A Gift of Dharma for 10.31.09
Today’s quote comes to us from Maha Ghosananda (1929-2007).
Maha Ghosananda was ordained in the Cambodian Buddhist Order of Theravāda Buddhism at the age of fourteen. As a young monk, he studied with such luminaries as Samdech Preah Sangha Raja Chuon Noth, Bhikkhu Buddhadhasa, and Nichidatsu Fujii, and also earned a doctorate in Buddhist Studies from India’s Nalanda University. He was studying with Ajahn Dhammadaro at his forest hermitage in Thailand when refugees from his country first began to flee from the horrors of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime.
By the mid-1970s, he had left the hermitage completely and was serving full-time in the refugee communities along the Thai-Cambodian border. Among other activities, he established temples in many of the camps, ordained new monks, and distributed tracts to survivors with a quote from the Dhammapada: “Hatred can never be appeased by hatred, hatred can only be appeased by love.”
As one of relatively few Buddhist monks to survive the Cambodian genocide, he was instrumental in preserving the country’s unique Buddhist heritage. Almost immediately following the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, he had returned to begin teaching, establishing temples, and revitalizing Buddhism in Cambodia. In the years that followed, he would also establish temples and train monastic practitioners in immigrant communities throughout North America, Europe, and Australia.
In 1988, he was elected Supreme Patriarch of Cambodian Buddhism by his expatriate peers in the sangha. In 1991, amidst the civil war that followed the signing of a peace treaty in Cambodia, Maha Ghosananda led a march through the country—a walk that gathered more and more participants as he continued. This was the first of many Dhammayietra Walks for Peace and Reconciliation, which simply sought to promote peace and nonviolence.
Honored with both Japan’s Niwano Peace Prize and Norway’s Rafto Human Rights Award for his work, he was also nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize six times. Among those who cited him for the honor were U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell (who nominated him twice), the American Friends Services Committee, and an anonymous Nobel Peace laureate.
Among his writing is Step by Step: Meditations on Wisdom and Compassion (Parallax Press, 1991)–a classic of modern engaged Buddhist literature.
Our friend Andrew Cooper at Tricycle: The Buddhist Review offered a beautiful reflection on Ghosananda in the magazine’s latest issue. Subscribers can read it online here.
Here’s the quote:
What can Buddhism do to heal the wounds of the world? What did the Buddha teach that we can use to heal and elevate the human condition? One of the Buddha’s most courageous acts was to walk onto a battlefield to stop a conflict. He did not sit in his temple waiting for the oppressors to approach him. He walked right onto the battlefield to stop the conflict…
We Buddhists must find the courage to leave our temples and enter the temples of contemporary human experience, temples that are filled with suffering. If we listen to the Buddha, Christ or Gandhi, we can do nothing else. The refugee camps, the prisons, the ghettos, and the battlefield will then become our temples. We have so much work to do.
[Photo by nyana-ponika.]
