Today I learned that Thich Nhat Hanh has stopped eating, in preparation for both his 94th birthday on October 11th and, presumably, his death. Or at least, that’s what social media told me, and you know how everything you read on social media is completely true and so you should believe it.
Nevertheless, I googled it, just in case social media was not being entirely truthful for once in its life. I had to figure out how to spell Nhat and Hanh but once I got those down I saw lots of articles from the monks at Plum Village about how reports of Thich Nhat Hanh stopping eating were not entirely truthful. He’s doing really well, the articles said. And all the elder brothers who have travelled to see him at Plum Village have arrived and are undergoing quarantine so they can see him. I wasn’t quite sure how all the quarantining elder brothers who had travelled from far away to see him were indicators that he was doing really well. And how well can you be doing when you’re 93 and stop eating? But it’s hard to know what to believe when you google something.
My point is that the venerable monk has asked us all to do sitting and walking meditations and to extend forgiveness to others. These are his wishes as he prepares to leave this incarnation. I’m not really the world’s greatest meditator, as I have explained previously. I have a particularly difficult time with walking meditations. But forgiveness? That’s something I could really get behind.
I read about his request as I was on the treadmill so I had plenty of time to think about it. I got to wondering: did he mean forgive everyone? without exception? So I googled this too and I came across a YouTube video where some Chinese woman asked him exactly the same question. He thought for a long while about the answer and then he started to give it but he took such a prolonged time to get to the point that even though I felt a bit guilty about it, I paused the video and went back to my own thoughts on forgiveness.
I know the Dalai Lama once said that mosquitos were exempt from the whole hurt no living being thing. Once he clarified that it was okay to kill mosquitos, I figured there were several other members of the insect world that had exemptions filed against them also. Those yellow wasp traps where the dead wasps build up in layers inside: they were clearly fine. I mean, wasps? And ticks! Even ticks that don’t carry lime, the ones whose heads get embedded in your skin and whose bodies swell up till they are shiny and grey with your engorged blood. BLAM! Ok with the Dalai Lama, ok with me.
So, on to forgiveness. Since I hadn’t been able to muster the patience to hear Thich Nhat Hanh out on the question of exceptions, I was left wondering about a certain group of people that I was hoping he might have listed as such. This group of people may or may not have something to do with running the country at the moment. Did he really mean we need to forgive all these people too?
I tried to imagine forgiving some of them. One of them. I tried to imagine forgiving just one of them, and not even the worst one. That didn’t work. So I moved on to another. Nope. So I went for gold, and spent a short time considering how I might forgive the principal player in all of this. If I could have stuck the YouTube video of the Chinese woman out to the end, I was pretty sure the answer would have indicated that yes, we have to forgive a sociopathic narcissist when he deliberately takes his mask off in a group of his subordinates while infected with Covid-19.
Then it struck me how Ruth Bader Ginsberg had a dying wish too. And her dying wish got trampled into the filth by some of the same people I was having such a hard time forgiving. Where to go with all of this? I wished that I could be kneeling beside Thich Nhat Hanh’s bed where he was doing so well on no food and ask him for his thoughts.
Failing that, I felt that I should just imagine what he would tell me to do. Try forgiving yourself first, I imagined he might say. So I thought about things I needed to forgive myself for. There was that wish I had on Sunday that the guy in the MAGA hat would get so sick he needed a ventilator but there weren’t any so they had to fashion him one out of cardboard and duct tape. However, I didn’t really feel all that bad about having that wish, so I would have to come up with something else.
While I was trying to dredge up something to forgive myself for, I fell to thinking about the patients I have had who have made the decision to stop eating. It’s nearly always a difficult choice and tends to come after a period of great suffering and to have profound consequences on those close to the dying person. Sometimes it’s too difficult for people to carry through. Their bodies are maybe not ready to relinquish nourishment, they get too hungry and they start eating again. Or they just lose their resolve.
I don’t imagine this is going to happen to Thich Nhat Hanh. I’m guessing resolve comes fairly easy to him after a lifetime of renunciation and spiritual practice. I hope he’s not relying on us all forgiving everyone who needs forgiveness before he leaves this life. I think I could work on a few lesser cases, maybe a couple of governors of states with no mask mandates. And in the meantime, I wish him well on his journey out of this life, that it may happen peacefully and without cravings for Haagen Dazs.
