of a spiritual practice is transmitted through
close and loving relationships. In My Master’s Robe
Thầy writes about discovering his teacher up very
late one night stitching a brown robe. Soon Thầy
realizes that his teacher is mending the robe so he
can offer it to Thầy in the morning, when he will receive the novice precepts and will no longer wear
the gray robes of an aspirant.
At last the robe was mended. My teacher
signaled for me to come closer. He asked
me to try it on. The robe was a little too
large for me, but that did not prevent me
from feeling so happy that I was moved to
tears. I had received the most sacred kind
of love—a pure love that was gentle and
spacious, which nourished and infused
my aspiration through my many years of
training and practice.8
The last time Thầy visited his teacher at Từ
Hiếu was in May 1966, just before Thầy traveled to
the US to speak about the horrific suffering caused
by the war and to call for peace. Thầy received
Lamp Transmission during the visit, becoming one
of many Dharma heirs of Master Thích Chân Thật.
Two years later, when the abbot died, he left instructions for Thầy to be appointed as the abbot
of Từ Hiếu. Thầy, however, because of his peace
advocacy in the US, was denied the right to return
to Vietnam and was not able to visit Từ Hiếu again
until 2005.
I signed up for the pilgrimage expecting it to deepen my understanding of Thầy and his teachings,
and it did. I didn’t expect how much it would teach
me about myself.
As I’ve noted, the pilgrimage made me more
aware of how deeply Thầy experienced and was
nourished by his relationships with his ancestors.
Once I saw that, I began noticing it all around me
Portraits in the Ancestors Hall at Từ Hiếu Temple of Thầy’s teacher, the fourth Abbot Thích Chân Thật (1884-1968),
and Thầy’s teacher’s teacher, the third Abbot Thích Tuệ Minh (1861-1939).

in Vietnam: in the space and care devoted to family
altars and in the way visits to family and temples
are an integral part of the celebration of the Vietnamese New Year.
The more clearly I saw these Vietnamese
connections, the more I became aware of the
paucity of my own connections to my blood, land,
and spiritual ancestors. My grandparents were
Eastern European Jews, shopkeepers and tailors,
who came to the United States as teenagers around
1900. They left behind the communities they had
grown up in, the languages they were accustomed
to speaking, parents and extended families,
and the spiritual traditions that had nourished
earlier generations. Shortly after I was born, my
parents relocated from the Midwest to California,
separating themselves from their own extended
families. I grew up rootless, unhappy, and without
a sense of belonging anywhere. Looking for
something better, and wanting to distance myself
from family tensions, I moved from California to
the Washington DC area in my twenties.
I struggled with my rootlessness for another
two decades, and then I met Thầy in 1990. I realized
I had a spiritual illness that I didn’t even know
how to talk about. But Thầy understood it, and
he (and the Buddha) had a remedy. Thầy offered
me a vision of a life fully and authentically lived,
concrete practices to develop my mindfulness
and compassion, and a community of spiritual
companions. In other words, Buddha, Dharma,
and Sangha.
Often during the pilgrimage I thought about
the almost forty years during which Thầy could
not visit Vietnam. He so loved the country and its
history; he cared deeply for his many friends and
teachers at Từ Hiếu and throughout Vietnam who
had supported and nourished him. How painful it
Pilgrimage members in the outdoor
ethnographic park at Tràng An, part of the
an UNESCO Cultural and Natural Area World
Heritage Site in Vietnam's Red River Delta.
In addition to a renown landscape, the site
contains historic buildings and temples from
Hoa Lư, the first capital of Đại Việt (Great Việt),
founded in 986.

was for him to be separated from them. In an odd
sort of way, both Thầy and I had lived much of our
lives in exile. His was geographic. Mine was a form
of psychological and spiritual alienation, a decaying of my capacity to relate well to myself, those
around me, and the natural world.
Fortunately, the practices that were helpful
to Thầy in his exile, were also helpful to me and
to millions of others. In At Home in the World Thầy
writes about his first two years of exile:
I had a recurring dream of being at home
in my root temple in central Vietnam. I
would be climbing a green hill covered
with beautiful trees when, halfway to the
top, I would wake up and realize that I
was in exile. The dream came to me over
and over again.9
Over time he learned to embrace his exile and
the profound insights it made available to him:
My practice was the practice of mindfulness. I tried to live in the here and now
and touch the wonders of life every day. It
was thanks to this practice that I survived.
The trees in Europe were so different
from the trees in Vietnam. The fruits, the
flowers, the people, they were all completely different. The practice brought
me back to my true home in the here and
now. Eventually I stopped suffering, and
the dream did not come back anymore.…

The expression, “I have arrived, I am
home,” is the embodiment of my practice. It is one of the main Dharma Seals of
Plum Village. It expresses my understanding of the teaching of the Buddha and is
the essence of my practice. Since finding
my true home, I no longer suffer.…

When we are deeply in touch with the
present moment, we can touch both the
past and the future; and if we know how
to handle the present moment properly,
we can heal the past. It was precisely because I did not have a country of my own
that I had the opportunity to find my true
home.10
I am deeply grateful to Thầy for offering his reparative teachings to Western practitioners. I am
grateful to Sister Định Nghiêm for imagining all
that an In the Footsteps of Thầy pilgrimage might
offer non-Vietnamese practitioners. It certainly
touched and transformed me more deeply and in
more ways than I anticipated. I am filled with gratitude for Sisters Định Nghiêm and Tuệ Nghiêm, who
worked tirelessly before and during the pilgrimage, and for the many wonderful practitioners on
the pilgrimage bus with whom I shared joys, challenges, and emerging insights.
1 Thích Nhất Hạnh, At Home in the World (Berkeley:
Parallax Press, 2016), pages 23-24.
2 Thích Nhất Hạnh, “The Three Spiritual Powers,” The
Mindfulness Bell 46 (October 2007),
https://www.parallax.org/mindfulnessbell/article/
dharma-talk-the-three-spiritual-powers/
3 “Thich Nhat Hanh: Extended Biography,” Plum Village.
Accessed August 31, 2023. https://plumvillage.org/about/
thich-nhat-hanh/biography/thich-nhat-hanh-fullbiography
4 Thích Nhất Hạnh, Hermitage Among the Clouds
(Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2001), page vii.
5 Thích Nhất Hạnh, Hermitage Among the Clouds
(Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2001), page 126.
6 Thích Nhất Hạnh, 2011, “Beloved Community,” Thích Nhất
Hạnh Dharma Talks. https://tnhaudio.org/2011/09/14/
beloved-community/
7 Thích Nhất Hạnh, My Master’s Robe (Berkeley: Parallax
Press, 2005), page 22.
8 Thích Nhất Hạnh, My Master’s Robe (Berkeley: Parallax
Press, 2005), page 97.
9 Thích Nhất Hạnh, At Home in the World (Berkeley:
Parallax Press, 2016), page 13.
10 Thích Nhất Hạnh, At Home in the World (Berkeley:
Parallax Press, 2016), pages 13-14.

Mitchell Ratner, True Mirror of Wisdom, has taught
classes and workshops focused on integrating mindfulness meditation with work, meaningful relationships,
and the challenges of everyday life since 1994. In 2001
he was ordained as a Dharma teacher by Thích Nhất
Hạnh. He practices with the Still Water Mindfulness
Practice Center and lives with his wife in Takoma Park,
Maryland, US.
View from the peak of Yên Tử Mountain, home to
Buddhist monks and Taoist sages for more than a
thousand years.

Korean Master Jong Man Oh, one of the
two abbots on the first segment of the
pilgrimage tour, gifted each participant with
an English/Korean calligraphy he had made
on the morning of his departure.