whenever I would go to Blue Cliff Monastery, or listen to talks from Plum Village, I would hear those gentle words uttered. Like many others, I first encountered Thay's teachings in a book. I forget who or when, but as a young man in my early 20s I was starting to finally feel the strain of the doubt in my Christian faith. One of my biggest issues was how a loving God could send a huge majority of the population to everlasting torment just because they never encountered the conditions to see and believe a certain faith. This seemed not like a compassionate or loving God, but more like a vengeful, spiteful toddler. It was blasphemy to think about it, but when I did, it was horrifying. Long story short, I eventually started to turn to Eastern religions, particularly Hinduism, as I heard that they acknowledged other faiths as legitimate manifestations of the Divine. But by chance, the pastor of my church heard of my dilemma and wanted to talk to me. Believe it or not, he became my first teacher of Buddhism, and of meditation! He taught me how to meditate and I took to it instantly. Around this time, I don't remember who or when, someone gave me a copy of "Living Buddha, Living Christ." I was immediately smitten with the gentle words of this Vietnamese monk whose name I had NO idea how to pronounce. (And interestingly, I never pronounced his name correctly for over 15 years until well into the next part of my story.)

Fast Forward. Years later, I was now in my early 30s and I was having another kind of crisis. I had gotten married and gone back to a semi-mystical kind of Christianity. My spouse had been fairly conservative theologically, so I had spent years suppressing my Buddhist urges and tiptoeing around the egg shells of her theology.

But now she had left me.

I wasn't sure how I was going to make a living. I was almost homeless and had no money and a huge child support payment for children I barely got to see. I felt completely alone and hopeless. I longed for death just about every day.

I started dating this French woman in NY city at the time, and I accidentally found a book on meditation in her bathroom. It was "Destructive Emotions." I was completely riddled with "Destructive Emotions." It seemed that was all I knew.

Reading the book, I thought of how I had started to find some happiness in my early 20s when I started practicing meditation. But I had never connected with other people in the practice. I remembered how my practice sputtered out without a community or teacher, but how difficult it had been to find them. Suddenly it dawned on me that now there was google! And Youtube! I started searching, and found more than one Sangha. I tried classes and sitting with a couple of them. By chance, I found Blue Cliff Monastery and it happened to be only about an HOUR DRIVE AWAY from where I was living. I remembered "Living Buddha Living Christ" and how powerful this man's teaching was.

Up until then I had always been drawn to Zen on one hand, Theravada on the other, and to some extent Tibetan Buddhism. Theravada and Tibetan felt too old-fashioned and superstitious. Zen (the Japanese kind I kept finding) felt a little dry and austere, and devoid of the new "metta" meditation I'd never been taught when studying Zen in my 20s. Suddenly, in Thay's teachings, I found an almost perfect blend of all of them. He was the first Zen teacher I ever encountered who actually taught from the Pali scriptures! He also did loving kindness, which I never saw Zen teachers teach. But he also didn't hammer on the necessity to take certain things literally, like rebirth and miraculous stories and supposed powers that had the tendency to strain credulity. If he told these stories, they were full of gentle humor, wit, and were about psychological truths in the present, not even implied as doctrines we had to swallow whole into our faith gullet. In short, I was home. When I was trying to move back to Florida to be near my children again after they moved down here, the abbot at Blue Cliff told me to look up this guy named "Fred Eppsteiner." So.... here I am. 

When I heard Thay had passed, it was kind of a shock, but I wasn't really that sad. I thought "we had been expecting it a long time." "He's not really dead, he's just in the form of a..."(you know the rest)

I even joked around about his passing.

The next day, as I watched the ceremony and they bowed to his body, suddenly I started crying like a baby. He may not "truly be dead" as he would always said, but... I am truly sad, and I'm crying even now as I can hear his voice in my head, when he would speak as the cloud that turned into the rain: "My darling! I'm not really gone! I am still with you, in the cup of tea. In the ocean, in the rain. I'm still with you. I've just changed form." 

You may still be with us, dear Thay, dear Sangha, but it still hurts. We miss you. 

Even though I never met Thay, his teachings saved my life too. I hope one day his teachings will BE my life.