by Hoa Pham
War was always the same. Men causing carnage while the victims died with no time for proper burial or grieving.
Then Hương stopped for a rest. She seated herself down on a dry patch of earth and bid me do the same. We breathed in and meditated together.
When I closed my eyes and let go of the horrible things I had seen, at the sound of her bell I found myself returning me to that island of calm I had cultivated while meditating at the temple in Saigon.
Present moment, wonderful moment.
It was her intense practice and the days of mindfulness that kept her fresh and rejuvenated, I realised. When I opened my eyes and met her gaze, finally I was able to smile again.
The work with the wounded took its toll on us both. Sometimes Hương would have tears in her eyes when she saw how much the little children were maimed in the war. I too broke down and we comforted each other, hugging one another. The simple human touch made me feel closer to her.
She would sing, simple songs inspired by Thầy as we called Thích Nhất Hạnh, Vietnamese for teacher.
I have arrived, I am home.
In the here and in the now.
I am solid, I am free.
Her voice was like a lark’s and I soon learned I could join her with my own voice, strengthened by the healing of the practice.
Thầy’s teachings talked about helping others, in engaged Buddhism and applying the Heart Sutra in a renewed way. He introduced me to the concept of interbeing — that everything is inter-connected and inter-are.
Form is emptiness, emptiness is form and we are all connected together. Thus we have to treat others and ourselves with compassion.
Hương and I talked about the Heart Sutra and it was then that I felt as close to her as I did to Bà. I had found a mentor steeped in the practice, open and generous, and willing to share her wisdom. Hương loved the simplicity of Thầy’s teachings.
We are the continuation of our ancestors and we will open our hearts with compassion to others to become more human.
Thầy said that the Buddha was a man and a human being. He did not worship the Buddha as God. Thầy’s teachings were radical and new. He was influenced greatly by his time in France and America and knew how to make Buddhism easy for the lay people.
I dreamt of the ivory Buddha in the trees again. When I awoke next to Hương, I felt hope for the first time since leaving our village. Maybe my gift had a benefit after all.
I found myself opening up to Hương during our discussions of the dharma. We would sit in the courtyard where questions had begun to fester in my mind. A lark sang amongst the bare branches of the trees and the gentle murmur of the mantras of the monks made me brave enough to speak my mind.
“I am still angry at the Việt Minh and I do not trust them.”
She gently touched my hand and smiled sadly. “The Việt Minh have many on their side. But you need to take care of your anger. They have been ordered to kill the ones we see here. But if we were brought up to kill, we too would be like them and wish to conquer all.”
I was silent for a while, and looked out into the busy courtyard from the bench we were sitting on. People were lining up for breakfast pho amongst the topiary of hedge animals tended by the nuns and monks.
“I could kill if I had a gun and someone wanted to kill me,” I said recklessly.
Hương looked sideways at me.
“Killing is never sanctioned by the Buddha. The seeds of violence in you have been watered very much. Watered in all of us, in fact. Mind your fear and your anger. Your practice is very deep, Liên. Draw on it like you would draw water from a well. I understand your suffering, but killing only makes us suffer more.”
I bit my tongue then and sighed. Focusing inwards I took another breath before I spoke again.
“I want the war to stop,” I explained. “I don’t want any more killing.”
“Thầy is in America asking them to stop the war,” Hương reminded me. “We can send energy to him in our prayers.”
This seemed like naive advice to me, so I held my tongue then. But she knew more than I did, I soon learned and had no fear.
I aspired to be like Hương, and have a mind free from suffering. She somehow was able to approach even the worst war wounds with equanimity by breathing in and out.
One day as we sat drinking water out in the country, I found myself opening up to her like a flower. I looked at her peaceful face, her dark eyes deep like lacquer and the years of mindfulness that radiated from her like the calm ripples from a pond.
“Today I remember my mother,” Hương said suddenly.
With the sensitivity I had acquired over spending days and weeks with her, I heard her personal sorrow and a story to be told.
“She did not want me to abandon my family and join the SYSS. But I was the fourth daughter and useless to everyone at home …”
I opened my mouth to reject such a sentiment but her gaze was far away.
“She screamed at me that Thích Nhất Hạnh` is a poet. A dreamer. That he did not know anything and how could he do anything about the war. But I had to work and hope. It is better to do that than to wait to be slaughtered by the Americans or the National Liberation Front.”
Then Hương bowed her head in silence. In the rice paddies, crows called across the fields in the distance.
“My parents died last year. I was not there so I did not die.” Her eyes glistened then the tears receded.
I touched her hand gently and she smiled, a different smile of grief.
I hugged her in the way I had seen the other nuns hug each other for comfort like children. She thanked me gently. Then she smiled again, a smile only for me and I felt my spirits lift.
Hương had suffered the way I had suffered, losing her family to the wars. Here was someone who had suffered yet still had enough compassion to heal others. She was a bodhisattva in her plain robe and muddy feet.
“Thank you for being here with me and sharing.” She put her hands together and bowed to me.
“A lotus to you, sister,” I said formally and bowed back. I wanted to share something with her, to make our intimacy two-way. So I found myself telling her of the dreams I had, of the carnage and destruction, and then the peace I had with the Buddha.
She was lost in thought as I spoke and I soon came to a shuddering halt with my words.
“Liên …” she reached out and touched my hand. “Do you see peace in your dreams?”
“Yes. I do. I am sitting on a grey rock in lotus position looking out over a waterfall. There is peace within me and outside of me.”
She smiled suddenly and radiantly and I could not help but share that smile.
“It is because of that dream that I can keep living.” I told her the honest bare truth of my existence. “One day there will be peace in Vietnam. But not before more war occurs.”
Hương sobered up again and gazed at the plump brown sparrows gathered around our feet. Back at the temple we would catch them with grain and release them for luck for the lay people.
“That gives me hope,” she said and we shared the rest of the day in noble silence.
One morning Hương surprised me with a new request.
“I have a letter to Thầy. Could you keep it for me today?”
Overwhelmed by her confidence in me I nodded and tucked the letter away in my pouch. I accompanied her as I did every day with first aid materials into the streets. Last night the bombers had been quiet, which filled me with dread. Usually the silence preceded a larger barrage that killed and injured more people.
Hương radiated calm that day, a deeper sense that radiated out to me. I could not worry for long as she walked mindfully with each step, feeling the miracle that we were still alive.
Children seeing our robes ventured out into the street, dodging the rubble and missile shells. Soon the word had spread and the injured and maimed came to us.
We tended to them, and my hands soon became sticky with blood, gore and pu
s. Each story I heard made me despair further. One village was occupied by the Việt Minh at night and in the daytime the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the ARVN, would hold the villagers at gunpoint demanding to be shown where the Việt Minh had gone. Everyone was a suspect, even the children. It was easy for me to practice the neutrality that Thầy wished us to. I had seen horrors inflicted by both sides.
At lunchtime the crowds began to dissipate.
Hương stood up and picked up a gasoline can she had carried with her from the temple. I had not questioned her; often we would be offered gas or kerosene for the temple.
Then she cleared a small space and sat down in the lotus position. I knelt down to join her, and she shook her head.
“Please watch me. You have the letter to Thầy?”
Startled, I nodded.
Some of the curious began to gather around her. Hương had not meditated in the street before, and this was unusual.
Then her voice rang out across the street. “I do this to wish for peace,” she smiled.
Suddenly she doused herself with kerosene from the gasoline can. She produced a lighter from her robe and snapped it alight.
Horrified, I started forward. But then flames enveloped Hương and the heat drove me back. Her silhouette blazed with fire and people came running out of their homes.
The familiar smell of burning flesh overwhelmed me. Tears streamed down my face as I clasped my hands together in prayer for her.
My eyes stung as I wept. My gaze was reluctantly drawn to the burning of her silhouette, calm in the lotus position. Her benevolence was gone. My innocence was gone.
Out of nowhere, or so it seemed to me, other brothers and sisters came, ringing a gong.
“A martyr is dead! A martyr is dead!”
People clustered around me in fascination. Someone took photographs, and a monk stood forward to burn incense. It was like a macabre festival.
The abbess put her hands on my shoulders. Coming to, I opened my eyes. The remains were hidden from view by the press of curious bodies.
“She has gone to the other shore. Her sacrifice will be noted for peace.”
I turned to her stricken. “I didn’t know …”
“I know,” the abbess said. She radiated calm, the same calm Hương had radiated moments before.
“I have a letter from her. To Thầy.”
“Then you must send it to him,” the abbess told me and gently escorted me aside.
“You can return to the temple today,” she suggested to me. “Pray for her memory and for peace.”
I returned to the place where we had slept side by side just the night before.
Weeping, I touched and stroked the floor where she had lain just hours ago as if by touching where she had been, I could be closer to where she had gone.
I sent the letter to Thầy, and I never knew if he received it or if he was able to respond.
When news of his permanent exile reached me, I wept again.
I am still weeping for Hương. And for peace.
NGHỈA,
LOVE OF COUNTRY
SOUTH VIETNAM, 1980
The past is in the present and is in the future. Time passes with the historical dimension. And experience is the ultimate dimension in time.
History is a wave and the ultimate dimension is the water.
THÍCH NHẤT HẠNH
After Hương’s death, the wars went on. The bombings did not stop. The press noted it as another Buddhist immolation. No one seemed to hear her cry except me. The SYSS tried to keep on with its work. Even when five volunteers were murdered in cold blood, we still continued to keep neutral and uphold Buddhist teachings.
It became too much for me. I retreated inside myself, though I prayed every day that Quan m would hear the cries of the wounded and make the wars stop. When the Communists won, with the Americans gone, I naively believed maybe now there would be peace.
Peace though was hard to manage under the Communist regime. The re-education camps began and even the Buddhists fell under suspicion.
When Thầy was prevented from returning to Vietnam, our worst fears were realised. The Buddhist Church was created, a state organisation with which all temples had to align themselves. Thầy’s books and teachings were still banned so some went underground. Some hid in plain sight, aligning themselves with the Buddhist Church so they could go on practising openly.
I lived in fear after the fall of Saigon and found myself longing to return to the place of my origins. I still dreamt of a time of peace, where I was meditating openly under the watchful eye of Quan m. The tea plantations in my dreams were in the hills, and the buildings vast and modern.
Peace for the Buddhists had not come yet. Who would have guessed that the Communists would fear Buddhist influence and ban soup kitchens and large public gatherings?
Sometimes I had sensed déjà vu while meditating, of memories that did not quite fit. The dream reoccurred to me as if to mock me;
Vietnam was at peace but we had to hide our rituals in our homes and close the monastery doors to the public.
I decided to return to the coast, further away from Saigon, now Hồ` Chí Minh City and wondered what I would find there. Maybe I could restore the graves of my ancestors from so long ago. Maybe other people from my village would return now that the wars were over. Maybe I could find another home by the sea.
There were many people moving after the war ended. Some headed towards the city, hoping for a better future. Others fled for the coast, knowing they didn’t have a future in Vietnam. As a lone nun, I told strangers I was displaced from my fishing village and wanting to return there. The truth without finer details sufficed for me. They greeted my nun’s robe with welcome and seldom did I have to beg for food; more often it was given to me without prompting in return for a blessing.
The horrors of my precognition had stopped after the fall of Saigon and I was only left with dreams of peace. Sometimes my dreams would be of meditating under siege, flashbacks I thought of finding mindfulness during wartime. Other times I flashbacked to Hương’s immolation and awoke hot and burning.
In the daytime it was different. The countryside was wrecked by war, and the trees were only slowly beginning to grow back if at all. On my way back to my village I helped out the wounded where I could and prayed for them.
I began to dread what I was going to find on the coast. Maybe the village would be gone, with no signs at all. Maybe Agent Orange had poisoned the fields and the forests, leaving nothing I could recognise.
The reality was worse and better than my expectations. The sea was black and the sand filthy with oil. New villages had begun to spring up on the coast, and fishermen were still trying to draw catches from the sea and the rivers. But normal village life was returning, there was a market and here, far from the city, people still prayed in the open. Outside each shack were flowers and incense for the lunar month and children played by the riverside still.
I wondered whether I would find the people I had grown up with. Scattered after the Việt Minh invasion would they, like me, come back home?
I headed towards where our ancestors were buried. Old guilt gnawed at me, that I had not the courage to bury Bà all those years ago. The cemetery’s fences were gone but someone had been taking care of the graves recently. I traced my way back to our family headstone from my fading memory. The headstone was mostly destroyed but the base still remained. In front of it, grass grew where the burial mound once stood. Trembling, I weeded the grass from around the plot. The last time I begged, I had received mandarins and I produced one for the dead.
Had Bà forgiven me for not attending to her memory as I should?
I have come home, I told the waiting sky and the hallowed ground. I will tend to you now. And to the memories of my family who did not survive or had gone missing.
I was lucky to be alive. I uttered a prayer to the dead and opened the mandarin for them to eat. My hands sticky with the juice, I bowed to my
ancestors and wished them peace.
I paced slowly around the market, following where the bamboo perimeter fence had set the boundaries of our village. Someone had built a shack over where our house once stood. It jarred me seeing strangers inhabiting the land where I grew up. Most of the familiar markers from my childhood had been destroyed. I had come back to find nothing.
Only at night, orienting by the stars, could I get a sense of where the village đình had been. Tears cascaded down my face as I retraced my steps back to where Bà must have died. It was just outside the marketplace and another old woman snuffled in the dark at my presence.
“Chao chị. Hello sister. What are you remembering?”
“My family died here,” I murmured through my tears and wiped my face with the back of my hand.
“Ah. Do you have anyone left?”
“No.”
“How unlucky. I have one son still alive. He fishes and looks after me. I do not remember you, but many of us fled during the American War. I used to live five miles from here before the wars. Now we are lucky we are still alive, heh?”
I nodded in the darkness at the old woman’s pragmatism.
“Come sleep here,” the old woman said companionably. “I’m Bình.”
“Liên,” I introduced myself and made my way over to where she was sitting, under a plastic tarpaulin.
When the morning light came, I saw the face of my new friend. Creased with experience, her eyes were still bright in the dawn and shrewd, taking in my clothes and well-worn hands. Her own hands were busy, sorting out fishing nets with practiced fingers. Hesitantly I joined her. My fingers remembered how, although my mind did not.
“You are from the sea,” she nodded her approval at my handiwork as we laid one net aside. Her son, Hiếu, a tall lanky boy with a limp, took the net and headed towards the water. I could see the bones of his back through paper-thin skin, but he still retained a little strength, I thought.
We talked around what we truly wished to know about each other, whether one was with the Communists or not. I proclaimed myself a Buddhist and saw sisterly recognition in her eyes. But she still maintained a distance from me, which I respected. In those days, no one really knew who to trust.
