Exiled Vietnamese monk returns to pray for the dead

This week, Vietnam's most famous exile has returned home - to lead prayers for the dead of a war that ended more than 30 years ago but still haunts the country.

He is an 80-year-old Buddhist monk who has lived outside the country for four decades, and massive crowds are expected to greet him everywhere he goes. Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh is Vietnam's best-known peace activist and, after the Dalai Lama, is probably the most influential Buddhist spiritual leader in the world.

Like the Dalai Lama, he has spent half his life in exile. A best-selling author, he is feted in Europe and the US, but he was barred from his own land by the US-backed South Vietnamese government and the communist regime that displaced it.

It was Nhat Hanh who inspired the Rev Martin Luther King to come out publicly against the Vietnam War. He was a close personal friend of Thich Quang Duc, the Buddhist monk who captured the world's attention when he burnt himself to death in front of television cameras in 1963 to protest against the persecution of Vietnam's Buddhists.

But Nhat Hanh is not going home to lead any protests. The purpose of his visit, according to the monastery where he is based in France, is reconciliation. At the heart of the trip will be three huge prayer sessions for the dead of the war. His followers have called for people of all faiths to join with their own prayers, and even for atheist communists to read favourite passages from Marx.

When Nhat Hanh was allowed back into Vietnam for the first time in 2005, he was mobbed like a rock star the moment his plane arrived. His followers flocked just to touch the hem of his robes. But the communist government was wary of letting the peace activist in. It allowed him to stay only three months, and let him make speeches only inside small pagodas, not in front of any large audiences. This time it is letting him go a little further, conducting prayers at mass ceremonies.

"After the first trip they have been a lot more open. I wouldn't say 100 per cent, but it's a lot better than before," said Brother Phap Hay at Plum Village, the monastery Nhat Hanh founded in France when he went into exile, and where he still lives.

"The government has done many wrong things - a lot of injustice," Nhat Hanh said in an interview after his first trip back in 2005. "When they allow you to go home, that does not mean they have understood you or that they look at you now as a friend. But they do it politically because they are gaining something by allowing a person like you to come home. And you know that. But you go home with the intention to help ... not only innocent people, victims of violence, of injustice, but you have the intention to help those who have done injustice to other people."

Nhat Hanh emerged from a group that was trapped between two sides in the Vietnam War: the Buddhist monks. Although Buddhism is the biggest religion in Vietnam, it was suppressed under the Catholic South Vietnamese government.

By 1966, Nhat Hanh was a renowned peace activist and he travelled to the US to campaign against the war. The South Vietnamese government refused to let him back into the country. When Saigon finally fell in 1975, the communists made it clear he was no more welcome under their regime. So he settled in France and founded Plum Village.

Today he is revered as a Buddhist teacher in Europe, and in the US, where he has founded two monasteries. His followers call him Brother Thay, which means teacher in Vietnamese.

In his teachings, Nhat Hanh was the first to coin the phrase Engaged Buddhism, the belief that social work and good deeds are an integral part of Buddhist meditation. Though some have credited him with the concept itself as well as the name, he insists it came from a 13th-century Vietnamese king.

Before he was exiled from Vietnam, he founded the School of Youth for Social Service, a corps of peace workers who set up schools and clinics in rural areas, and helped rebuild villages.

He is still a peace activist. He led marches against the Iraq war and publicly embraced Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq who staged an extended protest outside George Bush's ranch at Crawford, Texas.

But he has not always been as universally admired in the West as he is today. When Martin Luther King nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967, the Nobel committee decided not to award a prize that year. King purposely ignored a request from the committee not to reveal that he had nominated Nhat Hanh, and made it public.

And even though his followers treat him like a rock star, not everybody in Vietnam is as enamoured of his return visits. Anti-communist forces have condemned him for his stance against the war, and said that by returning he has handed the communist authorities a propaganda coup.

"Our teacher's purpose is to reconcile," says Brother Phap Hay. "We want to reconcile the anti-communists and the communists. We want to reconcile all that happened in the past so we can go forward together."

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