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His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Tenzin Gyatso is the 14th and current Dalai Lama, a revered spiritual leader among Tibetans. He is head of the Tibetan Government in Exile in Dharamsala, India. A Nobel Peace Prize laureate, he is also the world’s best-known Buddhist monk.

Being Beneath the Dirt

Tenzin Gyatso was the fifth of 16 children born to a farming family in a small and poor settlement of twenty or so families. Only 8 of his siblings survived childhood. Two years after he was born, a search party was sent out to find the new incarnation of the Dalai Lama. He was proclaimed this tulku (rebirth) at age 2, and at the age 15, he was called upon to assume full political power of Tibet.

A year before he was enthroned as Tibet’s Dalai Lama, in 1949, China invaded Tibet. As Tibet’s most important political ruler, the 15-year-old Dalai Lama became the undisputed leader of six million people facing the threat of a full-scale war. Over the next nine years, His Holiness faced the task of evading a full-scale military takeover of Tibet by China while also working to appease the growing unrest among Tibetan resistance fighters against the Chinese aggressors. Following the collapse of the Tibetan resistance movement, in 1959, he was forced to escape into exile. He left Tibet for India and thousands of refugees accompanied him there.

Branching Out Roots for Balance

In exile, he worked to establish the Tibetan Government and to preserve the Tibetan culture. There, in India, the Dalai Lama helped to establish agricultural settlements for ~80,000 Tibetan refugees. He created an educational system to teach children about Tibet’s traditional language, history, religion, and more. His Holiness helped to establish institutions for higher learning as well as monasteries and nunneries.

Meanwhile, he met with the Prime Minister of India, urging India to pressure China into granting Tibet an autonomous government. He also appealed to the United Nations. The Dalai Lama’s continued efforts to preserve the culture of his homeland resulted in U.N. resolutions that required China to respect the human rights of Tibetans and their desire for self-determination.

Rising like a Surfacing Stem

In the United States and other western countries, His Holiness the Dalai Lama has become an influential spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism. Promoting religious harmony and understanding among the world’s major religious traditions, he has met leaders of the Anglican Church as well as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, along with Muslim and Hindu officials. He has met with Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul II, and Pope Benedict XVI. He has shared interfaith dialogue with a delegation of Jewish teachers and met with the Chief Rabbi of Israel.

Reaching Fruition

In his public speaking, His Holiness has consistently promoted human values such as compassion and forgiveness, while working toward a a peaceful solution to the worsening situation in Tibet. In his address to members of the United States Congress in 1987, he proposed the transformation of Tibet into a zone of peace. In his Five-Point Peace Plan, regarding the future status of Tibet, the Dalai Lama also called for respect for fundamental human rights and democratic freedoms. This proposal urged earnest negotiations on the future of Tibet.

Over 20 years later, protests and crackdowns have put the Tibet issue firmly into the eyes of the international media. Tibet supporters across the world have united in their call for an end to Chinese government oppression. While His Holiness has blamed China for causing “cultural genocide” of his people, the Chinese government has blamed the Dalai Lama for recent accounts of anti-Chinese violence. Because of the restlessness among supporters of a free Tibet, the Dalai Lama has threatened to step down as leader-in-exile of Tibet, in an attempt to bring peace to his homeland.

Leaving a Legacy

Carrying the name of the Dalai Lama, His Holiness acts as the free spokesperson of the Tibetans in their struggle for justice. As a man of peace, he advocates policies of non-violence, even in the face of extreme aggression. His Holiness was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1989, for his non-violent struggle for the liberation of Tibet and efforts for a peaceful resolution. His acceptance speech focused on the importance of the continued use of non-violence and his desire to maintain a dialogue with China to try to resolve the situation. To this day, he is still seeking a mutually beneficial solution between the Tibetans and Chinese.

Disclaimer: Mud Puds bios are derived from widely-accepted “truths,” as shared in the Public Domain. In the absence of first-hand accounts, information is presented as: “Factual, as far as we know.”

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Home >> Legendary Mud Puds >> Pioneering Thinkers >> Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh

As one of the best known Buddhist teachers in the West, Thich Nhat Hanh offers a practice of mindfulness adapted to Western sensibilities. His teachings and practices appeal to people from various religious, spiritual, and political backgrounds. Nhat Hanh is an expatriate Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, teacher, author, poet and peace activist.

Being Beneath the Dirt

Nhat Hanh, born in central Vietnam in 1926, joined a Zen monastery at the age of 16, studied Buddhism as a novice, and was fully ordained as a monk in his early 20s. Commonly referred to as Thich Nhat Hanh, the title Thích is used by all Vietnamese monks and nuns, meaning that they are part of the Shakya (Shakyamuni Buddha) clan. The Vietnam War confronted the monasteries with the question of whether to adhere to the contemplative life and remain meditating in the monasteries, or to help the villagers suffering under bombings and other devastation of the war. Nhat Hanh was one of those who chose to do both, helping to found the “engaged Buddhism” movement.

Branching Out Roots for Balance

Since the mid 60s, Thich Nhat Hanh has headed a monastic and lay group, called the Order of Inter-Being, teaching the Five and Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings and “Engaged Buddhism.” As a Dharmacharya, or Dharma Teacher, from Master Chân Th?t, Thich Nhat Hanh has combined his deep knowledge of a variety of traditional Zen teachings with methods from Theravada Buddhism, insights from Mahayana Buddhism, and ideas from Western psychology to form his approach to modern meditation practice. He has established monastic and practice centers around the world.

Rising like a Surfacing Stem

During the Vietnam War, he aided his fellow monks in their non-violent peace efforts. He led efforts to help rescue Vietnamese boat people in the Gulf of Siam, but was forced to stop because of the hostility of the governments of Thailand and Singapore. Later, Nhat Hanh founded a grassroots relief organization to rebuild bombed villages, set up schools and medical centers, and resettled families left homeless during the war.

He traveled to the U.S. with the main goal of urging the American government to withdraw from Vietnam. Thich Nhat Hanh urged Martin Luther King, Jr. to publicly denounce the Vietnam War. Despite his efforts to end the violent conflict in Vietnam, the vietnamese government denied Nhat Hanh permission to return to Vietnam as a result of his involvement in the Paris Peace Accords, signed in 1973. Nhat Hanh went into exile in France.

Reaching Fruition

Nhat Hanh traveled to the U.S. a number of times to study comparative religion at Princeton University, and later lecture at Cornell University and teach at Columbia University. In 1967, the same year Dr. King publicly questioned the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, he nominated Thich Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize, stating, “I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of [this prize] than this gentle monk from Vietnam. His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity.”

Leaving a Legacy

Thich Nhat Hanh has become an important influence in the development of Western Buddhism. He has published more than 100 books, including more than 40 in English, while also publishing a quarterly Dharma talk in the journal of the Order of Interbeing, the Mindfulness Bell. Nhat Hanh continues to be active in the peace movement, sponsoring retreats for Israelis and Palestinians, encouraging them to listen and learn about each other. He has conducted peace walks attended by thousands of people and he has given speeches urging warring countries to stop fighting and look for non-violent solutions to problems.

Disclaimer: Mud Puds bios are derived from widely-accepted “truths,” as shared in the Public Domain. In the absence of first-hand accounts, information is presented as: “Factual, as far as we know.”

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