Buddhadharma: Sister Dang Nghiem, thanks for speaking with us. Let’s lay the ground about how you came to the dharma and how you first encountered the five strengths.
Sister Dang Nghiem: I came to the dharma in a desperate situation. I was born Buddhist. I took Grandma to the temple, that was the most I did. And when I came to the United States, I invested most of my time and energy in high school, college, and medical school, and then residency. So I really did not invest at all in the dharma.
But my partner was a Buddhist practitioner. And on his bookshelf there was Peace Is Every Step, by Thich Nhat Hanh. That’s how I actually met Thay [an affectionate epithet; “teacher” in Vietnamese], through his book, but I never ventured more than that. Somebody told me about this Vietnamese master who had a retreat in California, and I recognized his name, so I went to a retreat in Santa Barbara in 1999. Three weeks later, my partner, John, died suddenly in a drowning accident. And so I came to the dharma out of desperation. I went to Plum Village three months after he died, after I took care of all the affairs. I let go of medicine. I just wanted peace at that moment.
Nothing really meant anything anymore to me. I was so desperate. In my life, I’d suffered a lot of abuse, a lot of trauma. So John’s death plunged me into this despair, but also woke me up. All my efforts to become successful, to seek love, to seek all these things I thought would heal and bring me forward into the future, I accomplished all of that, but I was still drowning in my suffering. I really had to choose between death and practice. And, thankfully, I had met Thay three weeks before that, and had seen a glimmer of hope. So I chose to go to France to follow Thay
