Free The Novice by Thich Nhat Hanh

liked what we did, we encouraged them to build a school for the children. One family would contribute a few bamboo trees, another family would bring coconut leaves to make a roof, and so on. After a school was established, we would bring some doctors and medical students to come and help for a day or two and set up a dispensary for medicines.
    So the SYSS was founded on that volunteer spirit. We didn’t wait for the government to get around to helping; we just initiated the projects ourselves at the grassroots level. During the war we sponsored more than ten thousand impoverished orphans. That is how we lived our engaged Buddhism. We only wanted to bring relief to people who were sick, wounded, or needy in the war zone and to poor, struggling farmers in other areas. We helped peasants help themselves by sharing ways of taking better care of their health, improving the yields of their food crops, making handicrafts to increase household income, and educating their children; we had no political ambition.
    Meanwhile, politicians in Saigon were suspicious and hostile toward us because we called on them (as well as on their opponents, the Communists) to stop the war, which was causing such immense suffering to our people. When the anti-Communist authorities in Saigon saw our success in helping so many, they feared we were becoming too popular or influential. So in May 1966, a group of masked men arrived at dusk to throw grenades into various rooms, including Thay’s room, at the SYSS. The curtain in Thay’s room pushed the grenade back out the window, but in any case Thay was not in his room at that time; he had been invited by Cornell University to come to the United States and had just left the day before.
    In June, as we were having a meeting at SYSS, masked men again came and threw grenades at SYSS workers running away from them to hide in rooms here and there. This is when I personally witnessed the first two deaths among my friends; sixteen other people were gravely wounded in that attack. Thich Nhat Hanh was still in the United States at the time, calling for a cessation of hostilities in our country.
    Of course we grieved over the deaths, but we knew that those who had ordered the murders must be caught in a wrong perception about us. At the funeral, as we stood before the corpses of our friends, with our beloved teacher physically far away but vividly present in each of our hearts, we could only respond to these terrible violent injustices by declaring that we deeply regretted their wrong perceptions about us, and we also believed they could find ways to help us alleviate the suffering of poor peasants, illiterate children, sick people, and war victims, as we had no ambition other than that. Two weeks later, eight of our social workers were kidnapped and perhaps all killed, as we never heard anything of them again.
    Then on July 4, 1966, a band of masked men took five of our social workers out to a riverbank and shot them. All but one of them died; but thanks to that lone survivor, we learned that before shooting our friends one masked man did say, “We’re sorry, but we are forced to kill you.” At the funeral we thanked that man for saying he was sorry he was forced to kill our friends, and we asked that any who received such orders in the future please try to save us any way they could. And in fact no other killings occurred after that.
    To show how wrong the belief that we were seeking political power was, our peaceful young people, whose only aim was to care for people of their country, had to accept the murders of fourteen beloved friends without uttering a single word in bitterness or anger. This behavior on our part moved the hearts of many people and may have helped the killings to stop. Silent helping hands appeared everywhere. Day by day, month after month, the number of volunteer social workers grew until it reached nearly ten thousand by 1975.
    Thinking back on these tragic events,