Larry Ward, Respected Buddhist Teacher in the Plum Village Tradition, Has Died

Larry Ward, PhD, a poet, author, cofounder of the Lotus Institute, and a senior dharma teacher in the Plum Village tradition of the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh died on August 19 at the home in Saunderstown, Rhode Island, he shared with his wife and teaching partner, Peggy Rowe Ward. He was 77.

A message on the Lotus Institute website notes that Ward in recent years had lived with peripheral neuropathy and prostate cancer, but “with courage and grace . . . continued to teach, guide, and support the staff at Lotus Institute, his students, and the wider communities he touched.”

A self-described “dharma preacher,” Ward was an ordained Christian minister active in international community organizing before becoming one of the first lay dharma teachers—along with his wife, Peggy—in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Order of Interbeing. He became a mentor for students at Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village in France and Deer Park Monastery in California, and in sanghas around the world, as well as an inspiration and support for community members of Lotus Institute, a nonprofit offering practical guidance and transformative experiences for healing trauma and affecting social change. The outpouring of condolences on Instagram alone attests to the love and esteem Ward engendered among followers of all ages, backgrounds, and spiritual persuasions. In a moving tribute posted on the Lotus Institute website, Matt Dorma touches on not only Ward’s formidable achievements but also the qualities that made him a singular force for good: 

“He [was] a lighthouse of love, laughter, and wisdom for countless people across generations, cultures, and faiths. Larry’s voice, the lion’s roar, grew even louder this year as we all faced the challenges of a world on fire. His expression of the dharma was inspiring, rebellious, accessible, and no-nonsense. He often drew on his studies and teachings from Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Jungian psychology, and beyond.”

Born in 1948, Ward was raised in Cleveland, Ohio, in a Pentecostal family whose life revolved around the church. His father, a Ford factory worker,  was a church deacon and his mother was a devoted volunteer. “My energy comes from the oral tradition,” Ward said. Moved by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s murder and the riots in Chicago that followed, Ward eschewed college for theological study at the Ecumenical Institute in Chicago and was ordained a Baptist minister in 1972. Under the aegis of the Chicago-based Institute of Cultural Affairs he served as an international director, helping organize leadership programs in thirty-five countries undergoing urban and rural socioeconomic development. His experience in organizational change and community renewal later served him not only as director of the Lotus Institute but also as an advisor to the Executive Mind Leadership Institute at the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University in California. “My concern with organizations,” he said, “is their cultural adaptability—how the energy of attention can be applied skillfully on helping organizational cultures change and grow.” 

It was while working in India that Ward “met a monk who really helped me understand the practice of meditation and mindfulness beyond the theory that I was already getting acquainted with,” Ward recalled in an interview for Sounds True. “From then on,” he said, “wherever I was  stationed or moved to in the world, I would find a place to practice . . . in any contemplative tradition—Christian, Buddhist, Hindu. It kind of led me,” he continued, “to getting connected with Thich Nhat Hanh.” His first encounter with Nhat Hanh, he told Tricycle, was in the late 1980s at a retreat he attended at his wife’s invitation, but it was not until 1990 that he met the Zen master in person. In 1994, the same year Thich Nhat Hanh married Ward and Peggy, Ward received dharma transmission. In 2000, Ward and Peggy were among the first to receive lay teacher transmission in the Order of Interbeing. With his global experience and commitment to engaged Buddhism, Ward became a valued advisor to Thich Nhat Hanh.

“I’ve always been a student,” Ward said. Despite a busy teaching schedule, when he was in his 40s and 50s he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Cincinnati-based Union Institute & University. He then went on to get a PhD in religious studies focused on Buddhism and neuroscience from the University of the West in 2015, and trained at the Trauma Resource Institute in Claremont, California. Ward’s teaching style—what he termed “Deep Buddhism”—interwove buddhadharma with neuroscience, trauma work, indigenous wisdom, and “social imagination.” His influences included not only Buddhist teachings but also a variety of figures, including St. Francis of Assisi, rights activist Malcolm X, human potential visionary Jean Houston, Native American advocate Joseph Mathews, and authors James Baldwin, Nikos Kazantzakis, and Langston Hughes, as well as poets bell hooks, Nikki Giovanni, and Emily Dickinson. 

“My engagement in society is with groups and individuals who are working toward justice and harmony and well-being all over the planet . . . so we can arrive where we’re needed,” he said in a 2021 dharma talk on engagement, trauma, and equanimity. Trauma is lodged in the body, he emphasized, and “it is very important to learn how to responsibly care for our traumatic experience.” It is a topic Ward knew intimately: As a child he was shot by police for playing baseball in the wrong place, and as an adult, the house in which he and his wife were living was bombed by white supremacists. With their safety threatened, they took care of immediate essentials—police, cleanup, insurance—then went to stay at Plum Village, a place of healing for Ward. “I have to practice coming home to myself every day,” he said. “If I don’t, when I step out of my practice, when I step out of the zendo that is my life and enter into the world to care, to teach, to learn, to serve, I step into the trauma field that is always there.” 

In America’s Racial Karma: An Invitation to Heal, a collection of essays published by Parallax Press in 2020, Ward examines our “radicalized consciousness” and answers the question: How do we break karmic patterns and free ourselves from repeated cycles of anger, denial, bitterness, fear, and violence? “Part of the reason I use the word karma to describe racialized consciousness is that it’s completely predictable,” he said in a Tricycle interview. “It’s just a cycle of action, a pattern that lives inside of us. It’s wired into us neurologically but also economically, politically, and culturally.” Ward’s body-centered approach evokes his dharma name: True Great Sound. “As I transform myself and heal and take care of myself,” he writes in the book, “I’m very conscious that I’m healing and transforming and taking care of America.” 

In addition to teaching together, Ward and his wife, a clinical psychologist, wrote Love’s Garden: A Guide to Mindful Relationships, published by Parallax in 2008. It includes couples’ personal stories, along with exercises that demonstrate how Buddhist principles can help in navigating relationships at any stage.

Threaded throughout Ward’s teaching and talks is his poetry. It, too, offers inspiration for bringing dharma to everyday challenges.

This householder life is not easy.
So many things pulling at us—family, work, relationships,
economy, politics—it all seems like a constant theater of the
absurd,
and yet . . . 

This noble mind of goodness still courses through our veins.
This holy attitude, this eternal energy of enlightenment,
that can free us  from the prison of the small self. 

Ward’s most recent book, Morning Night: Poems on Nature, Spirit, and Race, as yet unpublished, is a compilation of his work. 

For all his impressive credentials and vast scope, Larry Ward was a warm presence and eminently relatable. According to the Lotus Institute team, “he enjoy[ed] British mysteries, studying Buddhist sutras, and spending time with his wife, Peggy, and dog, Tashi, at their home in Rhode Island.” He was a staunch champion of the benefits of spending time in nature, and before his death “his current passion [was] learning the stories and names of the many birds and plants in his backyard. His favorite mindfulness activity [was] the practice of open awareness from a chair on the back patio.”

Larry Ward was recently featured in the “Visiting Teacher Q&A” in the Fall issue of Tricycle. This interview was written before Ward’s death on August 19, 2025.