Does George Bush sleep well at night?

April 1st found us making our way to the Hanoi airport en route to Hue. En route, I realized I didn't have my passport. (In Vietnam, as in many countries, hotels keep your passport during your stay. I was too tired when I arrived to offer a Xeroxed copy instead.) The hotel's driver made a quick call. We pulled over to the side of the busy road, and after a quarter hour's wait, along comes a motorcycle driven by the hotel's manager, my passport in his hand!

Arriving in Hue, we entered a different climate zone. It was 34 degrees C! Toasty. Many other group members arrived on the same flight, so slowly, we are becoming a travelling sangha.

The Green Hotel, our new home, is elegant and has all the amenities one could hope for...a lovely pool, a gymnasium, Internet access, restaurants, shops, and, of course, air conditioning. We settled into our rooms quickly. Sister Tue Nghiem greeted us and helped us get oriented. Each of us received a nametag, a grey robe, and a bowl. The grey robe identifies us as lay members of the sangha. The bowl is to use when we have meals at the pagodas.

With two hours of arrival, we were on a bus to a nearby hall to hear Thich Nhat Hanh give a public Dharma talk on power and happiness. Local government officials, as well as many monastics, were in the audience. Thay (the Vietnamese word for “teacher,” which we used respectfully to refer to Thich Nhat Hanh) spoke about the difficulties of power. He talked about the Iraq war and wondered whether George Bush, who has tremendous power, sleeps well at night. I suspect that most of us sitting and listening didn't have a hard time understanding that power is not a path to happiness.

Thay invited one of our fellow lay travellers, Cheri Maples, to speak to the audience about her experience as a police officer and a practitioner of mindfulness. Cheri was taken by complete surprise. She spoke about her work organizing mindfulness retreats and trainings for police officers and other criminal justice professionals and how it is possible to transform attitudes through mindfulness practice, even in those very challenging professions. (More information about this can be found at http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/thichnhathanh/transcript.shtml.)

Thay offered his Dharma talk in Vietnamese. Some of the nuns provided real-time translations for us as we sat on a veranda overlooking the Perfume River. As Thay spoke, the sun set, the bats emerged, and the geckos scampered across the walls.