It is a joy to still be able to review a new book by the wonderful Thich Nhat Hanh, who passed in 2022 at the age of 95. This little book was put together by Brother Phap Luu, one of Thay’s dedicated editors, who has assembled a few previously published pieces on the subject, along with some transcribed portions of talks given by Thay that touch on it. Phap Luu also intersperses throughout the chapters brief explanations of Thay’s ideas.
“This book is an invitation into a new way of looking at your life and the events happening within and around you,” Phap Luu writes in his Introduction. The first chapter by Thay, titled “Karma and Continuation,” begins with the metaphor of tea leaves boiling in a teapot and how “the tea is the continuation of the tea leaves” and that “as the tea is drunk, we can see that the tea is in us, the teacup, and the person drinking the tea.”
This little book may cause you to look at reincarnation in new ways. Thay reveals aspects of our ordinary lives in fresh light. “When a person has a thought,” for instance, “it is their continuation. When that thought arises, it influences that person and their environment.”
And “a person is the totality of all their karma, of their actions of body, speech, and mind.” So what should we do, then? “Take care of what comes in…. If you plant corn, you get corn; if you plant beans, you get beans.”
Along the way, Thay challenges some common Buddhist teachings about rebirth and reincarnation — because “their belief is based on what we consider to be a wrong view of the self. They believe that there is a self or a soul distinct from the body, and when the body is gone, the soul survives and seeks another body to enter and continue.” Thay writes: “That is one teaching of rebirth, but it isn’t the deep teaching of the Buddha…. To truly understand the Buddha’s teachings, we must realize the reality of nonself.” This is Thay’s great teaching about our illusions of separateness — from one another and from ourselves.
There are moments with significant depth of teaching from Buddhist sources. These come in the book’s second half, including Chapter 4: “Store Consciousness, Ripening, and Rebirth.” See the excerpt accompanying this review for a sampling.
This is a little book — in both stature and word count — but you could spend a lot of time exploring these teachings and re-understanding your life.
