c. 1996 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) When the Nobel committee met Wednesday (Oct. 2) to decide who will be awarded the coveted Peace Prize to be announced Oct. 11, the list of nominees was a closely guarded secret. Nevertheless, word leaks out, mainly from those who have nominated.
This year, several high-profile religious leaders and groups are included in the list of 120 Nobel nominees: The Salvation Army, long known for its service to the poor; Roman Catholic Archbishop Samuel Ruiz, who has mediated civil strife in Chiapas, Mexico; and Roman Catholic Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo of East Timor, a critic of Indonesian occupation.
Lesser known is a small and soft-spoken Buddhist monk from Cambodia, whose quiet demeanor belies his fearless attempts to reconcile enemies and defuse hatred deeply embedded in the psyche of a nation recovering from years of civil war and mass murder.
Samdech Preah Maha Ghosananda, often called the”Gandhi of Cambodia,”has achieved near legendary status for bringing physical and spiritual healing to refugees traumatized by the Khmer Rouge, which ruled from 1975 to 1979. Later, as a refugee in Providence, R.I., he helped other Cambodians settle throughout North America and Europe, establishing several dozen Buddhist temples. And Ghosananda, now living in Phnom Penh, helped bring his nation’s warring factions to a tenuous peace agreement, using both his strict neutrality and his moral authority as supreme patriarch of Cambodian Buddhism.”As a deeply committed Buddhist, Maha Ghosananda embodies the spirit of nonviolence and compassion and has spent much of his life in untiring, dedicated effort to nurture peacefulness by example, by word and by deed,”said Kara Newell, executive director of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that nominated Ghosananda for the Nobel Prize.
This is Ghosananda’s third nomination.
Carrying his activism to the global sphere, Ghosananda helped organize an international campaign urging a worldwide ban on the production, deployment and use of antipersonnel land mines.
He also has participated in peace negotiations for Sri Lanka and has taken part in commemorations at Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
Ghosananda’s activities are all the more remarkable because this elfish man in a saffron robe and simple sandals is quiet, almost to the point of appearing shy. In English at least, he often speaks in aphorisms that would seem abstract coming from anyone but one who has practiced them to such effect.”I make peace with myself,”he told a Kentucky interfaith conference this summer.”If you make peace with yourself, you will give peace to other people who are near to you. If you are peaceful, they become peaceful.” And in an era when getting in touch with one’s anger is considered a virtue in the West, Ghosananda firmly invokes the Buddhist principle that categorically rejects anger at any oppressor.”What is the cause of the fighting?”he asked.”That is anger. In order to make peace, we must cultivate loving-kindness.” The Rev. Peter Pond, a United Church of Christ minister from Providence who has worked closely with Ghosananda since 1979, said that although Ghosananda is fluent in about 15 languages, he tends to be most articulate in his native Khmer.
But his real eloquence is in actions such as the land-mine campaign, said Pond:”That’s an example of how he is practical, even though sometimes he sounds impractical.” Ghosananda is a moving force behind the Campaign to Ban Land Mines, an alliance of 350 non-governmental organizations, which has lobbied the United Nations, the United States and other nations to ban the manufacture and sale of the weapons.
While President Clinton has said he supports an eventual ban on land mines, the United States has yet to take steps to approve the immediate, sweeping ban called for by Ghosananda and other anti-mine campaigners. On Thursday (Oct. 3), an international conference of some three dozen nations will convene in Ottawa, Canada, in another effort to negotiate a comprehensive ban on the production and use of land mines.
Between 6 million and 11 million land mines remain buried in Cambodia, one of the most heavily mined nations in the world, killing or wounding 200 to 300 people a month. It is one of an estimated 60 nations in which mines remain a lethal threat to civilian populations. Ghosananda has led annual peace walks in Cambodia to publicize the land-mine issue.
Born in 1924, Ghosananda became a monk at age 19 and studied under several spiritual masters, including a former associate of Indian peace advocate Mohandas K. Gandhi who trained Ghosananda in non-violent activism.
Ghosananda was living in a Thai hermitage during the Khmer Rouge rule in the late 1970s, when as many as 2 million people were killed by hard labor, execution, starvation or disease in the Communist government’s ruthless attempt to build an agrarian utopia. Almost all of the country’s monks and nuns were killed, and most temples were destroyed.
Defying the conventional expectation that Buddhist monks mind their spiritual business and stay out of politics, Ghosananda traveled to camps on the Thai border, distributing tracts to remind traumatized refugees of the Buddha’s words:”Hatred can never be appeased by hatred. Hatred can only be appeased by love.”Ghosananda’s presence there was a stunning witness after years of religious repression, said Pond:”Forty-thousand people literally went on their knees as he entered”a camp.”Maha Ghosananda is the dreamkeeper of Cambodia,”wrote Dith Pran, The New York Times translator and photographer whose brutal treatment by the Khmer Rouge was chronicled in the 1984 movie”The Killing Fields.” Ghosananda was always”reminding us that Buddhism was alive in us, and that we could call upon the sweetness and depth of the tradition,”Pran wrote in a foreword to Ghosananda’s 1992 book,”Step by Step”(Parallax Press).”Although his entire family was lost in the (Cambodian) holocaust, he shows no bitterness.” Indeed, Ghosananda has exasperated many in his fervent neutrality, even agreeing to a Khmer Rouge request in 1981 to help build a temple at one of their camps.”I do not question that loving one’s oppressors _ Cambodians loving the Khmer Rouge _ may be the most difficult attitude to achieve,”he wrote in”Step by Step.””But it is a law of the universe that retaliation, hatred and revenge only continue the cycle and never stop it.” While living in America during the 1980s, Ghosananda ran into conflicts with members of his modest temple located in a Providence tenement. Ghosananda ultimately turned the purse strings over to the members after they sued in 1990, Pond said. Ghosananda’s opponents wanted the funds used for the temple itself, while Ghosananda was channeling the money toward efforts to rebuild Cambodia, Pond said.
But most Cambodian immigrants in the West admired Ghosananda’s efforts to build temples and resettle immigrants, he said. During laborious peace talks that led to United Nations-sponsored democratic elections in Cambodia in 1993, Ghosananda would often conduct Buddhist ceremonies for the participants and remind them of”their Buddha nature,”said Pond.
With such a track record, peace activists for years have paid tribute to Ghosananda. But one is especially telling: When the Dalai Lama entered the room at the Kentucky interfaith conference, a row of Buddhist monks all bowed respectfully, and he bowed in acknowledgement. But when he approached Ghosananda, the Nobel laureate made a point of bowing even lower to him. It was not only a gesture of deepest respect but of shared experience: two Buddhists, both the spiritual leaders of their people, whose response to the catastrophic suffering in their countries transformed them from provincial patriarchs to global forces for political and religious reconciliation.”We Buddhists must find the courage to leave our temples and enter the temples of human experience, temples that are filled with suffering,”Ghosananda said at the conference.”If we listen to the Buddha, Christ, or Gandhi, we can do nothing else. The refugee camps, the prisons, the ghettos, and the battlefields will then become our temples.”
MJP END SMITH
