Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
by Thich Nhat Hanh
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Book Summary Information
Author: Thich Nhat HanhEditor: Arnold Kotler
Foreword: H. H. the Dalai Lama
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1992-03-01
ISBN: 0553351397
Number of pages: 160
Publisher: Bantam
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780553351392
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
Book Review: Disappointing
Summary: 2 Stars
This book is disappointing. Hanh purports to offer helpful information and advice to individuals. He does that in the first two parts of the book. But, the reader will find in the last part that he is actually trying to put a guilt trip on Americans to raise money to help victims of the Vietnam war and to help the poor and downtrodden in underdeveloped countries. I'm all for helping victims of war and for providing some aid to people in underdeveloped countries. But Hanh is dishonest in his approach because he says nothing to the people who are the causes of the problems. Hanh was exiled from his own country after the Vietnam War. He would have been imprisoned or killed if he had tried to return. Yet, nothing in this book is addressed to those who would have killed him, to the government of Vietnam, or to the people of Vietnam.
Hanh blames Americans for damages done during the Vietnam War. But, China was the primary cause of the war because it backed and supported it. That war was only the most recent time in history when China or its allies conquered neighboring countries in Southeast Asia. One motivation that the U.S. had for engaging in that war was to stop the spread of communism. That goal is understandable since "communists" had already killed many millions of people.
Hanh says that mindfulness will cause Americans to see that they should provide aid to war victims and the downtrodden around the world. But, other questions or conclusions could be reached that Hanh does not address. I'll give three examples. (1) Why didn't the Vietnamese people try to stop the spread of communism themselves? (2) Why don't people in underdeveloped countries take action to rid themselves of the corrupt governments that are oppressing them? (3) The United States should not have entered a limited war in China's backyard (Southeast Asia) if it wasn't willing to confront China.
I gave the book two stars for its first two parts. Some sections in the first two parts are very good. They give concise statements of what mindfulness meditation involves. However, some of Hanh's views seem immature. For example, he said that to understand an individual is to love them. If an individual is sadistic or a sociopath and dangerous, how am I to love that person? Maybe I could if being charitable is considered to be loving. Hanh leaves it to the reader to figure out how to love someone who is doing really bad things.
I'm not an expert on mindfulness meditation but I recommend two other books on the subject over this one by Hanh. The first is Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn. The other is Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana. If you are considering meditation for the first time, I suggest reading The Meditative Mind by Daniel Goleman. It gives a good overview.
Summary of Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
In the rush of modern life, we tend to lose touch with the peace that is available in each moment. World-renowned Zen master, spiritual leader, and author Thich Nhat Hanh shows us how to make positive use of the very situations that usually pressure and antagonize us. For him a ringing telephone can be a signal to call us back to our true selves. Dirty dishes, red lights, and traffic jams are spiritual friends on the path to "mindfulness"?the process of keeping our consciousness alive to our present experience and reality. The most profound satisfactions, the deepest feelings of joy and completeness lie as close at hand as our next aware breath and the smile we can form right now.Lucidly and beautifully written, Peace Is Every Step contains commentaries and meditations, personal anecdotes and stories from Nhat Hanh's experiences as a peace activist, teacher, and community leader. It begins where the reader already is?in the kitchen, office, driving a car, walking a part?and shows how deep meditative presence is available now. Nhat Hanh provides exercises to increase our awareness of our own body and mind through conscious breathing, which can bring immediate joy and peace. Nhat Hanh also shows how to be aware of relationships with others and of the world around us, its beauty and also its pollution and injustices. the deceptively simple practices of Peace Is Every Step encourage the reader to work for peace in the world as he or she continues to work on sustaining inner peace by turning the "mindless" into the mindFUL.
Thich Nhat Hanh's writing is deceptive in its subtlety. He'll go on and on with stories about tree-hugging or metaphors involving raw potatoes; he'll tell you how to eat mindfully, even how to breathe and walk; he'll suggest looking closely at a flower and to see the sun as your heart. As the Zen teacher Richard Baker commented, however, Nhat Hanh is "a cross between a cloud, a snail, and piece of heavy machinery." Sooner or later, it begins to sink in that Nhat Hanh is conveying a depth of psychology and a world outlook that require nothing less than a complete paradigm shift. Through his cute stories and compassionate admonitions, he gradually builds up to his philosophy of interbeing, the notion that none of us is separately, but rather that we inter-are. The ramifications are explosive. How can we mindlessly and selfishly pursue our individual ends, when we are inextricably bound up with everyone and everything else? We see an enemy not as focus of anger but as a human with a complex history, who could be us if we had the same history. Suffice it to say, that after reading Peace Is Every Step, you'll never look at a plastic bag the same way again, and you may even develop a penchant for hugging trees. --Brian Bruya
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