On December 31, 2020, the Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation published a short video of thanks from the International Plum Village monastics, the community of monks and nuns who live and practice across the Plum Village network of monasteries and practice centers. Running about six minutes, it is less a lecture than a chorus: a string of brief, sometimes overlapping messages in several languages, each one saying some version of the same thing. We see you, we are grateful, we are still practicing, and we wish you a peaceful holiday and a good new year. Read closely, it is also a plain account of what a monastic community depends on, and of how a pandemic year turned that dependence into something visible.
The core of the video is gratitude, delivered in many voices. Early on, one speaker offers a line that captures the tone of the whole piece: "thank you for being a beautiful flower in the garden of humanity." Later, a monastic thanks listeners for "doing your best to take care of yourself" and for continuing the practice, and then links that care to something larger: the ability to keep helping other people. The message is careful to name the difficulty of the moment. Monastics speak of "this difficult time," and they say they love and appreciate their supporters during it.
The video is also explicit about money and material need. The channel's own description states that the message exists to express gratitude for continued support and to acknowledge donations that meet "our monastics' basic needs of food and shelter." That is a plainer frame than most spiritual messaging chooses. It does not dress support up as abstraction. It says that people who give are keeping roofs over heads and meals on tables, in a community whose daily life is built around shared practice rather than wages.
One of the most concrete passages comes from a speaker who begins, "thank you so much on behalf of the monastery here." They express gratitude for "your support all the way during the COVID-19 pandemic," and name three things supporters' efforts made possible: the continued existence of practice centers, the chance for the community "to ordain and to practice," and the work of their "diligent hard work" and "love." The speaker uses the Buddhist term bodhichitta, usually rendered as the awakening heart or the mind oriented toward the welfare of all beings, to describe what donors contributed. In other words, the message places generosity inside the practice itself rather than outside it.
That matters for a tradition built on the idea that a monastery is not a closed institution but a shared space. Ordination and practice centers do not run themselves. A year of lockdowns and uncertainty put real strain on the people who keep them open, and the message treats donors as part of that continuity.
The last few minutes shift to a looser, more personal register. A speaker sends wishes for "a very happy Christmas and a very wonderful 2021," and another says, in effect, that the community knows its supporters are there and is glad of them. A short blessing follows, "may you be happy, healthy and safe," and a Spanish-language "gracias" appears among the others, a small reminder of how many communities and countries the message reaches. A line closing out the message refers to Blue Cliff, one of the practice centers in the broader Plum Village family, though the automatic captions are garbled at that point and the exact wording is hard to pin down.
Honesty about the transcript is worth keeping in mind. The video's captions are machine-generated and in places simply wrong, with some voices and phrases rendered as fragments. Anyone quoting the piece should check the original recording rather than rely on the auto-text.
Short year-end videos are easy to dismiss. This one rewards a slower listen because it shows a relationship that runs in both directions. Supporters give, monastics practice, and the practice is offered back as a kind of care for the givers: a wish that they take care of themselves, stay healthy, and keep practicing too. The message does not claim to solve the pandemic or the holidays. It names the hardship, says thank you, and leaves the relationship intact.
To learn more about how donations have supported the International Plum Village monasteries, visit the Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation website at tnhf.org. Watching the full video on the Foundation's channel is the best way to hear the multiple voices and languages for yourself, and to catch the parts that automatic captions miss.
