Rev. Danny Fisher

The Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi at the White House this past July 26th, 2010. Photo via Buddhist Global Relief.

My latest “On the Buddhism Beat” post is now online over at Shambhala Sun Space.  This week, it’s a conversation with our friend the Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi about his recent visit to the White House (!!).  A well-known and prodigious translator of Pali Buddhist texts into English, he is also the founder of Buddhist Global Relief— a new, visionary, Buddhist-inspired humanitarian organization contributing to relief and justice efforts all over the world.  It was in his capacity as BGR’s founder that the Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi found himself called to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Here’s a snippet:

The Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi at the White House. I sure like the sound of that! What can you tell us about your visit? What brought you there?

The Center for Interfaith Action (CIFA), based in Washington, has been organizing a Global Initiative for Faith, Health and Development. The initiative was launched in response to President Obama’s call for the world’s religions to collaborate on issues of shared humanitarian concern. The aim of the initiative is to prepare a strategic framework to advance and strengthen interreligious cooperation on action against global poverty and illness.

To prepare the strategic framework, CIFA has appointed a task force, bringing together the world’s most prominent faith-based relief organizations to propose ideas, explore opportunities for collaboration, and lay down broad principles for interreligious action. They have emphasized that the purpose is interreligious action, not dialogue. In gathering the task force, CIFA wanted to broaden the range of the Global Initiative by including delegates from other religions besides the three Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. After a careful review, they chose Buddhist Global Relief (BGR) as the best qualified American Buddhist organization to serve in this role.

It felt odd for us to be sitting at the same table with delegates from such faith-based relief organizations as World Vision, Catholic Relief Services, the American Jewish World Service, and Islamic Relief USA. These have all been in existence for decades and their budgets run in the multi-millions. However, though BGR is only two-years old and much smaller in scale, the organizers were impressed by our achievements and the broad reach of our programs during our short life span. Thus CIFA invited our executive director, Kim Behan, and me to the first meeting of the task force, held at the White House on the afternoon of July 26th.

Read the rest here.

You can also find my previous conversation with the Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi about Haiti for Shambhala Sun Space here.  Also, be sure to check out my extended interview with him for elephant journal.