A Day of Mindfulness for Thay's 100th: Poetry and Song

On Sunday, October 25, Deer Park Monastery set aside its traditional Dharma talk and gave the morning to poetry and live music. The occasion was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, whom the community calls Thay, and the program was built from his own verses, from songs written in his spirit, and from photographs and childhood memories that monastics shared with the gathering and with viewers online. The recording runs about eighty-four minutes, and it is less a lecture than a sequence of recited poems, sung settings, and short remembrances. What it shows, clearly, is a teacher whose hardest years returned his community again and again to the same practice: breathing and walking, done with full attention, as the ground of peace.

What happens when a Dharma talk becomes a poem?

The morning opened with a monastic welcome that framed the whole program as a shared act of presence. The speaker invited the room to "offer our presence to one another in the spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood," and to practice looking deeply enough to recognize that Thay is also here in each person. That idea, that the teacher is not somewhere else but in the practitioner's own seeing, sets up the first poem.

That poem, recited early in the program (about 8 minutes in), speaks in the voice of a teacher calling to a disciple: "Look again. You will see me in you and in every leaf and flower bud. If you call my name, you will see me right away. You and I have never really been apart." The lines are the program's thesis in miniature. They do not ask the listener to revere a distant figure. They ask for a change of looking, and the rest of the morning keeps returning to that same instruction.

The music matters here too. Several passages are sung rather than spoken, and the sung versions slow the words down enough that the imagery lands. The poem's speaker moves through "thousands of lifetimes," from the first dawn of the world to "the trees in the secret forest," and then arrives at the plain present: "I saw you in my breath, in my footsteps." The shift from the cosmic to the breath is deliberate, and it is the first of many such shifts in the program.

Why is the present moment described as a homeland?

At about 17 and a half minutes in, the program takes up a line that anchors the whole morning: "Our home and homeland are here in the present moment. Our homeland is the sangha, and within the sangha we have Thay. We have younger and elder siblings and our fellow practitioners."

This is a teaching about belonging. In the Plum Village tradition that Thay founded, the sangha is the community of practitioners, and the program presents it not as an organization but as a homeland a person can carry anywhere. The reader's invitation is to locate home in the present moment and in the people practicing alongside you, rather than in a place or a past.

What does a story about a novice monk add to the teaching?

Around the 18-minute mark, the program tells a small, concrete story from the monastery's early days. A young novice sits at the edge of a pond in the evening, listening to a fellow novice chanting inside the Dharma hall, a voice "as clear and full as a bell." He stays there until nightfall and does not get up even to wash his hands. The moon is brilliant over the hill, and the narration sums it up: "Everything had converged to make him a poet."

The passage is a reminder of how Thay's community understood poetry. It was not an ornament added to practice. It grew out of attention: listening, sitting, noticing light and sound. The verses that follow, about a song across the river, golden hay on a bamboo bridge, and the moon rising above a bamboo thicket, read as that attention put into words.

Why does a poem about breathing dissolve the breather?

The most striking passage of the morning arrives around the 23-minute mark and again at about 27 minutes. The narration first insists that poetry is not only moonlight: "We know the poetry is also the swampy stagnant water, outer space, firestorms, broken down huts on the river's edge, rescue attempts, bold and dangerous acts, yellow flowers, violet bamboo, and ultimate reality as it is." That sentence refuses to separate beauty from suffering, and the program treats the refusal as the source of the practice.

Then comes the recited poem on breathing and walking. It begins, "Let the Buddha breathe. Let the Buddha walk. I don't have to breathe. I don't have to walk," and moves through a sequence that quietly removes the subject from the act: "The Buddha is breathing. I enjoy the breathing... I am the breathing... There is just a breathing... There is no walker." It closes with "Peace and joy while breathing. Peace and joy while walking."

The logic is simple and demanding. If there is only breathing, there is no separate self doing the breathing as a technique to be mastered. Walking is not a means to arrive somewhere else. The poem makes the everyday act the whole practice, which is why the program's refrain, "Breathe. Walking. Sitting. Smiling," reads less like a list of exercises than a description of a life.

Where did the practice of breathing and walking come from?

The program is candid that this practice was not born in calm conditions. Around the 30-minute mark the narration says Thay "devoted his whole heart and his entire life to fulfilling his aspiration to renew Buddhism," and then adds that in the course of his efforts "to bring about change, Thay also endured many hardships." From that difficulty, the narration says, came a return: "It was necessary for him to return to the practice of mindful breathing and mindful walking every day."

One reading in the program names the stakes directly: "If we don't know how to nourish ourselves with what is fresh and miraculous in life, then we lose balance and are unable to continue our work." The line is spoken within the event rather than quoted from a published text, so it should be read as the program's own framing of Thay's approach, not as a citation from one of his books.

The clearest example of this turn is the song "My Awareness, The Sun Shines Brightly." Around 31 minutes the program describes it as built from beautiful and peaceful images: a sunflower field, a forest in sunlight, the fragrance of mint, a line of coconut trees on a riverbank. The narration is explicit that "this song was born of challenging times." The brightness in the lyric is not an escape from difficulty. It is the practice made audible, the result of a person choosing again and again to attend to what is fresh in a day that has given him "24 brand new hours" and a "boundless sky."

What does the morning ask of someone watching now?

Near its close, around 81 minutes, the program returns to siblinghood, the idea that the community is a family of practitioners who walk together. The transcript cuts off mid-sentence at that point, so the article does not attempt to reconstruct Thay's exact words there. What is clear is the program's final intention: to let the seeds Thay planted "keep blossoming in the heart of our sangha and in the world."

The morning's lesson is practical. A poem about breathing is not finished when the music stops. It is meant to be tested in the next breath, the next step, the next moment of irritation or grief. The program models that testing in the monastics' own stories of difficulty, which give the joy in the songs its credibility.

Where to go from here

If this program moved you, the most useful next step is small. Pick one line from the breathing poem, "There is just a breathing," and try it for a single minute the next time you walk from one room to another. Then sit with the question the morning kept asking: where is home, if not in this present moment and among these people?

For more on the monastery's programs and upcoming gatherings, the event information is published at deerparkmonastery.org/visit/events/day-of-mindfulness-october-25. The full recording is worth watching slowly, one section at a time, rather than all at once. A note on sourcing: the transcript used for this article covers the opening stretch in full and much of the rest only in fragments, with many sung passages rendered as bracketed music. Where lines are quoted here, they are the recited or clearly legible text; where they were not, the article describes the program's structure instead.