A Father's Lamentation

2026-09-27 · Ho Chanh Nghia

Originally published on Substack: https://hochanhnghia.substack.com/p/a-fathers-lamentation

A page from Krishnamurti — “The Right Kind of Education.” The photo is the post; read it first.

“Conditioning of any kind, whether political or religious, is not freedom and it will never bring peace.”

I have been through many educational institutions. Buddhist education — Vietnam, Thailand, Sri Lanka. Catholic education. I am with Jiddu here.

Education is needed. But education is also the problem. One does not eliminate the other. It is not that simple.

Take Miyamoto Musashi. He left the institutions. He left those who taught him. Then he wrote the Book of Five Rings — which is itself education. The intent was to teach.

So the question was never whether education is needed. The question is the finer details: what is education, and what is appropriate, and what is not.

The education I mean is the one provided by Bruce Lee, Miyamoto Musashi, and Lee Kuan Yew.

Jiddu is education. The problem is not Jiddu. The problem is us — we worship Jiddu, we parrot Jiddu, instead of doing what he did and living how he lived.

Bruce Lee and Miyamoto Musashi shared the same faith. Their genius was their life and their result. But genius gets entrusted to inferior minds — students who hold the lineage instead of dropping it. A man near me, third generation of Bruce Lee’s school, wants to carry on the lineage. The lineage of the man who taught “absorb what is useful, discard what is useless” is almost an oxymoron.

Add Singapore to the list of tragedies of genius. Lee Kuan Yew said demolish my house — Singapore needs the land, my dead self doesn’t need it, and keeping it as a souvenir does not help Singapore. He is not saying it is wrong. He is weighing what is useful. The average won anyway. In December 2025, 38 Oxley Road was gazetted a national monument. The genius takes his genius to the grave and leaves an idol too hard to match, impossible to defeat or surpass. So all grovel under the shadow, for fear of failing to live up to standards.

The Heart Sutra has a special place for me. Bát Nhã Ba La Mật Đa Tâm Kinh. The instructions for finding Buddha are to understand that Buddha does not exist — and then it proceeds to explain how to reach Buddha across twenty-six volumes. And the followers put it on a shelf and pray to it for protection against evils.

The map is not the territory. In April, two American MC-130s landed on a makeshift desert strip inside Iran. The sand trapped their landing gear. Ninety-plus operators stranded behind enemy lines — the rescue force needed rescuing. Both aircraft were destroyed on Iranian soil. Defeated by their own map.

During the Iraq war, I saw the intel brief for the WMD. Why Colin Powell could not show it at the UN was not because it would reveal our capabilities. It would reveal our capabilities were looking at a pile of dirt and declaring it evidence of Iraq moving its WMD.

Ukraine: America won the war on YouTube. Russia owns the ground.

The test score is not the child. The diploma is not the education. Parents frame the map and hang it on the wall.

I am building an education system — PHAM education. Holding these threads together, seeing the one pattern across them, is its last phase. I call that phase M, in a taxonomy I am still writing.

Every school I passed through handed me the finger and called it the moon.

The photo is the call. “The Right Kind of Education.” Jiddu called for it. I am calling for it.