Sunday Feature: Afterwords

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Sunday Feature: Afterwords: Thich Nhat Hanh

Afterwords: Thich Nhat Hanh

BBC Radio 3 - Sunday Feature, Afterwords: Thich Nhat Hanh

A radio portrait of Vietnamese Buddhist monk and author Thich Nhat Hanh.

New interviews and archive come together in a radio portrait of Vietnamese Buddhist monk and author Thich Nhat Hanh.

Activist, author, scholar, poet, spiritual teacher and community-builder, Thich Nhat Hanh (1926 - 2022) joked that his younger self, the novice monk growing up in Vietnam, would never have expected that one day he’d be touring the world to share his insights and his practice with packed auditoriums, assembled parliamentarians, business leaders and school children. “I did not have any intention to propagate Buddhism in the West,” he says in a BBC Radio interview from 2003, at that time still officially barred from returning to his home country; but his work as a leading voice in the opposition to war in Vietnam and his organisation of a grassroots humanitarian movement, had led to his exile. Nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967, Martin Luther King described Thich Nhat Hanh as “an apostle of peace and non-violence, cruelly separated from his own people”.

Dubbed the “Father of Mindfulness” by Time Magazine, Thich Nhat Hanh’s scholarship of Zen traditions, his desire to renew Buddhism for his age, and his ability to translate the teachings across cultures has led to a quiet revolution in the history of consciousness in the West. This radio portrait looks to find Thich Nhat Hanh amongst lines from his poems and at key moments from the many hours of talks and teachings he gave, as well as in the words of some of the monastic followers who continue his practice, and in those of writers and artists inspired by his life and work. And it finds, in his concept of Interbeing and his calls for collective spiritual awakening, provocative and compelling ideas for how we might meet the crises of our times.

With contributions from retired Professor of Economics Richard Layard; Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; the Rt. Rev. Dr. Marc Andrus, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California; and Sister Đinh Nghiem and Brother Phap Huu of Plum Village.  

Produced by Phil Smith
A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio Three

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