Another great passage

"Nhat Hanh: Returning to the Israeli professor-well, he also asked me about my loyalty to Vietnam as a nation and to Buddhism as a religion, because in our discussions I always put peace and human life above everything. So he asked, "What if Buddhism cannot survive in Vietnam? Will you accept that in order to have peace in Vietnam?" I said "Yes, I think if Vietnam has real peace-cooperation between North and South-and if it can ban war for a long time, I would be ready to sacrifice Buddhism." He was very shocked. But I thought it was quite plain that if you have to choose between Buddhism and peace, then you must choose peace. Because if you choose BUddhism you sacrifice peace, and Buddhism does not accept that. Furthermore, Buddhism is not a number of temples and organizations. Buddhism is in your heart. Even if you don't have any temple or any monks, you can still be a Buddhist in your heart and life.

The rabbi asked also, "how about your loyalty to Vietnam as a nation?" I think that question touched the very core of the problem of the MIddle East. I said that if I had to choose between the survival of the Vietnamese people and the survival of Vietnam as a nation, I would choose the survival of the people. He said, "Well, we cannot agree on that. That is why we cannot agree on other things." So that was the ened of the dialogue."

[The Rabbi is a Jewish Rabbi, and the "problems of the Middle East" refers to Israel and Pakistan]

Thich Nhat Hanh also gave this example to the same Rabbi earlier in the book:

"For instance, in India in the ninth century, Hindus and Muslims undertook a great persecution fo Buddhism. They burned down Buddhist temples and killed monks and destroyed scriptures. What the Buddhist monks did in those days was to flee to Nepal, where they preserved their manuscripts. They couldn't carry the Buddha statues, which were magnificent, with them. But they did carry the scriptures. After that, Buddhism flourished in Asia-in Tibet and China and Japan. Theirs was a kind of negative resistance.

But if they had organized violent resistance and killed Muslims and Hindus, I don't think that would have been real Buddhist behaviour. By organizing violent resistance, they might have preserved something that is called Buddhism, but might not be Buddhist at all in substance. By acting in the way they did, they preserved the identity of Buddhism.

I also asked him whether he though Israel as a nation is the most important condition for the existence of the Jewish people, even when in order to protect that nation it is necessary to bomb people, to destroy life in order to protect life. A contradiction in itself. I suggested that there may be ways other than the killing of people to protect life."