One of the guiding forces behind the scenes of the
Paris climate agreement may well have been an 89-year-old Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk.
Christiana Figueres, who led the climate talks, has credited
Thich Nhat Hanh
with having played a pivotal role in helping her to develop the
strength, wisdom and compassion needed to forge the unprecedented deal
backed by 196 countries.
Figueres, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change, says the teachings of Thay, as he is known
to his hundreds of thousands of followers around the world, “literally
fell into my lap” when she was going through a deep personal crisis
three years ago.
She says the Buddhist philosophy of Thay, who is currently recovering
from a serious stroke, helped her to deal with the crisis while also
allowing her to maintain her focus on the climate talks.
Figueres said she realized that “I have to have something here,
because otherwise I can’t deal with this and do my job, and it was very
clear to me that there was no way that I could take a single day off,”
she told
The Huffington Post this week at the
World Economic Forum‘s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
“This has been a six-year marathon with no rest in between,” she
said. “I just really needed something to buttress me, and I don’t think
that I would have had the inner stamina, the depth of optimism, the
depth of commitment, the depth of the inspiration if I had not been
accompanied by the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh.”
So what did Thay teach her?
Figueres illustrates this via a visit she made to his monastery in
Waldbrol, Germany, which was once a mental institution with 700
patients, before the Nazis came along to exterminate them and took over
the premises for the Hitler Youth.
She says Thay chose to locate his monastery there “because he wanted
to prove that it is completely possible to turn pain into love, to turn
being a victim into being a victor, to turn hate into love and
forgiveness, and he was intent in showing that in this place that had
been associated with such absolute, inhuman cruelty.”
“The first thing that he did was he wrote to the Buddhist community
and he said, ‘I want hearts. I want hand-sewn hearts, one for each of
the patients who were killed here, so that we can begin to transform
this building, and this space, and this energy,'”
Figueres told HuffPost.
“It was such a powerful story for me, right? Because in many ways,
that is the journey that we have been on in the climate negotiations,”
she continued. “It is a journey from blaming each other, to actually
collaborating. It’s a journey from feeling completely paralyzed,
helpless, exposed to the elements, to actually feeling empowered that we
can do this.”
“It’s actually been for me internally a beautiful journey of healing.
So for me, I’ve sort of been living life at many different levels,
because I had to turn my own personal crisis, I had to transform that,”
Figueres went on to say. “I’m still in the midst of that, I’m not going
to say I’m way over on the other side, but I had to do that for myself.”
“I felt this is exactly the energy that the climate change convention
negotiations need, all inspired, you know, by this amazing teaching,”
she said.
In fact when Thay arrived for the first time at the former Nazi
headquarters, which has 400 rooms, he wrote a letter to the patients who
died, which is read every day at the monastery by the monks and nuns
who live there.
“Now the Sangha [community] has come, the Sangha has heard and
understood your suffering and the injustice you endured,” it says. “The
people who caused your suffering have also suffered a lot. They did not
know what they were doing at that time. So please allow compassion and
forgiveness to be born in your heart so that they also can have a chance
to transform and heal. Please support the Sangha and the next many
generations of practitioners so that we can transform these places of
suffering into places of transformation and healing, not only for
Waldbrol but for the whole country of Germany and the world.”
Thay, who is considered by many to be the
father of mindfulness
in the West and has been an environmentalist activist for more than two
decades, has other monasteries around the world and has built the
fastest-growing monastic order in the world. He is also well respected
by senior leaders across the United States.
Last year, he was invited by the
World Bank president, Jim Yong Kim, to the organization’s Washington headquarters for an event with the staff. Kim’s favorite book is Thay’s
The Miracle of Mindfulness, and he praises the Zen monk’s practice for being “deeply passionate and compassionate toward those who are suffering.”
Thay visited Silicon Valley in 2013 at the invitation of Google and
was also asked to lead a private day of mindfulness for CEOs of 15 of
the world’s most powerful technology companies.
Marc Benioff, CEO of cloud computing giant Salesforce, has been actively supporting Thay’s rehabilitation after he fell ill.
Thay has led an extraordinary life, including a nomination for the
Nobel peace prize from Martin Luther King in 1967 for his work in
seeking an end to the Vietnam war. In his nomination King said: “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.”
