this interview was taken fromTricycleMagzine

Tricycle: It's very hard to imagine that somebody could come out of Vietnam, the way you did, and be completely free of anger. Do you think of yourself as being free from anger?

Thich Nhat Hanh: You have to practice in order to diminish your anger, to help non-anger prevail. Non-anger is a wholesome mental formation that you can touch. When you have seen your whole country destroyed, millions of people dying, it's natural that you get angry. But through the practice of looking deeply, you can see things that other people cannot see: you ask: "Why have the American soldiers come here? Have they come with intention to kill? To destroy our country?" If you had any contact with the soldiers, you would see that they had been sent in order to kill or to be killed, and that the Vietnamese soldiers also don't want to be killed, don't want to kill, but are forced to do so. When you practice looking like that, you see that the deep cause of the war is a policy that is based on a wrong perception of the situation in Vietnam and in the world and wrong perception is the real criminal.

Tricycle: You talk a lot about being happy, as if creating happiness in a very deliberate way is itself beneficial, whereas so much of "daily life" seems to be about anger, frustration, despair.

Thich Nhat Hanh: I have noticed that people are dealing too much with the negative, with what is wrong. They do not touch enough on what is not wrong it's the same as some psychotherapists. Why not try the other way, to look into the patient and to see positive things, to just touch those things and make them bloom? Waking up in morning, you can recognize "I'm alive" and that there are twenty-four hours for me to live, to learn how to look at living beings with the eyes of compassion. If you are aware that you are alive, that you have twenty-four hours to create new joy, this would be enough to make yourself happy and the people around you happy. This is a practice of happiness.

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