Gary Slutkin was about to cry on the phone. An epidemiologist renowned for his work identifying violence as a contagious disease and efforts to curb it, Slutkin paused while talking about Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who died January 22 at age 95.
โHe was so sweet, just so damn sweet,โ said Slutkin from his home in Chicago. โHeโll go down in history as one of the worldโs great teachers.โ
The Zen masterโs message? The usual top of the mountain stuff sought by people โ typically Westerners, many, many thousands of them โ lost in the trenches of modern life: Slow down, be still, let go, just be.
โPeople talk about entering nirvana, but we are already there,โ said Hanh. Try that one out at your next board meeting.
He was known as Thay โ pronounced โTie,โ Vietnamese for teacher. In his presence, say those who were, you felt the peace that comes with a lifetime of practicing those precepts. And wanted it for yourself.
Slutkin, the founder and CEO of Cure Violence Global, met Hanh in the early 1990s at Plum Village, a monastery the monk founded north of Bordeaux, France while in exile.
In 1965, a letter from Hanh to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., helped nudge the American civil rights leader to come out strongly against the war in Vietnam. In 1969, Hanh led a Buddhist delegation to the Paris Peace Talks to persuade Western leaders to end the war. Soon afterward, he was denied entry to Vietnam, an exile that lasted until 2018. He died at the Tแปซ Hiแบฟu Temple in Hue, where, at age 16, he took his vows as a novice.
And Slutkin, after a decade of battling epidemics in Africa with the World Health Organization, was a physician unable to heal himself. He returned to the United States, he said, โfeeling isolated and lost. I was in crisis.โ
Those closest to him noticed right away. In one week (it may have been the same day), two dear friends gave him copies of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche.
The confluence launched Slutkin on a spiritual journey that eventually led to the โengaged Buddhismโ of the poet and holy man Hanh who practiced a โgentler approach โ simple, beautiful, immediate.โ
Slutkin did not return to the States with the idea of studying the scourge of violence as a contagion. He simply came home, broken. While finding himself anew through meditation and deeper readings of Eastern spirituality, he began to appreciate that everything (and thus everyone) is interconnected.
โThe idea that we exist as individuals is wrong and essentially why our [Western] culture is failing,โ said Slutkin. โThich Nhat Hanh knew the West was suffering because it was bombing his country.
โItโs why he took his message to Germany, England, France and the United States โ all violent societies that need the teaching of interconnectedness.โ
This dovetailed with Slutkinโs hunch that violence spreads like tuberculosis and cholera; from person to person. โWe see violence all the time and everybody [seems to be] fine with it, thatโs an exposure system.โ
It became Slutkinโs lifeโs work: putting individuals predisposed to violence, particularly gun violence among young people, in touch with each other as well as once-violent elders who, by luck or decision, had aged out of the streets. The โold headsโ โ or peers โ would function as prophylactic by counseling those about to hurt someone to take a moment, to be still if they could, that they werenโt alone. Or even unique.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnโt, as experienced over the years in Baltimore via the Safe Streets program. But often it does work, shown by results posted by Slutkin on cvg.org/impact.
โThere is no separation between yourself and others,โ said Slutkin. โAnd our susceptibility to disease and passing it on is always where we have a sore.โ
Like Slutkin, former machinist and retired Baltimore City school teacher Don OโRourke also spent time at Plum Village in the early 1990s. At the time, OโRourke had been sober about a decade (now 85, he hasnโt had a drink for 43 years) and, despite being off the sauce, he was lost.
Where Slutkin sees extreme individualism shredding society, OโRourke comes from a healing movement that believes โself-will run riotโ (as described in 12-step literature) drives the destruction of the alcoholicโs life and often those dearest to them.
While searching for a way to meditate (a foundation of 12-step recovery), someone told him โabout this little Vietnamese guy giving a lecture in Washington,โ said OโRourke. โI was looking for a teacher, so I went.โ
Valerie Wethered, a United Way of Central Maryland employee, went to DC with OโRourke โ โbefore [Hanh] was really popular here,โ she said โ and had a very corporeal experience that told her she had a long way to go.
โIt was an old Quaker meeting house with hard benches, no air-conditioning, stuffed with people and felt like it was 110 degrees inside โ awful,โ said Wethered. โIโm dying in the heat and sweat and he was up there as peaceful as can be. I thought, โGood Lord, Valerie, this man has been through war and exile and youโre complaining because itโs too hot to meditate.โ
For OโRourke, after that first meeting, dominoes began to fall before him like stepping stones. He then attended a retreat at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York where he first heard of Hanhโs Plum Village. Then he lost his job and made a call to France asking the person who answered the phone if they had room for him. They did.
โI was in my mid-50s and so messed up I could hardly make it across town, but I just took off,โ OโRourke said. At the monastery, โIt was pretty much just me and Thay and about ten nuns.
โHe was an absolute real teacher, the real thing. When I was there he was doing his first retreats for therapists from the U.S. After that it started becoming commercial, but not him. Heโs way above all that.โ
OโRourke stayed at Plum Village for nearly four months and it was there โ practicing exercises that included Hanhโs โwalking meditationโ while working as a handyman โ โโthat my head started to clear up,โ he said.
It cleared up enough for OโRourke to realize that he desired other forms of meditation, other teachings, different ways to peel the onion of self. And revealed a concept in direct
opposition to most Western thought.
โThe school Iโm in now teaches you to do the hard things in life to feel good about yourself,โ he said. โNot to feel good.โ
Rafael Alvarez is the author of Crabtown, USA, an anthology of feature stories. He can be reached at orlo.leini@gmail.com
