The Power of a Quiet Life

One of the most beautiful and powerful Buddhist teachings is the bodhisattva vow, the aspiration to work for the welfare and liberation of all beings. In my half-century as a Buddhist meditator and teacher, I have tried to live in accordance with this vow and have encouraged others to do the same. But when I see the state of the world today, when I view its wars, its degradation of the living planet through pollution and climate change, when I see its chronic teetering on the brink of nuclear war, and its erosion of meaning and truth in the morass of disinformation fomented by social media, artificial intelligence, and the internet, I wonder: What is a bodhisattva of today to do? I know my question is shared by legions of others. We all live in limbo now, waiting for the next destructive shoe to drop, frozen in our unknowing, seemingly helpless.

There are three principles of bodhisattva life I teach: keep your mind clear, be patient, and when you see an opportunity to act, do so without hesitation. Now I am thinking about adding a fourth principle: live a quiet life. Don’t be distracted by things. When the insanities of the world become too noisy and preposterous, remain inwardly calm. If you don’t see what you can do, don’t do anything. Just wait. Things will change; they always do. Change is the Buddha’s first and best teaching. In some ways, change has never been more in the air than now. The aspiring bodhisattva rides change the way a thrown stone skips over water. Change is our best hope and strongest power.

When I was young, I was a dedicated peace activist, but now I am 77; I can’t be an activist in the same way. I must be quieter. My health is generally good now after surviving two illnesses that should have killed me but didn’t. Through all that I managed to write five books. I still have energy, but my stamina has its ups and downs. I need naps. I don’t travel much anymore—a habit honed during the dark years of Covid—and I focus on cherished avocations such as music. I am a classically trained pianist and have taken it upon myself to learn all the Beethoven piano sonatas before I vanish. Possibly I will succeed. My life strategy at first glance may seem similar to the recent “slow living movement,” popular with people who are looking for a way to reduce stress, step back from the frantic pace of work life and social media, and restore some sanity to their days. This movement is a valuable counterbalance to our current frenzy, but my “quiet life” method is not self-care or stress reduction, it is a strategy for opportune engagement in a gone-crazy world.

I reflect on the many Buddhist teachers I have had. Foremost among them is Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, my first teacher and best exemplar of how to embody Buddhism. Then there is the Dalai Lama, who came to our Buddhist retreat center in the 1970s with only two attendants and lived with us as a simple monk. The inspiration from those days has been lifelong for me. I also think of Thich Nhat Hanh, whom I was close to for a time. His like will not soon come again. During the Vietnam War he went on foot from village to burned-out village, tending to the injured, comforting the children, burying the dead, and trying to keep his fellow countrymen and women’s spirits up in the most dire, horrific circumstances. What I remember most about him was how slowly he walked. He paid close attention to every footstep. I wondered if that’s how he had to walk through death and destruction, slowly so he could see clearly, and not turn away from the fires of human suffering. He once remarked that rural Vietnam of those days was connected not mostly by roads but by a network of footpaths; people walked everywhere. So unlike our world! When I think of how I want to live now, I think of how Thich Nhat Hanh walked, and the quiet way he was.

These days I would like to walk and live in a way that I can clearly see the living aspect of what we are all facing now, the existential threats to our species, to the planet, and to life itself. I have come to realize how profound it was that Thich Nhat Hanh walked so slowly. It was his physical expression of the bodhisattva vow—to walk slowly enough to actually see exactly what was going on, to truly feel the suffering of beings everywhere in the finest granular detail, leaving nothing out. That’s the fundamental job of a Buddhist, after all, to see clearly what is real and true, and not be fooled.

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n June 1982, the Nuclear Freeze march took place in New York City to protest the then-burgeoning specter of nuclear war between the US and Russia. It was the largest protest march in US history; more than a million people participated. Myriad religious groups and peace organizations collaborated in its planning. The U.S. Congress passed a resolution supporting it. The United Nations was engaged. I was there; so was Thich Nhat Hanh, as well as many luminaries from all walks of religious, political, and artistic life. The story of that day is a bodhisattva story, and an illustration of the power of one person to change a million minds. If you think it doesn’t matter how fast or slow you walk, or how you live your life, this story will inspire you.

The New York fire, police, and traffic departments had been brought onboard to clear Fifth Avenue from all traffic so that the crowd of assembled people could walk from the UN plaza north to Central Park—a walk of nearly two miles. Precise estimates had been made of how long the walk would take. Hundreds of volunteers with white armbands lined the street to guide the crowd. People came to New York from all over the country—by bus, train, plane, and car. I came as one delegate from my Buddhist group in San Francisco. Somehow, I came to be in the front row of this huge march, along with Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast, the jazz saxophonist Paul Winter, and other religious luminaries and UN delegates—about fourteen of us in all. And with us in that front row was the Buddhist monk and advocate for peace, Thich Nhat Hanh. The signal was given, and the march began. Thich Nhat Hanh gestured to all of us in the front line to link arms. Fifth Avenue is not that wide. We in the front row spanned the entire breadth of it.

We started to walk the way we usually walked, a brisk pace as befitted the energy of the event. But quickly we slowed. What was happening? Our arms were linked with Thich Nhat Hanh’s, and he was walking very slowly—the way he always walked. We had to match his pace. I glanced over at Nhat Hanh. His face was calm, his expression steely and determined. This was no joke. He hadn’t told anyone in advance that this was what he was going to do. I’m not sure he himself knew. But he was doing it, and we had no choice. The multitude of people behind us didn’t know what was happening. They craned their necks forward to see. Was there some problem? The monitors and planners of the march were quite alarmed. The police and fire people didn’t know what to do. Only so much time had been set aside to close the avenue for the march, based on ordinary walking speed. If we continued at this pace, all of New York soon would come to a screeching halt. It didn’t matter. We were walking the way Nhat Hanh wanted us to walk—slowly, so very slowly.

I didn’t know what was going through Thich Nhat Hanh’s mind. Like everyone, I was caught up in the moment and its power. Only much later did I have a chance to reflect and remember that here he was in America, the country that destroyed his own country with bombs, artillery, and napalm. Was he calling us to account? Was he compelling us to face what we had done? Or was he thinking about nuclear war, the focus of the march? Was he, who knew from bitter experience the worst of war, forcing us to truly and completely focus on what was really at stake that day?

I don’t know. But I do know that he was acting as best a bodhisattva could, seeing the opportunity of the moment and acting without hesitation. During the Vietnam War, I’m told, all sides and factions tried to kill him. They thought he must be working for the other side, whichever side that was. Now, years later, in sunny New York City, he was long beyond facing death, so for him, making a million people walk as slowly as he walked was nothing special. He simply did it because he could.

Eventually, the monitors, shouting and gesturing to one another and to the crowd behind us, motioned for everyone to go around us, using the sidewalks on both sides. The march flowed by and sped up like a dam breaking into two streams. Soon our slow-walking line was not in front but well back. By the time the march reached Central Park, we were the last to arrive. We walked, arms still linked, the way Thich Nhat Hanh wanted us to walk, the way Buddha surely walked when he was in the world. Thich Nhat Hanh made the Buddha come to life that day. That day is forty years past. The world has moved on, and in many ways, in terms of existential danger, it has gotten worse. Now, it is not just nuclear war but climate change, engineered viruses, or malevolent robots that could do us all in. And yet, for the most part, we go about our days as though all were well, as though normality were the norm. Somewhere else in the world disasters are looming, bombs are exploding, but we appear to be safe. That is an illusion, one of many taught by the Buddha. No one is ever safe.

These days I would like to walk and live in a way that I can clearly see the living aspect of what we are all facing now, the existential threats to our species, to the planet, and to life itself. 

I saw the power of one man. I would like, in my own life today, to rekindle something of that power, but I’m not sure how. I don’t know exactly when I came upon the idea of living a quiet life as a response to the world’s frightening shape, but it may have been during the Covid years. We all remember how it was. Covid came from nowhere and exploded into our world, like a biblical plague of old. We were all afraid to go out. We wore masks. For a time, my wife and I didn’t even shop; we ordered our groceries to be delivered to the door. Before the vaccines came, people by the thousands languished in hospitals on ventilators. When they were near death, spouses were not allowed to visit; the best the nurses could do was use FaceTime to let grieving families see the intubated, oxygen-masked face of their loved one for the last time.  That possibility is what frightened me the most. I couldn’t imagine saying goodbye to my wife that way, or her saying goodbye to me. It was, quite literally, hell.

And we were all so alone during that time. We often couldn’t see our friends except on Zoom, a thin, hollow substitute. We couldn’t touch and see the people that meant the most to us. In those months, my wife and I sometimes got in the car and drove into the countryside, simply to be in the real world again and gaze out at landscapes that were still green, alive, and free from disease.

As terrible as that period was, I did notice that it resembled certain qualities of the monastic life with which I was familiar. There were few distractions. Life was simple; we got up, made our meals, dusted and cleaned, and sat after dinner in silence together without much distraction. We didn’t watch TV. We discovered that that enforced quiet was paradoxically the most genuine way to be connected with the world, which was living through the same angst that we were. Each week, at a set time, we talked to our son on the phone. Even though there wasn’t much new to report, all of us cherished being together and hearing our voices.

These days life is back to so-called normal. Covid has receded in people’s minds. But not completely in mine. I still grieve for what we all lost during that dark time—a sense of connection, a fabric of community, the feel of a hug or of shaking hands. I now spend some time each day “resting in spacious awareness”—the kind of meditation I practice. And I watch and wait. I don’t have any illusions that in the years of life that remain to me I will ever have even the smallest fraction of the impact that Thich Nhat Hanh had that day on Fifth Avenue in New York City. But I’m sure he didn’t expect anything in particular. He just acted because action had suddenly become possible. He had the opportunity, and he didn’t hesitate. He demonstrated what is possible when your mind is free from distraction and when your life is given over fully and completely to the bodhisattva vow.

I was fortunate enough to see in him what is possible for a human being. It may be that before long the remnants of humanity left after nuclear holocaust or climate catastrophe will have found a way to survive on what will have become verdant landscapes of ice-free Greenland and fern-covered Antarctica. I have read that during one of the Ice Ages, the population of humanity was reduced to a few straggling bands of twenty or thirty. That is why, they say, we are all cousins, descendants of Lucy, the one great mother from those days. We were lucky then; maybe we’ll be lucky again.

Living so that you can see clearly what is going on is Buddhism in a nutshell. There is a story of an old Chinese Zen teacher named Ruiyan, who used to call out his own name three times when he woke up every morning, “Ruiyan, Ruiyan, Ruiyan.” And then he would answer himself, “All right, and from now on, don’t be fooled by anything.”

In my final years, I don’t want to be fooled and pushed around by the maelstrom of confusion afflicting our world. I want to be more like Ruiyan.

Once someone asked my Buddhist teacher Suzuki Roshi, “Roshi, if a nuclear war destroys all of humanity, what will happen to Buddhism?”

He replied, “It will continue.”

Was he joking? Was he being naive? Or was his heart so big that he could encompass the vast time and space that his answer implied?

I don’t know. I’m just going to try, to the best of my ability, to live a quiet life and keep my mind clear. If I have an opportunity to help someone or change some situation for the better, good. If not, I’m still convinced that this, in the end, is the right way to live, and the best strategy for keeping hope alive.