NEW YORK (RNS) — Dozens of Buddhist monastics and lay believers huddled collectively on a busy Higher West Aspect avenue nook on a chilly, wet day to bear witness to a historic new avenue signal positioned of their religious chief’s honor Friday (April 11).
Thích Nhất Hạnh Means, positioned on the nook of Broadway and West 109th streets, was symbolically named in honor of the influential Vietnamese Buddhist monk, who died at age 95 in 2022.
“New Yorkers will not be essentially identified for peace,” mentioned New York Metropolis Councilmember Shaun Abreu to the gang of robed monks and jacketed metropolis dwellers. “We dwell with quite a lot of noise, quite a lot of stress. However Thích Nhất Hạnh had a message for folks like us. He knew that we will’t construct a greater world if we’re indignant on a regular basis, or if we lose sight of one another’s humanity. By placing his identify proper right here, we’re making a second of pause and of breath.”
The Zen grasp, thought of the daddy of mindfulness, lived on the identical block within the early Nineteen Sixties, when he was learning comparative faith and educating Buddhism at close by Union Theological Seminary and Columbia College.
Hạnh was exiled from his residence nation for his opposition to the Vietnam Conflict and his refusal to take a aspect. In 1967, after assembly with the peace activist, Martin Luther King Jr. nominated Hạnh for a Nobel Peace Prize. Hạnh additionally printed books, meditations and poems focused towards folks of all ages and backgrounds.
The road naming, followers mentioned, is one approach to honor the influence of Hạnh, whom they confer with as Thay, on each Jap and Western mindfulness communities.
New York Metropolis Council member Shaun Abreu, left, poses with monks and nuns from the Plum Village custom, from Deer Park and Blue Cliff monasteries, throughout an unveiling ceremony of Thích Nhất Hạnh Means in New York Metropolis, Friday, April 11, 2025. (RNS picture/Richa Karmarkar)
The gang, a lot of whom are a part of Hạnh’s Plum Village custom of Buddhism, created a serene silence on the occasion — contrasting regular morning automotive alarms and police sirens — by utilizing the American Signal Language model of clapping, what they known as “exhibiting their flowers.” Monastics from a number of of Hạnh’s monasteries, together with California’s Deer Park and upstate New York’s Blue Cliff monasteries, traveled to have a good time the road naming, singing his poems after taking a number of deep breaths as one.
Following within the footsteps of Hạnh, the group additionally engaged in a strolling meditation from 109th Avenue to the Buddhist seminary on 121st Avenue.
“Thay’s educating encourages (us) to return to our breath, to search out tranquility amid chaos and to domesticate compassion in our coronary heart,” mentioned Brother Pháp Không, a monk from Blue Cliff. “This apply of strolling meditation, the place every step is taken mindfully and every breath is identical, reminds us that peace isn’t a distant objective. He’s proven us that peace begins inside ourselves.”
Brother Phap Luu, the eldest non-Vietnamese American monk within the Plum Village Buddhist custom, was ordained as a novice by Hạnh in 2003. Luu mentioned he considers himself among the many fortunate technology, touring as a younger aspirant with Hanh everywhere in the world.
FILE – Vietnamese Zen grasp Thích Nhất Hạnh , middle, in Ho Chi Minh Metropolis, Vietnam on March 16, 2007. (AP Picture, File)
“You possibly can nearly say we have been reborn from the trainer’s mouth,” he informed RNS.
Luu, who first got here throughout Plum Village as an English scholar at Dartmouth Faculty within the late Nineties, recalled the way it felt when he noticed Hạnh for the primary time in 2002.
“We have been exterior in an outside amphitheater, and abruptly, Thay simply manifested in the midst of a crowd of monks and nuns,” Luu mentioned. “I didn’t see the place he got here from. It appeared like he simply appeared.
“That imaginative and prescient of Thay amidst the monastic sangha, that’s the essence of Thay. You can’t see him as a person, as this separate individual, however moderately because the physique of collective mindfulness apply that he has generated out of the Buddhist neighborhood in Vietnam, after which being exiled and recreating that neighborhood right here within the West,” he mentioned.
Luu frolicked with Hạnh and different college students on the Deer Park Monastery within the years main as much as the chief’s demise. In line with the traditions of the Buddha, Luu mentioned, Hạnh didn’t designate a successor. He as an alternative “educated us how you can use loving speech and deep listening to grasp one another when there’s misunderstandings, to open our hearts to at all times be prepared to reconcile, moderately than maintain resentment in our hearts.”
The newly positioned Thích Nhất Hạnh Means avenue register New York Metropolis, Friday, April 11, 2025. (RNS picture/Richa Karmarkar)
This educating, different followers mentioned, is particularly related in moments of social reckoning and intense political discord, such because the Vietnam Conflict or ongoing actions relating to the struggle in Gaza.
Jonathan Gold, a 24-year-old grasp’s scholar on the close by Manhattan Faculty of Music, mentioned he turned “hardcore” about Hạnh’s teachings over the previous 12 months. Raised Jewish, he discovered about Zen Buddhist teachings from learning sacred music and studying Hạnh’s books. Gold mentioned by them, he discovered “a gateway into dwelling extra of a lifetime of social change.”
“I feel the guts of all the pieces is thru each day, each dialog, each motion you are taking, having or not it’s rooted in radical non-violence, radical non-harm,” Gold mentioned. “Any time we’re having discussions with folks or speaking to our dad and mom — that’s an enormous one — altering the language we use in order that we’re approaching issues with compassion and understanding moderately than aggression or antagonizing. Even the those who we predict hate us, and even really feel like we hate, after we can remodel that? Then each problem turns into, ‘How will we strategy this as peacefully and compassionately as potential?’”
And whereas younger folks could also be turning away from institutional faith usually, for 15-year-old Fiona Falco, Buddhist teachings assist with the day by day stresses of being an American teenager, from volleyball video games to massive exams.
“It’s simply calming, and it’s enjoyable to do it with my mother,” mentioned Falco, who’s the daughter of Elaina Cardo, a trainer within the Inexperienced Island Sangha of Plum Village in Lengthy Island, New York.
“It’s the simplicity of the teachings,” mentioned Cardo, who additionally works with Plum Village’s Wake Up Faculties program, an initiative to deliver mindfulness practices into grade faculties by educators. “It’s not a sure time that you must apply it, it’s in all the pieces you do — whether or not it’s consuming or strolling.”
Jean Aronstein, 76, discovered Hạnh’s meditation teachings in the course of the starting of the COVID-19 pandemic. Aronstein mentioned his teachings are suitable together with her Jewish religion — particularly “the spirituality, the ritual, the consistency and the love of all humankind.”
Aronstein, a longtime Higher West Aspect resident, mentioned she appears ahead to seeing the Thích Nhất Hạnh Means signal when she goes on walks in her neighborhood. A educating she holds closest to her coronary heart, she mentioned, is: “With out the mud, there is no such thing as a lotus. There’s struggling, however there’s magnificence, and all of us want to stay collectively, (to) handle one another.”
