Making peace with our unpeacefulness: Claude AnShin Thomas' path from war to Zen Buddhism

"Peace is not a static reality."

Claude AnShin Thomas enlisted in the US Army at 17, served as a helicopter gunner and crew chief in the Vietnam War, was shot down five times, and was awarded numerous medals and a Purple Heart.

He was medically discharged at 20 years of age and after returning to the US, experienced years of unemployment, social isolation, violence and addiction.

Claude says that he carries the responsibility for much death and destruction, and the burden of moral injury and post-traumatic stress.

"I felt like my bones were wrapped with barbed wire. I lived in a constant state of disease," he says.

"I'm not a good or a bad person because of what I did, but I am responsible, and I cannot turn away from that responsibility. If I want my life to be different, then I have to do things different."

He began to walk a Buddhist path in 1990, training under the Vietnamese monk Thich Naht Hahn, and the Zen peacemaker Bernie Glassman. This led to his full ordination as a Zen Buddhist Monk into the Japanese Soto Zen Tradition in 1995.

"Peace is a very organic process, and peace is not necessarily what we define as peace," he says. "Through my willingness to sit down, become still, to focus on the foundation of life which is one breath followed by one breath, peace has the opportunity to reveal itself to me as it will in each successive moment."

Sitting meditation has become a crucial discipline for Claude, and through the Zaltho Foundation he teaches zazen to civilians and combat veterans and spreads a message of active nonviolence, transformation and change.

"I encourage people to sit just to sit," Claude says. "There is nothing to be accomplished, nothing to be gained. We simply need to become conscious of the essential point which is breath awareness."

"It's not a form to be mastered, it's a process to be engaged with. We need to do it just to do it without looking to get anything from it, because if we're looking to get something from it, then what actually is revealed to us through the process, we won't see it, we'll miss it."

"This process is not about getting good, it's about waking up."