{"id":12335,"date":"2022-01-22T14:11:01","date_gmt":"2022-01-22T19:11:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=12335"},"modified":"2022-01-22T15:04:24","modified_gmt":"2022-01-22T20:04:24","slug":"thay-passing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2022\/01\/22\/thay-passing\/","title":{"rendered":"Thay passing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Readers of Shadowing the Anthropocene<\/a><\/em> will know that Buddhist thought has influenced my own thinking in profound ways. To be more precise, Buddhist thought, feeling, and practice has influenced my own thought, feeling, and practice. But there are many forms of Buddhism; like all philosophical and religious systems, it is a long and complex historical tradition, whose “essence” is debated among its representatives, and some of whose forms may be less adequate for contemporary needs. The form I have found most fruitful is connected to the more life-affirming variations of Mahayana (including Varjayana) Buddhism, particularly in their East Asian (Chinese and Sino-derived) forms such as Chan and Zen. (I should add that the duality “life-affirming” and its opposite, “life-denying”, like any conceptual duality, is ultimately meant to be overcome through the liberating insight of Prajnaparamita<\/a><\/em>.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of latter-day representatives of this tradition, Thich Nhat Hanh<\/a>, known to his followers as Thay, was perhaps the best known and most celebrated and beloved. He passed away this week at the age of 95. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

To be consistent with his own teaching, Thay’s passing should be considered not as a death, since there is no death that is not non-death. It was not a loss, and not a cause for sadness. Rather, it is an opportunity to recognize and realize reality as it is. It, like everything, is a wake-up call. \u201cA bell,” Thay wrote (this can be kept in mind as you watch the video below), “is a bodhisattva. It helps us to wake up.” Anything, as Peter Levitt writes in the foreword to Thay’s final re-translation of the Heart Sutra, “can help us to awaken to the present moment and all that it contains” — which, as I described it in Shadowing the Anthropocene<\/em>, is also the core practical goal of process-relational philosophy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here is a ceremony performed by the monks and nuns of Deer Park Monastery in Thay’s honor. The Heart Sutra chant, beginning around 28-29 minutes in (the link should open to it), is quite beautiful:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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