The Asian Reporter's
BOOK REVIEWS

By Thich Nhat Hanh

Riverhead Books, 2004

Hardcover, 295 pages, $19.95

By Dave Johnson

-- Thich Nhat Hanh

For those who haven’t been introduced to Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen master who can trace his lineage back 2,000 years to Buddha himself, Taming the Tiger Within is a good place to begin a spiritual friendship.

For those who have read and been inspired by any of his over 100 books, this latest publication will serve as a compendium of examples of his calm, sensible, and enlightening advice.

Distilled from the pages of these popular texts, Taming the Tiger Within is a handbook of concise commentaries one can use to cope successfully with the inevitable onslaught of three basic human emotions: anger, fear, and love.

If you have no difficulty diffusing anger, if you find it easy to conquer your fears, and if you are blessed with love unblemished by complications, then Godspeed and read no further. But if you are like the rest of us, and could use help in any or all of these often volatile arenas, then I recommend this book. It’s a user-friendly collection of meditations, analogies, reflections, and down-to-earth techniques for transmuting these powerful emotions from destructive and obstructive to happy, peaceful, and productive states of being.

One of this volume’s design features that really works for me is that the text is not a sea of gray pages with wave after wave of obtuse metaphysics. Perhaps I’m lazy, but if I have trouble understanding three out of four paragraphs in a spiritual treatise, I shift my attention to a detective novel or take a walk by the river. In Taming the Tiger Within, each page is a generous swath of white space with a sentence or a paragraph in center field.

For example, Thich Nhat Hanh offers a simple way to deal with those lurking demons of fury, rage, annoyance, and resentment:

He reiterates this thoughtful approach to subsuming one’s ire in a folksy metaphor that anyone can grasp:

Turning to fear, the philosopher states succinctly that "No fear is the ultimate joy. When you have the insight of no fear, you are free." He explains that if we let go of the notion of existence, then we can let go of fear. And to place his advice in the context of everyday life, he says:

In the last pages of this book the author talks about love, that mysterious sentiment that inspires great art, music, literature, and a reason to venture into the unknown. Here’s a comment that I really like:

Thich Nhat Hanh doesn’t bother to offer specific advice to the lonely or lovelorn in this meditation of difficult emotions. He leaves that to newspaper columnists. Instead, he entwines love with all-encompassing compassion — always an appropriate stance particularly in these dark days of war, ethnic cleansing, and pandemic disease.

Thich Nhat Hanh was born in central Vietnam in 1926 and was ordained a Buddhist monk at age 16. Quickly recognized as a prolific and influential scholar, author, and theologian in Vietnam, he inspired the movement known as Engaged Buddhism and co-founded the An Quang Buddhist Institute. Later, he started the Forest Monastery of Phuong Boi and was appointed editor-in-chief of the periodical, Vietnam Buddhism.

Now recognized throughout the world as a Zen master, peace activist, humanitarian, and author of over 100 books, Thich Nhat Hanh divides his time between Vermont and France.