By Tom Hallock
Last
week, in the midst of sorting out some business matters, I emailed one of the
sisters in Thich Nhat Hanh’s community, Plum Village, and asked if we could
have a quick call. She emailed back that the sangha (community of practice) had just landed in Boston
and suggested I join them the following day. So, I found myself at the Park
Plaza Hotel in downtown Boston with over a thousand people who had come to hear
Thich Nhat Hanh (called Thây by his students) talk about “Healing the Heart with Mindfulness.” Afterwards, he led us on a silent walking meditation
out of the hotel, down Hadassah Street, across Boylston Street, and into the Public
Garden. We sat under trees near the swan boats on an exquisitely clear
day and meditated. I was struck by how Thây kept his eyes open, and seemed to
be drinking in the beauty of the trees and their gentle movement in the wind.
It was powerful to sit peacefully in this familiar place and find serenity in
the heart of the city. One of Thây’s great teachings is that the present moment
is the only one we have.
At
the event, the Harvard School of Medicine honored Thây for his great
contributions to public health. One of the graphs in the program book showed that
the number of publications that mentioned mindfulness grew from a handful in
the early 1980s to almost 500 last year. Clearly a new idea has found its way deep into
our culture.
In
1976 Beacon Press published the book in which these ideas were first fully
articulated, The Miracle of Mindfulness: A
Manual on Meditation*. As part of its mission “to
affirm and promote world community with peace, liberty, and
justice for all,” Beacon was publishing other
books on Buddhism at the time including Philip Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen, as
well as books that grew out of the anti-war movement on which Thây
had such impact. These included Howard Zinn’s Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal and,
of course, The Pentagon Papers. In this spirit, Beacon also published Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr.s’ Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
Thây had written and spoken to Dr. King about the war in Vietnam, asking him to
lend his moral authority to the peace movement. He wrote,
“I am sure that since you have been engaged in one of the hardest struggles for
equality and human rights, you are among those who understand fully, and share
with all their hearts, the indescribable suffering of the Vietnamese people.
The world’s great humanists would not remain silent. You yourself cannot remain
silent.” Dr. King did speak out against the war soon after in his famous
Riverside
Church address. Later Dr. King nominated Thây for the Nobel Peace Prize, saying in
part:
“I do not personally know of
anyone more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than this gentle Buddhist monk from
Vietnam. This would be a notably
auspicious year for you to bestow your Prize on the Venerable Nhat Hanh. Here
is an apostle of peace and non-violence, cruelly separated from his own people
while they are oppressed by a vicious war which has grown to threaten the
sanity and security of the entire world.”
Returning to Beacon from my
walking meditation in the Public Garden, I somewhat unmindfully ate a hot dog
and reflected on this history and the powerful web of people, ideas and social
movements that have informed our publishing over the years.
The
Miracle of Mindfulness sold 2,733 copies its first
year—prophetic publishing not always leading directly to commercial success.
It has now, however, sold over half a million copies. As Bob Giroux is quoted as saying in Hothouse, “The most sobering of all publishing lessons is that
a great book is often ahead of its time, and the trick is often how to keep it
afloat until the times catch up with it.” Here, at least, a book has been kept
afloat and the times have indeed caught up to it.
About the Author
Tom Hallock is associate publisher at Beacon Press.
* Beacon was not, however, Thây’s first US publisher. That honor belongs to Hill & Wang, as far as I can tell, which published Viet Nam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire in the late 60s.Other early works were published in English by Unicorn, Doubleday, and Hoa Binh Press. Today, Parallax Press stands out among the many that are currently publishing his work. I picked up two of their new titles last week, Work: How to Find Joy and Meaning in Each Hour of the Day and Good Citizens: Creating Enlightened Society.