In a world that tells us we are broken, incomplete, and in need of constant improvement, writer and teacher Cuong Lu offers a different story. His new book, At Peace, Filled with Joy (2026), released by Shambhala, gently pushes back against the relentless pressure to become someone else—and reminds us that peace is something we already carry within us. A former monk-turned-Buddhist teacher and author, Cuong Lu has spent his life practicing this remembering. Now he invites us to do the same.
“The Dhammapada contains the verses the Buddha spoke himself,” Cuong Lu tells me over Zoom, his warmth palpable even through the screen. “But when you read it, you don’t get in touch with the wisdom of the Buddha. You get in touch with your own wisdom.”
His new book offers a fresh exploration of this ancient collection of verses. Fifty-seven of them appear here, each accompanied by a Zen Key and a Reflection drawn from his life as a monk, prison chaplain, husband, father, and twenty-first-century citizen.
Cuong Lu was ordained by Thich Nhat Hanh and spent sixteen years at Plum Village. He left at forty-one. What followed was not liberation, but confusion. “After I left the monastery, I felt stripped of my identity,” he writes. “The rhythm of daily life I had trusted was gone. The silence, once sacred, became heavy.”
I ask him about this period. “I saw that I had never finished,” he says. “I could see my pride, my knowledge, the many things that prevented me from touching the deepest part of myself. And I knew I could not finish there.”
It was in that confusion that he touched something unexpected. “I touched the non-suffering deep in my suffering. Before that, I saw non-suffering as happiness. But non-suffering is not happiness. When you are able to get in touch with non-suffering, you are no longer afraid of suffering. Because non-suffering is the essence of suffering.”
He pauses, letting this land. “Like when you look at a banana, and the non-banana is the essence of the banana. If you don’t believe that, just wait. You’ll recognize it.”
One of the most powerful themes in At Peace, Filled with Joy is the idea that we are already whole. There is nothing to fix, only something to recognize. “You don’t need to be perfect; you just need to be you,” he writes. “When you see that you are already whole, you stop organizing your life around the wound.”
Cuong Lu’s invitation is not to improve, but to uncover—a message that feels particularly urgent in a culture that equates growth with self-improvement. “The book is not to discover Cuong Lu or the Buddha,” he says. “It’s to discover Nina Müller. You discover yourself. That’s the function of this book.”
Reading At Peace, Filled with Joy, I was struck by how Cuong Lu weaves together Buddhist teachings with insights from psychology, quantum physics, and even Christianity. St. Francis of Assisi appears. Dr. Gabor Maté. Peter Levine. He cites the “wood wide web” of fungi that connects trees underground.
I ask him why. Everything he has lived, suffered, and loved, he says, must be expressed in his own way—and in that expression, all traditions find their place. He tells me about searching for a retreat center in France. Standing before a church, he looked at a statue of Jesus and asked for help. He found the center soon after. For Cuong Lu, the wisdom of emptiness lives in the New Testament as much as in the Dhammapada. Different teachings, same source.
His latest project—the No Word Zen order—extends this vision. It’s a community for people who want to be monastic members without living in a monastery. Laypeople who, as Cuong Lu puts it, “deep in their hearts, know they are monks and nuns.” His students now come from around the world.
“Society is the temple,” he says. “You don’t need the form of a monk to be a monk. You can practice in society. You have to practice in society.” He hopes to see “millions of monks in society—not out of society, but in it. People who can be fathers, mothers, children, and at the same time, know they are monks at heart.”
For Cuong Lu, the Dhammapada is an invitation to show up as we already are—imperfect, uncertain, and entirely enough. “These teachings do not offer perfection,” he writes. “They offer presence.”
As our conversation winds down, I ask Cuong Lu if there’s anything he wants to add. “One thing I want to tell my readers is: you are always beautiful. Always wise. Even when you’re suffering. When we suffer, we think we’re nobody. And there are so many young people who think, ‘I’ve suffered too much. I don’t want to live anymore.’ I want to tell them: when you’re suffering, you have a chance. To get in touch with your wisdom. Wisdom is there in suffering. Peace is there in suffering. Not just in happiness.”
He smiles. “If you can see that, you discover another way to live your life. You become more beautiful. Because you believe in yourself. And that’s very funny,” he says, “because what is non-self? And I encourage people to believe in themselves. Only in yourself can you find non-self. Only in yourself. If you throw yourself away, you cannot find non-suffering.”
At Peace, Filled with Joy is not a book to read once. It is a book to return to, like an old friend. “Every time you read it, you discover yourself again,” Cuong Lu says. “Sometimes you live your life and you lose yourself. You take the book, and you read, and you think, ‘Oh. Hello. I love myself.’”
Cuong Lu’s teaching offers a quiet revolution: we are already whole, already wise, already at peace. He has walked the path the Dhammapada describes—“from confusion to clarity, from suffering to wisdom, from despair to joy”—and now he shares it with us. His invitation is simple. “Whether you reread a verse a day or just go sit by a tree, the Dharma is alive in you. Knowing that fills me with joy.”
Nina Müller is a mindfulness teacher who offers online mindfulness coaching sessions. To find out more, please visit The Mindful Practice and book a complimentary consultation.
References
Cuong Lu. 2026. At Peace, Filled with Joy: Buddhist Wisdom from the Dhammapada. Boulder, Colorado: Shambhala Publications.
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