Honoring the 49th day since his passing, we offer these loving remembrances from Dharma teachers Valerie Brown and Kaira Jewel Lingo.

By Kaira Jewel Lingo, Valerie Brown on October 7, 2025

Tribute to Dr. Larry Ward

August 25, 2025

Dr. Larry Ward, senior Dharma teacher in the Plum Village tradition, was and remains a light, a beacon for peace, creativity, and solidity in the Plum Village community and beyond. A poet, Buddhist teacher, sangha builder, community leader, educator, activist, and friend to countless people, Larry’s creative presence gently reminds us all that love, justice, and compassion never die, that love and light live on.

I met Dr. Ward and his devoted wife Peggy Ward-Rowe about twenty-five years ago at a Plum Village retreat in the United States. Even now, I recall Larry’s signature stature, grace, and dignity. He embodied both the Plum Village teachings and his Christian roots as a Baptist minister. Dr. Ward, together with Sister Kaira Jewel, was highly instrumental in organizing and launching the first BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) retreat in North America at Deer Park Monastery, which brought together hundreds of BIPOC practitioners from around the world. That highly successful retreat gave rise to a film on the Colors of Compassion Retreat and a book largely based on the retreat, entitled Together We Are One: Honoring Our Diversity, Celebrating Our Connection, written by Thích Nhất Hạnh and published by Parallax Press in 2010. Larry’s efforts and commitment to bring the practice of mindfulness in the Plum Village tradition to a broad audience, and especially to historically socially marginalized groups, planted seeds that now flourish with diverse sanghas worldwide.

In 2015, I interviewed Dr. Ward for my book, The Mindful School Leader: Practices to Transform Your Leadership and School. At the time, Dr. Ward was the Head of Organizational and Business Development at The American School of Bangkok, Thailand, and he was completing his PhD in brain plasticity at the University of the West in Rosemead, California.  This was not an ordinary day and not an ordinary interview. Just outside his office was the sound of explosions and antigovernment protests that had left dozens injured, rocking the country.  Despite the violence, Larry remained calm and composed throughout the interview, an anchor in a sea of turmoil and a true embodiment of peacemaking, peacekeeping, and calm, grounded presence under the most chaotic and dangerous circumstances.

Dr. Ward embodied a global perspective as an educator and mindfulness practitioner with Tibetan Buddhists in Hong Kong, Soto Zen Buddhists in the United States, and Chinese Buddhists in Taiwan and China. As an international leader and mindfulness practitioner, Larry spoke eloquently about his mindfulness practice within the Plum Village community, his devotion to his teacher, Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh, celebrating and cherishing awareness of his breath and body, and releasing tension within his body to remain a calm and peaceful presence.

On June 29, 2025, I received an email from Larry with a copy of his new book of poetry, inviting me to write an endorsement. As I read the book, I was overcome with a stunning sense of joy, wonder, and awe. I realized Larry came home to himself. Through his poetry, he touched an essential and elemental Buddha nature within himself and illuminated that for us to see and feel. His poetry was a transmission.

Recently, I was in conversation with a Taiwanese friend and fellow mindfulness practitioner about the power of listening, and of course I thought about Larry. They mentioned that the Chinese character for listening contains many elements, including those for the ears, eyes, mind, and heart. In other words, we listen not just with the ears to hear but with the mind to reflect and discern, with the eyes to see and focus, a quality of attentiveness, and with the heart to feel. Dr. Ward embodied the essence of true listening to the bounty, beauty, and brutality of life, to the great turning of our lives to transform and to be transformed, to the potential and power of community, to the light within.

I am endlessly grateful to have accompanied Larry on the path of practice and the community of love that is Plum Village. His life continues to shine with clarity and depth of expression with each breath, each step.

—Valerie Brown, Dharma teacher, Plum Village

Homage to our beloved ancestor, Dr. Larry Ward

Larry Ward has been a powerful presence of love and care in my life since before I was born. He and my parents worked together in the Ecumenical Institute (later known as the Institute of Cultural Affairs), a global intentional community dedicated to spiritual renewal and social change. Because the children in our community were cared for collectively, Larry cared for me as a baby. He was among the first Black leaders in both the Ecumenical Institute/ICA and the Plum Village Order of Interbeing, where he was a gifted teacher, bringing wisdom, courage, and compassion to the community.

Larry was both a Baptist minister and a Buddhist Dharma teacher, a combination that for him never posed a conflict. He felt that Jesus and Thích Nhất Hạnh were deeply aligned, and his life reflected the way these two traditions could harmonize. At times, his voice carried the power and fire of the Black Baptist tradition, and at others, the gentleness and clarity of the Buddha’s path—blending seamlessly into something uniquely his own.

His Dharma name was True Great Sound, and he was indeed a master of sound. He soothed, uplifted, and gave confidence through his soulful songs; through the way he recited a poem from the depths of his being; and through the way he directed us in his teachings to listen to the sounds of the world—both the suffering and the joy—and to respond wholeheartedly.

When I became a nun, Larry’s mentorship and steadfast support were a guiding light. Together, he and I helped bring into being the first POC retreat at Deer Park Monastery in 2004, which is still to date the largest BIPOC retreat ever held in the US, and we continued organizing and teaching these retreats in subsequent years. Larry’s Dharma talks were tender, authentic, and transformative, addressing the pain and resilience of people of color. He embodied and encouraged us to “stand up in the house of belonging,” as he writes in his poem, “For You.”

We also collaborated with others on creating a new Touching the Earth practice to honor the many racial and ethnic land ancestors in the US. When Thích Nhất Hạnh asked me to edit his teachings from the POC retreats into a book, he requested that I include Larry’s and my teachings in it, and Together We Are One: Honoring Our Diversity, Celebrating Our Connection came out in 2010.

Larry experienced enormous suffering in his life, but he moved through the world with grace, humor, and lightness. He was deeply grounded in the Dharma, which allowed him to steadfastly engage with both personal and collective shadows. His book America’s Racial Karma is a luminous and courageous guide on how healing America’s racial wounds is inseparable from our collective awakening. Thích Nhất Hạnh’s deep love and respect for Larry and his wife Peggy were evident in his invitation to them to live permanently at Deer Park, a rare honor. Larry and Peggy invested their lives in building community and mentoring others wherever they went, and they were beloved as a teaching couple all over the world.

Larry and I had the opportunity to teach together again at Omega in 2023, at the “Be Not Afraid: We Were Made for These Times” retreat. Larry and Peggy’s visit to our home in 2023 left us with such wonderful memories of their warmth and presence. That same year, we gathered with Buddhist and Christian practitioners for a communal reading of bell hooks’ last unpublished work of poems and prayers at Harvard—an experience of communing with the ancestors and each other in which Larry was a bright and powerful light.

He wrote an incredibly supportive foreword to Healing Our Way Home, affirming the three of us Black women co-authors and the importance of our stories. His luminous book of poetry, completed just this summer (2025), moved me deeply, and I was honored to endorse it. His words reveal what he lived: the wisdom, beauty, and compassion he continually shared with the world.

Larry Ward was, as Judi White put it, both a spiritual revolutionary and a spiritual evolutionary, embodying the courage to challenge systems of suffering while also evolving our collective consciousness toward love and liberation. And he loved life while doing this—he savored music, poetry, friendship, dogs, and the joy of connection to the living world.

Larry Ward’s life was a testament to love, courage, and service. He leaves a luminous legacy of teaching, mentorship, and presence that will continue to guide and inspire. I am so grateful for the gift of his life and feel honored that I had the opportunity to walk alongside him on this beautiful path.

—Kaira Jewel Lingo, Buddhist teacher, Order of Interbeing