Learning True Love: Practicing Buddhism in a Time of War by Sister Chân Không PDF

Learning actual Love, the autobiography of Sister Chân Không, stands along the nice non secular autobiographies of our century. It tells the tale of her religious and private odyssey, either in her fatherland and in exile. Its anecdotal sort offers an intensely own portrait of a lady with wonderful braveness, supplying us a viewpoint at the ache of the Vietnamese humans. This specified autobiography tells the gripping tale of a girl who not just lived yet made heritage, and whose lifetime of single-minded commitment to humanity can function an proposal for us all.

Sister Chân Không used to be born in a village at the Mekong River Delta in 1938. In her children she committed her lifestyles to the improvement and perform of nonviolence grounded within the Buddhist precepts of non-killing and compassionate motion. Propelled via her passionate commitment to social swap, she all started operating within the slums of Saigon, dispensing nutrition, operating with the ill, and educating young children. whilst she used to be 21 years previous she met the fellow who until eventually to at the present time continues to be her instructor and religious significant other: Thich Nhat Hanh. With him she co-founded the varsity of youngster for Social carrier in 1964, which grew to a firm of over 10,000 youth organizing clinical, academic, and agricultural amenities in rural Vietnam, and rebuilding villages destroyed within the scuffling with. Sister Chân Không turned renowned within the anti-war and peace group for her paintings selling human rights and protesting repression and violence, usually susceptible to her personal lifestyles. She keeps to do that paintings today. 

After the struggle she turned one of many co-founders of Plum Village, the non secular heart, that's domestic to Thich Nhat Hanh's neighborhood in France, the place she remains to be deeply all for the advance and imaginative and prescient for this special community.

In January of 2005, after approximately forty years in exile, Sister Chân Không was once in a position to go back on a 3-month stopover at to Vietnam. during this absolutely revised variation of Learning real Love she movingly describes the go back to her place of origin, the reunions with many elderly neighbors and fellow activists, and stocks her impact of the "new Vietnam," the place Buddhists nonetheless fight for spiritual freedom and the re-establishment in their personal organizations. 

Learning precise Love is a relocating own memoir, an creation to the mindfulness teachings and lifetime of Thich Nhat Hanh and his group in exile, an outline to the advance of the eu and American peace and human rights move, and an advent to the engaged and useful form of Vietnamese Buddhism. It files the method that introduced an finish to the USA Vietnam battle, and provides a full of life precis of Vietnamese background from 1945 to the present political, social and religious weather in Vietnam. Learning actual Love additionally snap shots a number of the many notable people who shared Sister Chân Không 's path.

Foremost but it is the striking and ambitious tale of a really brave girl, whose trip from an approved biologist on the collage of Paris to a Buddhist nun, offers her particular perception into life's critical questions and the power to handle them in an unflinching and easy manner. 

Forewords by way of Thich Nhat Hanh and Maxine Hong-Kingston