Remember.  Remember.  Remember.

Sister Đẳng Nghiêm
December 2005

When I close my eyes, I see hundreds of eyes looking at me.  Those eyes open wide, round, dark, and innocent.  Yet, they wrench my heart and force me to seek deeper understanding of my path.  

Therese came to our monastery last Friday evening.  She represented John, who has become one of the financial supporters of our "Understanding and Love" programs in the highlands of South Vietnam since October this year.  We organized a tea meditation on the night of Therese’s arrival, to celebrate her visit as well as the visit of one of our elder sisters.  The meditation hall was packed with over two hundred and fifty monks, nuns, lay men and lay women.  We sat silently in concentric circles - three people on two mats - with tea and cookies placed on a leaf in front each of us.  In the center of the circle, there was a simple arrangement of flowers and candles.  It was cozy being together as a community of brothers and sisters.  Our Venerable Abbot spoke warmly to welcome the visiting sister and Therese.  He also shared about the history of Prajna monastery ("Prajna" means understanding).  Around forty years ago, he mobilized seven other young novices to leave their temple with the aspiration to find better trainings for themselves, in order to serve the society more effectively.  He encountered Thầy’s teachings through reading Fragrant Palm Leaf.  It was Thầy’s ideals and clear visions that guided our Venerable Abbot through the most difficult periods of his life, including the time when the communists took over the country and forced monks and nuns to disrobe and leave their monastic path.  Our Venerable Abbot recited by heart Thầy’s poem in Fragrant Palm Leaf.  His face glowed in the candle light - so young, determined, and inspired!  In 1975, our Venerable Brother came to Bảo Lộc to personally see Thầy’s hermitage as described in Fragrant Palm Leaf.  Thầy had been in exile over 10 years by then and, to the Venerable’s dismay and agony, the hermitage and the whole place had become dilapidated.  He was infused with the determination to continue Thầy’s teachings and practices of engaged Buđhism.  That year he built his first hermitage in Bảo Lộc, which is now known as An Lạc Temple (Temple of Peace and Happiness).  That temple "gave birth" to seven other temples (Prajna was the most recently established, in 1998).  All of these temples locate within the three districts of Bảo Lộc, Di Linh, and Bảo Lâm in Province Lâm Đồng, highland of South Vietnam.  Except for An Lạc, his temples situate in the remote areas of the highland, where the arboriginal people "K-ho" and the poor people from North Vietnam had come to resettle.  Over the years, our Venerable Brother and his monastic disciples lived and supported the people in these underserved communities in myriad ways.  In 1998, the Venerable went to Plum Village to meet Thầy and asked for supports in his children program. He had started one school, following the model of the Understanding and Love program, established by Thầy’s social workers in North, Central, and South Vietnam, and he wanted to expand these programs in his own province.  Since then, Thầy’s lay students, trained through the School for Youth and Social Services in the 60's, have worked with the Venerable to establish 39 kindergarten schools for children in the distant areas of Lâm Đồng province.     

Many brothers and sisters expressed their gratitude to the community and offered songs that evening.  Many more still wanted to do so, but we had to end the tea meditation, so that we could be well rested for the morning sitting meditation at 4:30 ạm.  Therese was scheduled to go visit our Understanding and Love programs the next two days, and I was to come with her as a translator.  When I got to the brothers' hamlet, our Venerable Abbot was already there, showing Therese the part of land he wished to build our grand meditation hall.  As of now, our two meditation halls, one in the brothers' hamlet and one in the sisters' hamlet, are already too small for us.  The Venerable’s vision is to have up to one thousand monks and nuns in our practicing center within the next five years.  Íve been in Prajna for only over a month, but I see that our Venerable Brother's vision is not farfetched.  It can be realized quite easily, if we were to have enough brothers and sisters well trained in the Plum Village tradition to come guide this new community, and if we were to have financial means to build more living quarters, larger meditation halls and spaces for our daily activities.  So many people are inspired by Thầy’s teachings and practices, and they wish to be trained in our tradition.  Unfortunately, we have to limit their age to under 25 (those with a bachelor or doctorate degree can be up to 35 years of age), and at this point, we have no choice but to put them on a long waiting list.     

We all got in the van - our Venerable Brother, Therese, four social workers, and me (the driver worked for the company we rented the van).  The first kindergarten "school" we came to was not far from our monastery.  I hesitate to call these locations as "schools," because they simply include one to three rooms (each room is about 3x4m), one small kitchen, and a toilet (squatted style).  Most of them stand isolated on a field of tea plants, and some are built adjacent to the house of the people who have donated the land to the Understanding and Love program.  As we were walking to the door, the children were instructed by their teachers to stand up and join their palms into lotus buds to greet us.  "We respectfully greet Thầy" (to our Venerable Abbot).  "We respectfully greet Sư Cô" (Sư Cô literally means Miss Teacher, referred to me, a Buđhist nun).  "We respectfully greet our aunts and uncles" (to the social workers and Therese).   The children all looked at us with such big eyes!  Then with another command from their teacher, they quietly returned to their place.  There were no tables and no chairs.  Thirty to forty some children all sat on the floor, closely next to each other along the walls of the room. At some locations, the floor had ceramic tiles, but at the more remote locations (that we went to later), it was of bare cement.  The children were in their pre-school age.  One lay flat on her back near one corner of the room, because she could not sit up yet.  Therese and I walked into the room and sat down with the children.  Their teacher led them into one song:  "Here is the Pure Land.  The Pure Land is here.  I smile in mindfulness and dwell in the present moment...."  Then she started another:  "Breathing in, breathing out (2x).  I am blooming as a flower.  I am fresh as the dew.  I am solid as a mountain.  I am firm as the Earth...."  The four and five year olds sang enthusiastically, with their hands gesturing flowers and mountains.  The very little ones just lip-sang or sat wide-eyed. 

At each location, Therese asked why there was a need for our Understanding and Love program, when it was established, and how many tođlers and teachers it had.  The answers provided by the teachers and social workers were basically similar at each location.  The local government only had primary schools, and the parents were to pay for their children's school fees and daily meals.  Most parents were/are too poor to send their children to school.  They included the people of the ethnic minority groups, and as the city people continued to move into the highland, these people had to resettle deeper and deeper into the forests and the mountains.  There were also people from North Vietnam, who followed the government's "silk-worm raising industry" to go to this highland region to work in the 80's.  When the silk-worm raising industry fell apart, they could not afford to return to the North, so they deforested the area and planted tea trees and coffee trees for their livelihood.  Thus, most people in these regions work in tea and coffee plantations, either for themselves or for the Taiwanese companies (who have made a 50 year-contract for the land).  In the past, many parents had to leave their children at home to take care of one another, so that they could go to work in these plantations.  Many unfortunate accidents happened, where the children fell into the well or burned down the house while trying to cook for themselves.  Thus, the parents came together and petitioned to our Venerable Abbot, that they may have a program for their tođlers.  A family would offer one room in their house to the Understanding and Love program, and most of the times, the woman in that family also became a teacher for the program.  That class would usually have been moved at least three to four times over the years, before the parents could put their money together enough to buy land to build a "school" for their children.  The Understanding and Love program helps in buying the land (if the parents cannot raise enough money), in purchasing the materials for the building (the parents work together to build it), in paying the teachers monthly, and in feeding the tođlers two times a day (with soja milk in the late afternoon).  At some places, the parents donated the land to the program.  I met a woman who was allowing the program to take place in her house, and who had offered the program the small piece of land that her family has to build the school (but the program does not have the money to build it yet).  Her house had only two rooms, and it was small and shabby.  I was too curious not to ask her, "Your husband and you are so poor.  Why did you not sell the land that you have?  Why did you donate it to the program?"  She was very dark skinned, and in her thirties or forties.  "We would never sell the land!" she exclaimed.  "Then why did you donate it?" I repeated my question.  "Grandfather Monk (referred to Thầy) and the monks and nuns do charity work for us.  This is also my contribution to the charity work," she said.  My heart sank into a deep silence.  Her two children were helping with the program.  I asked the younger one, if it was annoying that so many children were in her house.  "Not at all, respected Sư Cô," she replied.  "Does it bring you joy then?" I asked.  "Yes, very much so, Sư Cô" she answered with a smile.  "What do you do to help?" I asked.  "When I come back from school, I help my mother wash the children's hands and feet," she said.  I turned to her older sister.  "Do you help your mother with the children, too?" I asked.  "Yes," she answered quietly.  "Are you still in school?"  "No, Sư Cô  I stopped going to school after fourth grade."  "Do you wish to go to school?" "Yes," she replied ever so quietly.  "Does it make you sad that you cannot go to school?"  She simply looked down to the floor, and her face turned pale.  I stroked her unkempt hair and breathed mindfully.  Later, as we walked out of the woman's house, Therese said to me, "It's so sad that her salary as a teacher cannot put her own children to school!" 

We came to a school of the aboriginal people of K-ho.  The teacher was twenty four years old.  She finished high school and received a scholarship to go to a university in the city, but she chose to stay and teach her own people.  She taught a night class to teenagers and adults for a number of years, and thanks to her, illiteracy was eradicated in her area.  In the day time, she took care of tođlers and taught them how to speak, read and write in Vietnamese.  Each year, she would take the ones who just turned six to the public primary school.  For one week to ten days, she walked them to their new school and stayed in class with them, to help them familiarize themselves with the place and to become less frightened.  Then she returned to her own pre-school class.  She was the only teacher to thirty some tođlers (up to age five), and another woman helped cook breakfast and lunch for the children.  Later, we went deeper into the forest to visit another location.  The local government had received funds to build a primary school in each sub-district, but they ended up leaving many of them vacant, because the parents could not pay for their children to attend the school.  Our Venerable Brother borrowed one of these primary schools for our program ("We’ll eventually borrow all of them," he said with a charismatic smile).  I was surprised to discover that a public school in these areas includes just a few relatively big rooms.  There are no toilets and no sinks! (The tea plants surrounding these schools must grow well with the natural fertilizers).  The children at this location were also of the K-ho ethnic group.  They had very dark skin, and they were particularly small in stature.  Their clothes were discolored, and many did not even have socks or hats.  It was cold and windy, but they all sat on a thin straw mat on a cement floor.  There were no toys and no decorations at all in the room.  The children simply sat still and silent.  I picked up a small girl and placed her on my lap.  The teacher immediately said to me, "That child comes from a very difficult family situation.  Her father died last year in a vehicle accident.  Her mother is only 22 years old, and she has to take care of two children by herself.  They are very poor."  The girl was 17 months old, but when I pulled her up, she could stand for only a few seconds before she sat back down.  Her face was beautiful and calm like a full moon, and her eyes opened wide.  Again and again at each location, Therese and I were deeply struck by the children's eyes and their demeanor.  They were so quiet and still, but it was not a kind of flaccidity or lethargy of body and mind.  Their eyes were wide-open and calm, yet penetrating.  I saw them as Zen masters in meditation, with ease and acceptance.  The teacher of that class was also a local person.  They had two teachers before, but one teacher quit, so she had to take care of 25 children and cook for them at the same time.  She had been doing that over the last four months, six days a week!  Yet, she smiled radiantly.  Her scrawny body moved with such agility and joy as she poured tea for us and insisted that we ate some cookies (although I was hungry, I could not bear to swallow the children's cookies!)  

We went to four locations in the morning, came back to the monastery for lunch, and then went to three more locations in the afternoon.  When we arrived at the last location of the day, all of the children were already picked up by their parents.  We sat down to have tea with the two teachers and an elderly woman, whose grandaughter attended our program.  The tea was particularly strong and fragrant.  The women told me that most of the tea plantations in this area belonged to Taiwanese owners, who lived in Bảo Lộc city with their families.  The local workers were allowed to use only the old tea leaves for drinking (called as "chè").  The young tea leaves were harvested for exports (called as "Trà").  I said to them that I must be drinking "trà," and the elderly woman smiled in embarrassment, saying, "Well, it's a special occasion that the Venerable and you are here, so I went the tea garden back there and took a few young leaves."  Her teeth were dyed black since she was sixteen years old.  "Everybody did that back then, so I imitated," she said.  I asked her how she kept her teeth all in tact in her 70's.  "Dyeing the teeth and chewing betel nuts help prevent cavity," she said with a bright black smile.   The younger women sitting next to her did not have dyed teeth.  I asked them if they were tired from taking care of the children (from 6:30 ạm. to 5:00 p.m., Monday to Saturday).  They smiled - a smile of kindness, acceptance, and endurance.  "How do you nourish yourself?" I asked them.  "We go to Prajna temple, and the monks and nuns teach us how to take care of the children and of ourselves," one teacher told us.  "How does the practice help you?" I asked.  "I learn to bring joy to other people.  I don't get so upset anymore.  If I don't hear the children's voices for a few days, I would miss them!" she replied. 

The four social workers were sitting next to me.  They were all in their 60's.  They were young men in their twenties, when they joined the School for Youth and Social Services, established by Thay.  In that school, they learned everything from religion, agriculture, nursing, to husbandry (?) (how to take care of cattles and poultry), etc. taught by volunteering professors and professionals.  They had gone to war zones and worked together with the villagers there, to build bridges, create makeshift classrooms, and establish health clinics.... Four classes, with over three hundred social workers, were graduated from the School for Youth and Social Services.  Thầy continued to provide them guidance, as he went to Europe and the United States to call for the stopping of war in Vietnam.  However, when the communists took over Vietnam, all of their social works were forbiđen.  They told me that they also lost contact with Thầy for fifteen years.  After the contact had been re-established, they began to do social work again.  Now, there are only over thirty active social workers, working throughout the three regions North, Central and South Vietnam.  They meet each other at least once a year on a set date, to commemorate the death of seventy six (?) of their brothers and sisters, who were killed or abducted without return, while they were doing social work for their people.  The faces of these men remained bright and calm, as they told me and Therese about their lives of service, and as they stroked the children's heads and passed out cookies and candies at each location.  They would take turn to go to these locations once every month to monitor the quality of the programs.  There were locations deep in the mountains that we could not go to with a four-wheel vehicle.  They would go in two on a scooter.  "These are great adventures.  We would fall off the scooter so often, because the roads get so muđy in the rainy season.  We use chains on the wheels like in an army tank," they smiled as they shared this to us.  Therese was greatly interested and said that she would bring her helmet next time, when she returns to Vietnam to visit our programs.  I asked them what fueled their minds of love all of these years.  "It's our love and loyalty to Thầy," one replied, and the three other social workers nođed in agreement.  "It's also the practice of the Dharma that nourishes us.  We certainly would not be able to continue this work if we did it for the money." (They receive every month from Plum Village one million đồng, an equivalent of less than 100 dollars, for their work).  One man has a daughter who is now one of our devoted monastic sisters (sister Túc Nghiêm).  Another man tried to encourage his son to do social service like him, but the son complained that he would not make enough of a living to take care of his family with this work.  "The young people do not have ideals or a direction anymore.  They just want to pursue and enjoy material comforts.  We believe that only Thầy’s teachings and practices can help save these young generations in our country," they said.  Therese also expressed her similar concerns about her young people in the United States.  She had gone to do social works in Asia for over twenty years, and she had returned to America only the last three years, after her country raged war with Iraq.  She returned to the United States with the hope to raise awareness in her own people about the peoples in other continents.  She found the young generations of Americans had no direction in their lives.  She had been taking at least eight college students to Asia each year, hoping that they may become inspired with social service.  I believe that during the two days that Therese spent with us, she discovered the importance of spirituality in our works.  "Hunger and poverty is one kind of suffering," said our Venerable Abbot from the front seat.  "Yet, the lack of spirituality is a greater suffering.  The people in these areas are very poor, but they live their lives with honesty and joy, because they have a spiritual practice.  If not, their lives would be much darker," he said.

At the end of our second day together, we came to our Venerable Brother's very first temple in Bảo Lộc, the Temple of Peace and Happiness.  Forty some young novices and pre-novices were standing in line to greet us.  The little ones looked adorable with three clumps of hair left on their shaven heads.  "Some of them are orphans.  Many of them come from very poor families, that their parents cannot afford to raise them," our Venerable Brother informed us.  He took them all in to raise them and send them to school.  "When they finish high school, they will come to Prajna Temple to be trained in Plum Village tradition.  Then they will go to remote areas to serve the people," said the Venerable Brother with his warm and charismatic smile.  These young pre-novices will have a choice to ordain as monks or to return to the society as lay people, when they turn sixteen.  "More than 90% of them choose to become monks," said our Venerable Brother.  The vegetarian meal was already prepared on the table.  We all sat down, with Therese next to the Venerable.  Midway through the meal, she said to us that she had been doing social work with many monks over the last twenty years.  However, she always had to sit further from them and to observe many temple etiquettes, that she felt afraid and uncomfortable around them.  This was the very first time for her to sit at the same table with a high venerable, and to feel so relaxed and comfortable.  The Venerable smiled and said, "In Thầy’s tradition, as monks we are trained to wash and clean for the sick people.  I used to go give injections to numerous people.  Now, I cannot do that, because I am so busy with over-seeing the development at Prajna temple."  Towards the end of the meal, our Venerable Brother slowly looked at each of our faces.  Then he turned to speak to the four social worker brothers, "Well, do you have any last thing to say to sister Therese?  Tomorrow, on our way to Saigon together, we will be practicing silence and hand gestures!" (because I will not be there in the car to translate for them).  We all laughed wholeheartedly.  After a while, one brother said, "Please send our regards and gratitude to John.   His financial supports benefit the children greatly."   Then after a long pause, another brother said, "I pray that you have a safe trip."  I translated that, and we laughed again, because the four of them and the Venerable will spend at least four hours on the road with Therese tomorrow.

On the way to the car, Therese told me that she was glad for me to have found an extraordinary community to live and work with.  I told her if it were not for Thầy’s teachings and for this kind of community, my heart would still be restless.  "Now my heart is calm, and I would like to lead this spiritual life and service to the day I die," I told her.  Before we parted, we reached out to embrace one another.  I followed mindfully my in-breaths and out-breaths, as I felt concretely Therese’s presence in my arms.  Our lives have crossed.  We have shared meaningful and beautiful moments together.  I was keenly aware that I may never see her again.  Yet, our lives are forever intertwined.  And the eyes of the children, they will always remind us, to reflect deeper into our path, and to remember.  Remember.  Remember.       

If you would like to read about our monastery in Viet Nam (Bat Nha temple) or about activities in Deer Park, please check at: www.deerparkmonastery.org <http://www.deerparkmonastery.org> (under Deer Park news) or www.tuvienlocuyen.org <http://www.tuvienlocuyen.org> (for articles in Vietnamese, under ''tho, van va nhac'' - nguoi tre)