Thích Nhất Hạnh (Thi Thit Nhat Hanh) is a famous Vietnamese Buddhist master, poet, scholar, and an active defender of human rights; a Zen Buddhist monk and the abbot of the Buddhist meditation center “Village of Plums” in Dordogne (France), the author of a number of books on Zen Buddhism. The master Thích Nhất Hạnh wrote “No Death, No Fear” based on his own experience. He calls on us to learn to look into the essence of things so that we can discover freedom and the joy of the path between constant selfhood and forgetting on our own. As a poet, Thích Nhất Hạnh studies the paradoxes of life and gently lifts the veil of illusion, allowing us to see that we are afraid to die because of our wrong views and misunderstandings.
“Most of all, we fear that after death we will disappear into nothingness. Many people believe that their whole existence is only the lifespan that begins at the moment of their birth or conception and ends at the moment of their death. We believe that we are born out of emptiness and become zero after death. That’s why we’re so afraid to vanish. The Buddha understands our existence completely differently. In his view, we only imagine birth and death—whereas in reality there is neither the one nor the other.”