I have a poem for you. It is called: “Please Call Me By My True Names.” This poem is about three of us. The first is a twelve-year-old girl, one of the boatpeople crossing the gulf of Thailand. She was raped by a sea pirate. After that, she threw herself into the ocean. The other person is the sea pirate who was born in a remote village in Thailand. And the third person is me. I had a lot of problems, because I was angry of course. But I could not take sides against the sea pirate. If I could it would be easier; but I could not, because I thought that if I were born in his village and were living his kind of life — economic, educational, and so on — it is very likely that I would now be that sea pirate. So, it is not easy to take sides. And out of suffering I wrote this poem: “Please Call Me By My True Names,” because I have several names and when you call me by my names, I must say: Yes.

Do not say that I’ll depart
tomorrow because even today I still
arrive.

Look at me: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a Spring branch, to
be a tiny bird, whose wings are still
fragile, learning to sing in my new
nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart
of a flower, to be a jewel hiding
itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and
to cry, in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth
and death of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river. I am
also the grass-snake, who,
approaching in silence, feeds itself
on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin
and bones, my legs as thin as
bamboo sticks.

I am also the merchant of arms,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the 12-year-old girl, refugee on
a small boat, who throws herself
into the ocean after being raped by
a sea pirate.

I am also the pirate, my heart not
yet capable of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.

I am also the man who has to pay
his “debt of blood” to my people,
dying slowly in a forced labor
camp.

My joy is like Spring, so warm it
makes flowers bloom in all walks
of life.

My pain is like a river of tears — so
full it fills up all the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names so
that I can hear at the same time all
my cries and my laughs, so that I
could see that my joy and pain are
but one.

Please call me by my true names so
that I could become awake, so that
the door of my heart be left open,
the door of Compassion.

I think the theme of this poem I still have in my mind, very much in my mind. “Where is our enemy?” I asked myself for a long time. Our earth, our green, beautiful earth, is in danger and all of us know this. We do not face a pirate, but we face the destruction of the earth where our small boat has been — it is going to sink if we are not careful enough. We still think that the enemy is the other, and that is why we cannot really see him. Now, everybody needs an enemy in order to survive. The Soviet Union needs an enemy, perhaps the United States. China needs an enemy. Vietnam needs an enemy. Everybody needs an enemy to the extent that without an enemy we cannot survive. In order to rally people behind them, the governments need an enemy and are very ready to approve that. They want us to be afraid in order for us to rally behind them. They want us to hate in order for us to rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they would invent one in order to mobilize us.

There are people in the United States who went to visit Russia and came home reporting that the Russian people are very nice, only the government is bad. And the Soviet people, the Soviet citizens visiting here in this country, when they go back home they will report the same thing. American people are fine; the government is bad.

I heard one American tell me this (he is in the peace movement): “Every time I see Mr. Reagan on the television set I can’t bear it. Either I have to turn off the set, or I get mad.” I think I understand him because it seems to me that he thinks it is the U.S. government that is entirely responsible for the situation of the world. If only Mr. Reagan changed his policy and we had a freeze, we would have peace with the Soviet Union and so on. I tried to tell him that it is not entirely correct, because Mr. Reagan is in yourself. We always deserve our government. That because of this, the other thing is like that. In Buddhism we used to speak in terms of interdependent origination. This is, because that is. This is not, because that is not. Has our daily life nothing to do with our government? That is the question I would like to invite you to meditate upon.

The other day I was talking about drinking a cup of tea and using toilet paper properly in order for peace to be possible. We really believe that our daily life has to do with the situation we now find ourselves in. If we do not change our daily life, we cannot change the situation. It is as clear as if I want to move this chair to my right, I have to stand up. I cannot move the chair without standing up.

Tea and Reality

I do not wish to talk about meditation now, but I want to talk to you about the way the people in Japan drank tea in the past. It took them three hours to drink a cup of tea. You would say that this is very much a waste of time because time is money. But two people being with each other and spending three hours drinking tea, I think that has something to do with peace. Please do not imagine that the two men or two women speak a lot to each other. No, they don’t speak much. They exchange only one word or two, but they are there. They enjoy the three hours and a few cups of tea. They know really what the tea is and they know really what the presence of each other means to them. Nowadays, we only have a few minutes for a cup of tea. We go into a cafe and we order a cup of tea and we listen to all that kind of music and we listen to a lot of noises and we think of the business we are going to do after the tea. So the tea does not really exist, and we do violence to the tea; we do not recognize it as living reality. That is why our situation is like this.

Pick up a newspaper to read in the morning, say The New York Times. I have seen and I have touched the Sunday edition of The New York Times, though it is a very heavy four kilograms, five kilograms. I don’t know why I need to buy such a heavy newspaper. I believe that in order to make such an edition they would have to cut down a whole forest. And The New York Times is not the only newspaper in this country. There are several like that, and we are destroying our earth without knowing it, if we pick up our daily papers without being aware of what we are doing.

Well, drinking a cup of tea, picking up a newspaper, or using your toilet paper has to do with peace. Nonviolence has another name, awareness. We should be aware of what we are, of who we are, and of what we are doing. That is what I was taught the day I became a novice in a Buddhist monastery. They taught me to be aware of every act during the day. Since that day I have been practicing mindfulness and awareness. First I thought that practicing like that was only for beginners. For advanced people, they practice other important things. But now I have found out that practicing awareness is for everybody, including the Abbot. The purpose of Buddhist meditation is to see into your own nature and to become a Buddha. That can be done only through awareness. If you are not aware of what is going on in yourself and in the world, how can you see into your own nature and become a Buddha?

I would like to draw your attention to the word “Buddha.” Buddha comes from the word Buddh. It means awake. Buddha means nothing except he who is awake or she who is awake. Are we really awake in our daily life? That is the question I would invite you to think about. Are we awake when we pick up our newspaper? Are we awake when we eat an ice cream?

Society makes it difficult to be awake, especially in Western countries. I am sure that you know this, but you keep forgetting this. Forty thousand children in the Third World die every day of hunger. Forty thousand of them. We know, but we keep forgetting because the kind of society in which we live makes us forgetful. That is why we need some exercise for mindfulness, for awareness. A number of Buddhists practice this — they refrain from eating a few times a week in order to be in communion with the Third World.

One day I talked to a Vietnamese refugee who is seven years old, a little boy. He lives in France and he now has plenty of food to eat. As he eats rice, I ask him, pointing to the rice he has in his bowl (very high quality rice), whether children in his own country have this rice to eat. He says “no,” because he knows about it. He has experienced hunger in Vietnam. He only ate dry potatoes sliced and he longed very much to have a bowl of rice. In France, he has been eating rice for one year and he begins to forget. But when I ask him, he remembers. But for a French child, I cannot do the same, because he has not had that kind of experience, so he could not understand. I realize how difficult it is for the people who live in Western countries to know what is really the situation in the Third World. Has it nothing, anything, to do with our situation? I told the Vietnamese child that this rice comes from Thailand, and I know because I have visited Thailand. Many Thai children do not have this rice to eat. They eat rice of very bad quality, because this is reserved for exportation only. “The government needs foreign currency, and the rice should be eaten by Westerners and not you.”

Perhaps you don’t know that in Vietnam we have an excellent banana called chuoi cao. Now, children and adults in Vietnam do not have the right to eat these bananas any longer because these bananas are now for exportation to the Soviet Union. And guess what we get in return? Guns in order to kill ourselves and to kill our Cambodian brothers.

We Keep Forgetting

Some of us practice this exercise of mindfulness. We sponsor a child in the Third World in order to get news from him or her, thus keeping in touch with the reality outside. We try many ways in order to be awake, but society keeps us forgetful and that is why it is so difficult to practice awareness in this society.

There is one thing I remember now: a French gentleman whose name is Peroh. He is the head of the Institute of Mathematics and Economics in Paris. He said this: “If Western countries reduce the eating of meat by fifty percent and reduce the drinking of alcohol by fifty percent, that would be enough to change the fate of the Third World.” But how can we do it if we don’t remember, if we are not aware? We are intelligent people, but we keep forgetting, and that is what I think meditation is about: to remember.

But I think there are means for us to nourish awareness. For instance, to enjoy silence. To enjoy the world. There was a young boy, twelve or thirteen years old, who came to my place and he had lunch with us in silence. His first time. That is why he was embarrassed. The silence was so heavy. So I approached him and asked him whether he felt uneasy, and he said yes. So I explained to him that we eat in silence in order to enjoy the food and in order to enjoy the presence of each other. If we talk a lot, we cannot do that. Is there any time when you turn off your tv set in order to better enjoy the conversation with your friends or the food? He said yes. So I asked him to try again another time. The next time he came he ate in silence, and he enjoyed it.

We have lost our taste for silence. Every time we have some quarter of an hour or half an hour, we have to pick up a book to read, we have to pick up the telephone in order to talk, or we have to turn on our television set. We cannot be ourselves without anything to accompany us. We have lost our taste of being alone or silent. I think society takes away so many things from us and destroys us a lot with its noises and smells and many things. And the first thing for us to do is to return to ourselves in order to recuperate ourself, to be our best, to be our better selves. In the light of the Buddhist practice, this is very, very important. We should go back to our life, to our daily life, reorganize it so that society cannot colonize us anymore. We have to be real persons and not just victims of other people.

The boat people said that every time their small boats were caught in a storm, their lives were in great danger. They also said that if one person on the boat keeps calm and does not panic, that would be a great help because the personality of such a person would inspire faith, confidence. People who listen to him keep serene, and there is a chance for the whole boatload to come out of the danger.

I have said before that our earth is somehow like a small boat. Yes, compared to other big things in the cosmos, it is a very small boat, and it is in danger of sinking. We need such a person to inspire us with calm confidence to tell us what to do. And who is that person? Who is that person? The Mahayana Buddhist Sutras have the answer. All the Buddhist Sutras tell you one thing — you are that person. If you are yourself, if you are your best, then you are that person. And only with such a person, calm, lucid, aware, solid, can our situation change and our danger be avoided. So please, good luck, be yourself, and be that person. Thank you.

This article was originally presented as a talk sponsored by the Rochester Zen Center and the Buddhist Peace Fellowship in the Spring of 1983. It was published previously in the Fall 1983 issue of Agape, the newsletter of the Bethany House Catholic Worker in Rochester, N.Y. Our thanks to the Rochester Zen Center for permission to print it here.

Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk and poet who lives in France.

— Ed.