A Meeting of East and West

The difficulties we encountered in establishing Plum Village were the problems the Buddha also had, but there were new difficulties too. One difficulty the Buddha had a little of (and we have had a lot of) is differences between cultures. Our Sangha is made of twenty or more nations and cultures. This is not a Vietnamese temple set up in Europe. It has root in Vietnam, but it has to grow and be appropriate for the environment where it is growing. When we bring plants from Vietnam and plant them in the West, they do not grow mustard greens in France, they grow thorns. That would never happen in Vietnam. We have to know how to adapt to our surroundings, and we have to know how to absorb the beautiful things from the cultures. Sometimes, people from both the East and West come to Plum Village and find forms of practice that are not suitable for them, because they carry expectations that it will be like their respective cultures. But in Plum Village is a combination of East and West. When a person from Asia hangs clothes out to dry, they hang the trousers lower than the shirts, and the two legs have to be hung close together. It would be strange for an Asian person to see them hung any other way. An Eastern person can never accept feeding a cat out of a person’s bowl. The bowl the cat eats out of should be different from what humans eat out of. When a Western nun cooks, putting all her heart into cooking, a Vietnamese nun may look at the food and go somewhere else to eat instant noodles. This makes the Western nun very unhappy. This happens everyday in Plum Village. So the cultural gap brings difficulties. It is not any one’s fault. It is just our differences.

In the Buddhist religion in Vietnam there are many jewels. But if we want to offer them, we have to have them within ourselves first. We have to put our roots down in our own tradition very deeply—our educational, ethical, cultural, and our spiritual traditions—to be able to share them. We have to keep the most beautiful things in our culture to be able to offer them to others.

Sharing the practice, we have to learn to understand the culture and the environment of the West. We have to present our own jewels in the way that is appropriate to the western way of thinking. If we don’t understand anything about the language or the behavior of the Western people, how can we offer anything? There are teachers from the East who have jewels from their own cultures, but they have not understood Western culture; so there is no way they can transmit these jewels to Western people. You have to understand Western culture before you can share the jewels of your own tradition. In these last thirty-five years, I have learned so much about this.

I have also learned from the East. In the light of Western culture, I have seen the beauties of the East in a way I had not recognized before. Before, I was only able to see 70 percent of the beauty of Vietnamese culture. But now, under the light of Western culture, I can see 100 percent of its beauty. When Western friends come to Plum Village, they also must have their roots in their won culture and spirituality. Then they have something to share with us. It is not that they are hungry ghost, wandering around with nothing to offer. If they have put down their roots in the Western culture, they will have something to offer to us. Because we are open, we can receive from them and both sides will profit. The basic condition to have successful exchange between different cultures is for each person to have his or her roots firmly established. This process takes places year to year, and Plum Village is still learning these things.