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Zen monk, teacher and activist to visit Tallahassee
By Jeff Danese
The extraordinary American dharma teacher Claude AnShin Thomas, author of “At Hell’s Gate: a Soldier’s Journey from War to Peace,” will be giving a public talk and retreat at Tallahassee Buddhist Community in Railroad Square on January 27 and 28.
Anyone with an interest in Buddhism – especially American Buddhism or Zen practice – should take advantage of this opportunity to interact with Thomas. Part of Thomas’ uniqueness is his distinctly American background and his development of the dharma (Buddhist teachings) in a distinctly American key.
A Vietnam veteran who says that as an Army helicopter gunner he was responsible for thousands of deaths, Thomas eventually became a Buddhist priest. His life is a map of the fault lines and strange terrain of American contemporary history.
As Buddhism is transmitted to North America, a signal of its success and relevance is the production of American teachers such as Thomas, who have lived and transformed some of the deepest tragedies of our times into messages of compassion, hope, and a powerful, incisive wisdom
Thomas wrote that he has learned that “healing does not mean ‘forget about the war, get on with your life’ (the absence of pain), but rather the acceptance of it in our life and the knowledge (at a place beyond intellect) that the war and our pain never end. We merely learn how to be with it like still water, with a clear an unequivocal commitment to not create more suffering in ourselves or in the world.
“We cannot make peace, we must be peace, and the rest of the process becomes self evident,” he wrote.
During his Army service, Thomas was shot down five times and wounded once, and he was left with a permanent disability. After an honorable discharge, he earned a degree in English education, studied creative writing and wandered about Europe, Asia, and the Far East before returning back to the United States to pursue a career in socially conscious rock and roll.
During his eleven-year musical career, he also was an activist working against the Vietnam War, supporting students’ rights and working to help veterans who were suffering from conditions that he was personally familiar with such as homelessness and addictions.
In 1991, he encountered the Buddhist monk Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh and became a member of Plum Village, the monastery and retreat center that the Vietnamese monk leads in France.
Thomas was ordained as a Zen priest by Roshi Bernie Glassman in 1995, and speaks and leads retreats internationally on mindfulness practice, transformation, and reconciliation. He has worked for peace in the Balkans and participated in a peace pilgrimage that began in Auschwitz and ended in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Thomas, who lives near Tallahassee in Mary Esther, Florida, created the Zaltho Foundation, a non-profit organization whose purpose is to promote nonviolence.
For further information about Thomas’ visit, contact the Tallahassee Buddhist Community at tallahasseebuddhistcommunity.org.
For information about the Zaltho Foundation: www.Zaltho.org.
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