One day when I was in Paris as a representative of the Vietnamese Buddhist Peace Delegation, to be present at the Paris Peace Talks, I received a phone message from Saigon, telling me that four social workers had just been shot and killed. I cried. It was I who had asked them to come and be trained as social workers.
A friend who was there with me, said, "Thây, you are a kind of general leading a nonviolent army, and when your army is working for love and reconciliation, there will surely be casualties. There is no need to cry."
I said, "I am not a general. I am a human being. I need to cry." Six months later, I wrote a play about the deaths of these students, titled The Path of Return Continues the Journey.
(Quoted from For a Future to Be Possible (2008), by Thich Nhat Hanh)
(The play mentioned above can be found in the book Love in Action: Writings on Nonviolent Social Change (1993), by Thich Nhat Hanh)
Martin Luther King, Jr., with Thich Nhat Hanh in 1966.
Thich Nhat Hanh visiting in Hue, Vietnam, in 2005:
Read about Nobel Peace Prize 2013 nomination campaign here.
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