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Brothers in the Beloved Community: The Friendship of Thich Nhat Hanh and Martin Luther King Jr.
Author: Marc Andrus
Publisher: Parallax Press
Price: $24.95
What happens when religious leaders trained in two different traditions of metaphysics, faith and ethics, come together in the spirit of dialogue? Do they try to dazzle each other with their spiritual attainments, or is it a humbler exchange focused on listening and learning? How do they engage with ideas that counter, perhaps even attack, what they believe to be true?
A new book titled Brothers in the Beloved Community: The Friendship of Thich Nhat Hanh and Martin Luther King Jr. might offer some answers. The author is Marc Andrus, the eighth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California, who can be counted among the few religious leaders who speak openly about LGBTQ rights, climate advocacy, and immigration reform.
Bishop Andrus embarks on an ambitious and noble enterprise. He tells the story of the legendary friendship between the Vietnamese Zen master, poet and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh — who died in January 2022 at the age of 95 — and the American Baptist minister and civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated in 1968 at the age of 39.
How did these men from countries that were at war befriend each other? Under what circumstances did they meet? Why did King nominate Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Prize? What challenges did they have to negotiate, internally and publicly? The author looks at all these questions with the zeal of an explorer who is full of admiration for the people he writes about.
In his nomination, King wrote, “As the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate of 1964, I now have the pleasure of proposing to you the name of Thich Nhat Hanh for that award in 1967. I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than this gentle Buddhist monk from Vietnam.” He added, “Here is an apostle of peace and non-violence, cruelly separated from his own people while they are oppressed by a vicious war which has grown to threaten the sanity and security of the entire world.” Two years before this, Nhat Hanh had written an open letter to King in order to raise awareness and bring peace to Vietnam.
While both leaders were working for human dignity through non-violent means, they had to struggle to understand where the other was coming from. King needed time and support to wrap his head around the religious justification for self-immolation in the Mahayana Buddhism practised by Vietnamese monks. Nhat Hanh’s letter helped him view it as an act of courage and commitment; one that was different from suicide, which is driven by despair.
Nhat Hanh, who was the founder of the Engaged Buddhism movement, had a hard time connecting with the teachings of Jesus Christ — an experience that is documented in his book Living Buddha, Living Christ (1965). Nhat Hanh writes, “My path to discovering Jesus as one of my spiritual ancestors was not easy. The colonization of my country by the French was deeply connected with the efforts of the Christian missionaries.” During the Vietnam War, Christians and Buddhists were baying for each other’s blood. Interestingly, he went on to write the book Peace Begins Here: Palestinians and Israelis Listening to Each Other (2004).
According to Bishop Andrus, King and Nhat Hanh bonded over a vision of the “Beloved Community” — a concept that both were familiar with because of their membership within the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). This global interfaith organisation, working for peace and justice, also played a substantial role in deepening King’s encounter with Gandhian ideas via Former FOR chairman A J Muste and FOR Race Relations secretary Bayard Rustin.
Nhat Hanh was heartbroken when King was killed. At their last meeting in Geneva in 1967, he had told King, “Martin, do you know something? The peasants in Vietnam know about what you have been doing to help the poor people here and to stop the war in Vietnam. They consider you as a bodhisattva.” While Bishop Andrus celebrates this ability to cross religious boundaries and honour exemplary compassion, he does not probe deeply into the implications of using concepts and categories from Buddhism while talking about Christianity.
Readers interested in this area of enquiry would find it useful to look up scholar and nun Karma Lekshe Tsomo’s article “Mother Teresa and the Bodhisattva Ideal: A Buddhist View” (2012) in the journal Claritas: Journal of Dialogue and Culture. Tsomo examines the “broader question of commensurability” that arises when the qualifying criteria for a bodhisattva — renunciation, compassion and wisdom — within a Mahayana context, “are superimposed upon a figure who is solidly grounded within another religious tradition.”
That said, Bishop Andrus’s new book is a welcome addition to the growing body of writing on Buddhist-Christian dialogue, which includes books written and edited by Nhat Hanh, Daniel Berrigan, Rita M Gross, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Terry C Muck, bell hooks, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, Tenzin Gyatso the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and Douglas Abrams.
