Martin Luther King and Thich Nhat Hanh

Martin Luther King said in 1967: ‘Before you finish eating breakfast, you’ve depended on more than half the world.’ Dr King was making a philosophical point with moral consequences. ‘We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,’ he said. Therefore ‘whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.’ That’s an argument for solidarity with people who are suffering or persecuted, wherever they may be.

Dr King probably had Christian sources for these ideas, but earlier in 1967 he nominated Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk who campaigned against the Vietnam War, for the Nobel Peace Prize. Thich Nhat Hanh spoke constantly about the interconnectedness of the human condition, drawing on Indra’s Net, a traditional Buddhist image of life. The net is infinite in dimensions and has a jewel at each intersection which reflects all the others. At every point we see endless reflections showing the net’s infinite scope.



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