He wrote some of the best books on religious thought I have read. I did a oral philosophy final with a book of his. Living Buddha, living Christ. Awesome book.
Zen Buddhist monks lead fictional lives. Zen: making a big deal out of simple intuition. Buddhism: rejecting logic, ethics and existence. The atman inside you will go to heaven without you. What a waste of life. In other news, our rights are given to us by the Creator.
His YouTube clips were pretty awesome, too!
Didn't care for the frequent commercial interruptions where he would market his hot-air bbq, though.
Regards,
“Jesus saith unto him, I AN the way, the truth, and the life: NO MAN cometh unto the Father, BUT BY ME” (John 14:6).
This monk certainly knows the impact of Jesus’ words now, but it is too late. The only thing he prays now is: “I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father’s house: For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment” (Luke 16:27-28).
“Even when I thought, with most other well-informed, though unscholarly, people, that Buddhism and Christianity were alike, there was one thing about them that always perplexed me; I mean the startling difference in their type of religious art. I do not mean in its technical style of representation, but in the things that it was manifestly meant to represent. No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The mediaeval saint’s body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that. Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards.” - G. K. Chesterton, “Orthodoxy”
He was an amazing man.
I met with him last year at his temple in Hue, Vietnam. While he had not spoken in several years due to a stroke, his soul spoke volumes.
We first met in the early 1990’s when I attended a week long workshop he did.
He has written several excellent books on the parallels between Buddhism and Christianity, one being “Living Buddha, Living Christ.”
Thich Nhat Hanh or Thay as most call him, was both a Buddhist and Christian.
A Methodist minister was with me when I spent a week with Thay in the early 1990’s.
At the end of the week, the minister stated. “After all my years at the pulpit teaching Christianity, I can honestly say that I never really understood Christianity until now when I look at it from a Buddhist perspective. “
Profound statement with much truth.
Wow, check out the level of religious bigotry in these comments. Simply disgusting and pathetic.
RIP.
a bodhisattva ...
RIP 🙏