The Mystical Passing of Thich Nhat Hanh: What You Never Knew About the Father of Mindfulness
Here comes what you never knew about Thich Nhat Hanh and his mystical passing.
What made him so ahead of his time?
While many 16-year-olds are looking for a first date, Thich Nhat Hanh was looking for enlightenment. In the middle of World War II, he walked into a Buddhist temple in Vietnam. He had passed from this life in the same temple at age 95 at exactly midnight on January 22, 2022.
He helped revive Buddhism in Vietnam, then spoke out against the Vietnam War. But he became known as the Father of Mindfulness, writing over a hundred books.
He knew how to enjoy earthly fun, too, becoming one of the first Buddhist monks to enjoy the thrill of a bike ride. And his smile could light up a planet.
The day mindfulness was born. The picture of a beaming Buddha is one of his earliest childhood memories. Later, on a school trip, Thich was sad he didn’t get to meet a Buddhist hermit. But then, something perhaps more incredible happened. He drank from a natural well that gave him such a profound sense of refreshment, he described it as his first spiritual experience.
This was perhaps the beginning of mindfulness, when something we do in ordinary life can become a profound meditation, with enough attention to the present.
What made the monk most unique was his blend of contemplative life combined with direct engagement with the issues of the day. He saw the darkness of oppression early in life, with the Viet Minh fighting to end French colonial rule. “The walls of our temple in Hue were riddled with bullet holes”, he says in his book, Inside the Now.
He continues: “French soldiers would raid our temples, searching for resistance fighters or food, demanding we hand over the last of our rice. Monks were killed, even though they were unarmed.”
He decided the only solution was to get even more spiritual, yet still engaged with the world: “We knew that the spirit of poetic inspiration, the heart of spirituality, and the mind of love could not be extinguished by death.”
When war came to Vietnam, the Buddhist monks had two choices, seemingly. Retreat to the contemplative life and focus on the spiritual world, or help those fallen into the turmoil of war.
He helped create a third option, to do both. And that is one of his lasting legacies on our world today, to not only become enlightened, but to be a light for those who aren’t there yet.
He’s like the person who escaped a flood by climbing up a ladder, and instead of stepping further away from the flood to total safety, he remained near the edge to help others up the ladder.
Martin Luther King, Jr. nominated Thich for the Nobel Peace Prize, calling him an apostle of peace and nonviolence.
His mystical passing. Thich Nhat Hanh is now on the other side, and like many masters, the time and place of his otherworldly voyage seems planned. He passed away peacefully at exactly midnight. There are many accounts of yogis who know their time of death, and some even go into meditation to pass through the portal willingly.
“Our biggest fear”, Thich said, “is that we will become nothing when we die. If we think we cease to exist when we die, we have not looked very deeply at ourselves.”
How could looking within convince us that we survived death? Perhaps Thich is talking about preferences and memories of lives from other centuries, or awareness of our consciousness connected to a unifying source.
Regardless, he paints the portrait of a future human who will have aligned both spiritual and political wisdom, both contemplative intuition with the willingness to act on insights.
Some say don’t engage with the world, it’s all an illusion, but seeing the suffering in his own country, Thich Nhat Hanh was convinced otherwise.
Our material world is at a great loss without him, but those he inspires to bring light to a dark world will now grow in numbers and voice.
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