A Centre: why?
Plum Village
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THE PRIMARY MODEL for the Centre to be built is Plum Village, the monastery near Bordeaux in southern France that Thich Nhat Hanh founded in 1982, and where he still lives and teaches surrounded by an international community of monks and nuns.
In recent decades Plum Village has been visited by thousands of people from all over the world wishing to attend the retreats offered by Thich Nhat Hanh throughout the year, to learn mindfulness from his voice and living example and from the serenity, smiles and absolute simplicity of the monks and nuns. More recently the size of the community and number of visitors have grown so much that four new residential ‘hamlets’ have had to be built near the three largest ones: Upper Hamlet, Lower Hamlet and New Hamlet.
Thanks to the world wide travelling of practitioners, Plum Village has greatly contributed to the spread of the practice of mindfulness in Western countries, resulting in the foundation of new affiliated monasteries in the United States: two in Vermont (Green Mountain Dharma Center for nuns and Maple Forest for monks) and more recently one near San Diego, in south California (Deer Park Monastery).

Following Thich Nhat Hanh’s three-month visit to Vietnam in 2005, after 39 years of exile, other monasteries exist in Saigon, Hanoi and Hue under the direct responsibility of Plum Village.