Vietnamese monk-turned-peace-activist Thich Nhat Hanh, a hugely influential Buddhist credited with bringing mindfulness to the West, has died aged 95.

The Zen master, whose reach within Buddhism is seen as second only to the Dalai Lama, spent nearly four decades in exile after being banished from his homeland for calling for an end to the Vietnam-American War.

Thich Nhat Hanh “passed away peacefully” at the Tu Hieu Temple in the city of Hue, Vietnam’s Buddhist heartland, his Zen teaching organisation, the Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism, said.

Before his return to Vietnam in 2018, he set up retreats around the world and wrote over 100 books including on mindfulness and meditation — a cornerstone of a $4.2 trillion global wellness industry espoused by Oprah Winfrey, Arianna Huffington and tech billionaire Marc Benioff.

Born in 1926, Thich Nhat Hanh was ordained aged 16 and went on to found a youth school which trained volunteers to build clinics and infrastructure in villages blighted by war.

In the early 1960s he travelled to the U.S., where he taught at Columbia and Princeton universities, but after one trip in 1966 to meet U.S. civil rights icon Martin Luther King — who joined his calls to end the Vietnam War — he was barred from returning home. Believing that war was fundamentally wrong, the monk refused to take sides in the conflict and was consequently persecuted by the governments of both North and South Vietnam.