Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the most respected Buddhist teachers. In his teachings based on Buddhist religion, he refers to people of different political, religious, social, and religious backgrounds suggesting the practice of “mindfulness” aimed to help us to resist and fight violence and transform it into good energy.
He believes that all the violence we face nowadays is caused by our misunderstanding and despair. This way we are all responsible for contributing to the world’s violence.
To reduce the level of violence we need to understand why it has been created. Then we would know what to do to create understanding, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Only this way we can win violence.
We see violence everywhere; it is present in all aspects of our life. And observing it we feel compassion. And sometimes compassion is the only thing that can help us to bear all the violence we can see.
But what is interesting is that we need to keep in touch with that violence all the time, we need to see the sufferings of the world. We need to see the violence every day in order to keep the compassion we have alive. But we should be very careful with this. We need to keep in touch with violence, as much as we can remember it, to the extend enough to nourish the compassion we have inside and to be able to have some actions against the violence in the world. If we observe too much violence then anger can be the source of our actions and we can do a lot of harm too. According to Buddhism Compassion is the only source of good energy. Only with compassion, your energy is coming from inside and that means that it is a good one and it should be used to do good things.
Thich Nhat Hanh also addresses the problem of ecology. If we are human-beings are made from completely inhuman materials such as water, minerals, earth and so on then we should not distinguish between human sentient and non-sentient beings. This is what one of many ancient Buddhist texts “The Diamond Sutra” teaches us. Every Buddhist should protect the environment.
We cannot support any killing. And not to kill with your own hands is not enough. If you do not kill yourself, but do nothing to prevent the others from killing, then you are killing too. But the most dangerous thing is to kill in your mind. According to the Buddha, the mind is the base of all actions. There are a lot of people in the world, all they have different ideas, different viewpoints and believes and it is very important to be tolerant towards all of them because a lot of killings can happen because of different thoughts.
Every one of us has some amount of violence inside. And to practice nonviolence, we should first of all defeat violence inside of us. Depending on the situation we can show it or not, but we have it anyway. It is impossible to get rid of all violence you have in, but we should always try to be the less violent possible. In any situation, we should do our best if not to help then not to cause more suffering.
Defeating violence is only possible when you surround yourself with love. Love in Hanh’s teaching is not a feeling, it’s something bigger. It’s something that resembles a state of mind. When a person reaches this state of mind, then violence becomes something, which existence doesn’t make any sense.
Every action that we take might have a disastrous effect on other people. First of all, when making a step to something, think about the result on the people surrounding us. Put yourself into their position.
Violence blinds you and makes you take the wrong decisions. Trying to look at any situation the nonviolent way makes the decision easier because your mind is not frustrated by your anger. Aware that anger blocks communication and creates suffering, we are determined to take care of the energy of anger when it arises and to recognize and transform the seeds of anger that lie deep in our consciousness. When anger comes up, we are determined not to do or say anything, but to practice mindful breathing or mindful walking and acknowledge, embrace, and look deeply into our anger. We will learn to look with the eyes of compassion at ourselves and at those, we think are the cause of our anger.
Also, nonviolence doesn’t mean nonaction. We have to act with love and compassion.
According to Buddhism teaching about karma, every action has an action that follows it. Violence brings out more violence. With every spin, it gets bigger and bigger. So for Nanh, the best way of stopping violence is not to start it.
Violence is brought out in us because of all of the animal nature that we have inside. Nahn tries to show that the correct way of leading your life is to prioritize your spiritual existence, which by itself denies any kind of violence because the key to spiritual life is in harmony and peace.