What is Thiền?
Thiền is the Vietnamese form of Chán, the meditation school of Mahāyāna Buddhism known in Japan as Zen. The word is the Vietnamese reading of chán, which comes from the Sanskrit *dhyāna*, meaning meditative absorption. It has been the meditative heart of Vietnamese Buddhism for fourteen centuries, and most Western readers meet it through Thich Nhat Hanh and his Plum Village community.
Thiền vs adjacent concepts
Thiền is not a watered-down version of Chinese Chán. The Vietnamese tradition has been continuous for fourteen centuries, is held by a sangha numbering in the millions, and has produced indigenous masters of the same calibre as its Chinese and Japanese counterparts: Trần Nhân Tông, Hương Hải, Liễu Quán. It is also not a synonym for Plum Village. Contemporary Vietnamese Buddhism includes a far wider range of monasteries and lineages, many of them doctrinally and stylistically distinct from the Plum Village synthesis that has had such success in the West. And it is not simply Zen with a Vietnamese accent. The Vietnamese tradition places a distinctive emphasis on joint cultivation of thiền and tịnh, the thiền-tịnh song tu practice that pairs Chán-style meditation with Pure Land recitation, standard in Vietnamese monasteries and almost unknown in Japanese Zen.
What Thiền names
Thiền is the Vietnamese reading of the Chinese chán, itself the Chinese transliteration of the Sanskrit *dhyāna*, meditative absorption. As a tradition-name it points to the lineage Bodhidharma is held to have brought from India to China in the early sixth century, passed through Huineng and his successors, and carried out of China across East Asia in distinct national forms: Korean Seon, Japanese Zen, Vietnamese Thiền. The four share one canonical history: the transmission of mind outside the scriptures attributed to Bodhidharma, the Platform Sūtra attributed to Huineng, and the koan-and-sitting curricula the Song-dynasty Chinese masters developed. Each took the inherited material its own way under its own pressures. The Vietnamese version is the least known to English-language readers. It is the form Mahāyāna Buddhism in Vietnam has been built around for fourteen centuries, and the form in which Thich Nhat Hanh, one of the most widely read Western-facing teachers of the late twentieth century, was trained.
How the tradition reached Vietnam
The first transmission of thiền to Vietnam is conventionally dated to 580 CE, when the Indian monk Vinītaruci (Vietnamese: Tỳ-ni-đa-lưu-chi), said to have been a direct disciple of the third Chinese Chán patriarch Sengcan, settled at the Pháp Vân pagoda in what is now Bắc Ninh province in northern Vietnam. His lineage lasted about six centuries. A second major transmission arrived in 820 CE, when the Chinese master Vô Ngôn Thông (Chinese: Wu Yantong) founded the school that carried his name. A third, the Thảo Đường school, founded by a Chinese monk who had been brought to Vietnam as a captive and was recognised there as a master, arrived in 1069. The most important indigenous school, Trúc Lâm (Bamboo Forest), was founded in 1299 by the abdicated emperor Trần Nhân Tông. It drew the earlier transmissions together and is the main stream the contemporary Vietnamese clergy descends from. The Lâm Tế (Vietnamese for Linji) and Tào Động (Vietnamese for Caodong, the Chinese ancestor of Sōtō) lineages arrived in later centuries. The modern Vietnamese sangha holds all of these inheritances together.
The Plum Village synthesis
The figure through whom most English-language readers meet thiền is Thich Nhat Hanh, the Lâm Tế-lineage Vietnamese monk ordained at sixteen at the Từ Hiếu pagoda in Huế in 1942, exiled from Vietnam for his peace activism in 1966, and founder of the Plum Village practice community in the Dordogne region of southern France in 1982. The Plum Village synthesis is recognisably thiền in lineage but distinct in register. The *mindfulness* vocabulary the community uses in English, the *interbeing* gloss on dependent origination, the walking meditation and bell-of-mindfulness practices that punctuate the day, and the *engaged Buddhism* that grew out of the Vietnam War years are Nhat Hanh's own contributions, layered over the inherited Lâm Tế curriculum. The community has spread from the original Plum Village centre to affiliated monasteries in the United States, Germany, Thailand and elsewhere. The thiền they transmit is the version most non-Vietnamese readers have met.
Where to encounter it
Plum Village's English-language written corpus runs through Thich Nhat Hanh's *The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching*, the most systematic single-volume account of the doctrine the school works inside, and the more devotional and applied volumes *Peace Is Every Step*, *Being Peace* and *Living Buddha, Living Christ*. The book that introduced most English-language readers to the practice itself is *The Miracle of Mindfulness*, the 1975 short volume that re-presents the satipaṭṭhāna contemplations in a Vietnamese register accessible to the Western lay reader. The video corpus includes Nhat Hanh's talk on meditating on emptiness, signlessness and aimlessness, the dharma talk on what the Buddha actually taught, the talk on the Buddhist understanding of reality and the teaching on refreshing one's way of seeing things. The course companion is the Plum Village-authored Body and Mind Are One, and the Plum Village voice in periodical form runs through Br. Trời Đức Niệm's reflection on peace within and a planet healed.
