Our dear friend Dr. Tho Ha Vinh ‘crossed over to the other shore’ on September 26, 2025, a day before his 75th birthday.
The Fintry Trust’s Integral Wisdom (IW) initiative will greatly miss him. Tho, whose Dharma name was True Great Understanding was a well-respected Buddhist Dharma Teacher in the Vietnamese Tradition and was ordained by Zen Master, Thich Nhat Hanh.
He was a regular contributor to the Trust, giving a talk in our series ‘Harmony: Reconnecting to Spirit for People and Planet’; and in July 2024, we were privileged to have him talk to the IW Summer School participants on ‘Know Thyself: The Path to Inner Wisdom’ ‘live’ from a meditation retreat he was leading in the Swiss alps.
Tho’s father was Vietnamese and his mother French; he was raised in many countries but settled in Switzerland, where he studied for a PhD in psychology and education at Geneva University.
He first visited Vietnam with his father in 1982 when he was 31 years old, and this left him with a lifelong dedication to children’s education. He shared his passion for education with his wife Lisi and they co-founded the Eurasia Learning Institute (ELI) in 2015 which offers experiential programmes and collaborative processes linking inner transformation to social innovation, for a happy and sustainable world.
Tho was also a highly respected figure in international humanitarian and educational circles. During his long career he worked at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as Head of Training, Learning, and Development; training professionals in war zones and emergency response situations around the world.
Later, from 2012 to 2018, he served as the Programme Director at the Gross National Happiness (GNH) Centre in Bhutan. And while there, he played a key role in developing international programmes and advocating for happiness and well-being beyond GDP (Gross Domestic Product).
Tho repeatedly emphasised that ‘happiness is a skill and must be self-learned and cultivated from within’. He looked at happiness from three viewpoints: taking care of oneself; spreading it to others; and caring for the ecosystem and environment.
Tho will be greatly missed for his generosity of spirit, kindness, and wisdom. He will be remembered for a life well-led, devoted to cultivating and spreading happiness and compassion. His publications include: ‘A Culture of Happiness: How to Scale up Happiness from People to Organizations’ (2022).
We are pleased to offer you this free recording, of Tho’s talk ‘The Inner and Outer Conditions of Happiness’ taken from the Fintry Trust’s Harmony series. Watch talk here on YouTube. His self-paced course ‘Mindfulness and Buddhist Psychology as Gateways to Self-Knowledge and Self-Transformation’ is also available on integralwisdom.org
“The transformation of suffering in the Buddhist tradition is based on two main pillars, which are wisdom and compassion, or wisdom and love. So, these are like the two fundamental pillars… that allow for the transformation of suffering into true happiness, into lasting peace and well-being. So that's the hope. That's the good news. That's the light that we see shining. And that gives us courage.” (Tho Ha Vinh, The Fintry Trust Summer School, 2024)
