This is a blog post about generosity and cynicism. It can also be read on my blog: https://teunvanson.eu/plum-village-cynicism/. Below is the full text.
=====================
Plum Village & cynicism
=====================
This summer I spent a week at Plum Village, a Buddhist monastery in the southwest of France. And this place held up a mirror in a way that I didn't expect.
There are lots of ways in which this retreat changed me as a person, but here I want to discuss one specific thing that happened there. Plum Village made me realize that I have grown cynical.
Paradise
========
It went roughly like this. I arrive at a beautiful place – an open area amid the farmland with a few buildings sprinkled around, and beside that mostly grass and trees. Everybody there walks calmly, slowly. People smile at each other. I learn where to pitch my tent, and I do, amid the trees to shelter it from the evening sun.
A bell rings. People stop walking. They stop talking. They stop everything and close their eyes. I do the same, although I'm not sure why. I later learn that this is to remind ourselves to watch our breathing and ground ourselves in the moment. Every bell – and there are many in Plum Village – is an opportunity to get back to the here and now.
We queue silently for dinner. The food is wonderful – wholesome, simple, vegan. I learn that the monastics practice 'eating meditation': eating mindfully, with full attention to the food, and with gratefulness to everyone and everything who provided the food. Eating slowly is difficult for me, but I'm was trying.
The next morning I get up and decide to do some farm work as my morning exercise. We get to pick tomatoes, and the smell of the tomato plant almost makes me cry. (That evening, these tomatoes would be served during dinner.)
We do everything slowly. The schedule is forgiving: 5:45 exercise, 6:30 sitting meditation, 7:45 breakfast, 9:30 walking meditation, 10:45 Dharma talk, 12:30 lunch, 14:15 deep relaxation, 16:00 Dharma sharing, 17:45 dinner, noble silence from 21:30. There's lots of time between each activity. In any case, most activities involve resting in some way – and all of them are done with ease and serenity.
The Catch
=========
At a certain point I catch myself wondering: all the sisters in here are so peaceful. There is so much generosity. Life is so simple here. What's the catch?
I go through the options: Is there some kind of hyper-strict ideology behind this? Is this a way to lure people into their cult? Is it a way to make money? Perhaps they harbor a deep hatred for a specific group of people? Are these people secretly miserable?
My friends, the closest I came to finding a 'catch' is that they seem to have a dislike for spicy food.
In other words: **there is no catch**.
---
This realization made me dizzy. I realized how used I am to being skeptical of things that seem too good to be true. I was buried so deep into my cynicism that I couldn't recognize and accept generosity, kindness and happiness when it was right there in front of my eyes.
Why does genuine happiness have to come with a catch? I don't rationally believe that humans are incapable of true, sustained happiness. I have a generally positive view of human nature. Yet for days I couldn't see this place for what it was.
Cynicism
========
Reflecting back on this, it's not surprising that I was so cynical. In my context – Western Europe in 2026 – cynicism is a survival strategy.
Bullshit is absolutely everywhere. Just outside my door there is a billboard cycling through ads telling me to buy Dior perfume, the latest Samsung phone (with AI!), groceries at *this* particular supermarket. Late capitalism, and advertising specifically, are waging psychological warfare on all of us to keep us ever wanting more, buying more, wanting more, buying more.
My municipality is advertising diversity and inclusion while gutting civil society organizations (particularly those with inconvenient opinions) and universities, and their police is happily using surveillance technology made in Israel. Activists are being raided, detained and processed like criminals while multinational corporations can keep polluting the air we breathe, the water we drink and the land we live on.
No wonder I'm cynical.
Interbeing
=========
But one of the many things I've taken from my time at Plum Village is that you cannot be a force for change if your inner state is not peaceful. If you are unmindful, out of balance, at war with yourself, then whatever you try to do in the world is not going to have the effect that you want it to have.
The deep insight of Buddhism is that all things are interconnected. You are not just you, for you are connected to and co-constituted by your surroundings.¹
You may think that you can put away your stormy weather and work for a good cause instead, but interbeing teaches us that the stormy weather *will* manifest in the outside world. There is no separation.
This is why I think it is important for people who call themselves activists to pay attention to themselves and their own inner state.² **Not** as a liberal, individualist form of 'self-care'. **Not** as a way to focus on individual people's footprints, as BP would like us to do. But simply because inner and outer world are not separated.
That's why I want to fight the cynicism in myself *despite the fact that it is an understandable and reasonable response to my current situation*. It is a self-defense attitude, but one that hardens me and keeps me from seeing deep beauty when it presents itself to me.
Through softness, Plum Village held up a mirror and showed me my own hardened self.
----------
Footnotes
1. Some even say that you *are* everything else, and there is no separation at all. In *Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet*, Thich Nhat Hanh (the founder of the Plum Village tradition) writes: "We are a human being, yes, but at the same time we are everything. Seeing this, we know that to preserve other species is to preserve ourselves. This is interbeing, the deepest teaching of deep ecology." The 'deep ecology' he refers to is an environmental movement spearheaded by Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss. While I think deep ecology is admirable and full of valuable insight, I agree with ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood when she criticized (in the paper Nature, Self, and Gender) precisely this 'all is one' aspect, arguing that it erases difference rather than engaging with it. It's not that everything is the same, but everything is *connected*, she argues. For instance, I am connected to the tree outside my window, and to my cat, and (to a lesser extent) to the plum trees in Plum Village, and so on. These connections are not just incidental: they make me who I am. But for these connections to exist, there need to be 'things' to connect to. Relationally constituted things, to be sure, not bounded and autonomous things – but things nonetheless.
2. According to Sister True Dedication (in *Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet*, p. vii–viii), Thich Nhat Hanh would sometimes say to his students: "Don't just *do* something, *sit there*!"
#PlumVillage #cynicism #bullshit #interbeing #buddhism #mindfulness #monastery #essay #blogpost #bearblog
