Jul 1, 2012 - CND: We've been threatened many times. They told me ... CND: Sometimes I think about that but, no, ......
SGI Soka Gakkai International
Quarterly
A Buddhist Forum for Peace, Culture and Education
Living with Courage
A NEW MEASURE OF POWER Rev. James Lawson AN UNDAUNTED VOICE Chouchou Namegabe Dubuisson THE QUESTION OF COURAGE William Ian Miller
July 2012 Number 69
Soka Gakkai International Quarterly Magazine
July 2012
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Contents Anthony George Elizabeth Ingrams Joan Anderson Julie Kazumi Kakiuchi Keiko Kakurai Marisa Stenson Motoki Kawamorita Richard Walker Satoko Suzuki Yoshiko Matsumoto Yoshinori Miyagawa
FEATURE
PEOPLE
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Living with Courage Courage and Cowardice By Anthony McGowan
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Art Direction & Design by Modis Design Printed by Japan Print Co., Ltd. © 2012 Soka Gakkai International All rights reserved. Printed in Japan. Printed on FSC certified paper, supporting responsible forest management. ISSN 1341-6510
An Undaunted Voice Interview with Chouchou Namegabe Dubuisson
Published by Soka Gakkai International
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The Fabric of Daily Life
GLOBAL CITIZENS 20
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Rosendo Mauricio Sermeño —The Imperative of Peace By Daisaku Ikeda
AROUND THE WORLD 22
Interviews from around the world
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A Sign of Hope By Kenichi Kurosawa, Japan
The Power of Courage Daisaku Ikeda in conversation with youth
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A New Measure of Power Interview with Rev. James Lawson
In Pursuit of Wild Dreams By Erendro Leichombam Singh, USA
SGI activity news from around the world
A Mother’s Fearless Heart
ON VOCATION
From an interview with Visaka Dharmadasa
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Beginning It
BUDDHISM IN DAILY LIFE
By Howard Hill
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Legal Challenges
The Treasure Tower
The Question of Courage By William Ian Miller
SGI
Quarterly
A Buddhist Forum for Peace, Culture and Education
The SGI Quarterly aims to highlight initiatives and perspectives on peace, education and culture and to provide information about the Soka Gakkai International’s activities around the world. The views expressed in the SGI Quarterly are not necessarily those of the SGI. The editorial team (see above) welcomes ideas and comments from readers.
Photo credits: (left to right) © Charlotta Janssen; © Sven Torfinn/Panos Pictures; © Seikyo Shimbun
Editorial Team:
Living with Courage
Photo credit: SuperStock/Getty Images
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hat is courage? Is it, as Aristotle said, refusal to succumb to the fear we feel facing danger, or does it require the actual conquest of fear and even a readiness to die? Where then is the line between courage and a reckless disregard for life? Because courage is hard to pin down, it is often delineated in terms of its opposite—the cowardice abhorred in all human cultures. Philosophers and thinkers have identified courage as the greatest of all virtues, because it is the virtue that sustains all others. Courage, though, is not only the province of the virtuous: it is also claimed by those with vicious motives. Very often, courage has been associated with particular ideals of maleness and manhood, with military valor and martial glory. But as Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and others made so clear,
courage is the necessary heart of nonviolence. The nature of courage comes into sharper focus when refracted through the prism of our own lives. Few of us are called upon to risk death in battle, nor are we faced with the choice of shirking a heroic but risky feat. But we all need courage to endure adversity, and each of us knows the extent to which our lives are limited by fears of one kind or another. From the perspective of Buddhism, courage is the quality that enables us to expand our lives and manifest our innate potential—to do the difficult thing we know to be right. Courage impels us to grow beyond our own selfish concerns, to take action for the happiness of others. For this reason, Buddhism sees an integral relationship between courage and compassion. As SGI President Daisaku Ikeda succinctly puts it, courage makes our lives brilliant. ❖
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Courage and Cowardice
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Anthony McGowan is an awardwinning author of books for adults, teenagers and younger children. He has written two highly acclaimed literary thrillers, Stag Hunt and Mortal Coil. Filming began in the UK in March 2012 on the movie based on his book for young adults The Knife That Killed Me.
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lato’s early dialogue on courage, Laches, points up the difficulty in pinning down what we mean by courage. All the definitions we reach for seem either to be excessively restrictive, or unnecessarily permissive, gathering in too few or too many of those moments of resolve or recklessness that we recognize as instances of bravery. Casting around, one finds two competing paradigms of courage. The old-school definition makes courage synonymous with fearlessness. The hero, as generally conceived, seems to have this quality—lightness in the face of danger, a certain swagger. Our hero, from Galahad to Captain Scott and on to Luke Skywalker, might be permitted to smile regretfully at the lost future as he confronts his (usually his, of course) nemesis, but never will his soul quake. Coming up on the rails is a contrary view— that true courage, in fact, precisely involves the overcoming of fear. The soul must quake before resolution stiffens it. This view may be less heroic, but it adds a psychological realism, for who has
not achieved at least the first part of this definition of courage? But the truth is that these remain words, and they struggle to gain purchase on the world of lived experience. So I’ve tried to dig down in my memory to find examples of courage to add flesh to the wraithlike concept. In my own life, thoughts on courage tend to settle like dust not on the positive virtue, but on its negative partner. On cowardice. And my cowardice almost invariably takes the same form: a shrinking from social awkwardness, a flight from any situation in which I might be embarrassed or humiliated. The first real job I ever had was working in a UK tax office. I was straight out of university and, frankly, didn’t have a clue. I was lost and hopeless and unhappy. My line manager was a person quite out of my experience. Let’s call her Norma. Clearly once a great beauty, now, approaching retirement, Norma was, to me at least, genuinely terrifying. She could see through me, and left me stuttering, blushing, lamely defending myself for my latest error or miscalculation.
Photo credit: © Amy Drucker/Getty Images
By Anthony McGowan
FEATURE But I got by. I survived by surrendering. By paying court. By offering her the elaborate compliments she demanded. She outgunned me, and so I struck my colors. But then another person joined our team: Sarah, a dumpy, happy, not very bright former primary school teacher, who didn’t know how to use apostrophes and whose best friend was the budgie she used to let fly freely around her tiny flat. I was rather fond of her, and I tried to show her the ropes. My boss, however, hated Sarah. Something about her plainness, and the lack of interest that she showed in her dress and hair, enraged Norma. And so a
Dean Taylor was in my class. He was one of the kids in a carefully pressed blazer, his hair combed into a side parting, his tie neatly knotted, who draws bullies the way grime loves a fingernail. His chief tormentor was a kid called Merton. Merton wasn’t the worst of the hard cases, but for some reason he had it in for Dean. Random punches, sly, back-of-the-head slaps. The routine trippings and dead-legs that make school playtime a little hell to be endured. Dean, like the rest of us, put up with this sort of thing. We put up with it partly through physical fear—the thought that the punches would get worse if we
And then something happened. Merton stopped fighting. His arms no longer flailed down on Paul’s head. The other hard kids stopped screaming, and launched no more than the occasional, desultory foray. And the whole playground was somehow transformed. The silence of the oppressed minority changed its texture. And then suddenly it was not silence anymore, but a kind of exultant murmuring. And finally a joyous cheering. What had happened, I think, is that our world—the hard kids and the quiet, even Merton and his crew—suddenly saw that what Paul was doing was brave, and true,
“Almost every day held a challenge, a conflict, a moral dilemma: the raw material from which cowardice and courage are formed.” campaign of persecution began. Cutting remarks came her way, along with the nastiest and most tedious office jobs. Sarah was frequently driven to tears. After a couple of months, she left. And me, what had I done to protect her? Nothing, except offer quiet condolence and eye-rolling sympathy at Norma’s latest sally. I never confronted Norma with the unfairness of her conduct, never publicly stood up for Sarah. Why not? Because I was afraid. Because Norma had power and presence, and I was a coward, and I feared the embarrassment and awkwardness my intervention would cause. And because of my cowardice, a person’s life was made worse.
Photo credit: © DAJ/Getty Henry King/Getty Images Images
Brave, True and Just For my example of positive courage in action, I’m going to have to travel yet further back in time. Back to a period when almost every day held a challenge, a conflict, a moral dilemma: the raw material from which cowardice and courage are formed. My school was on the outskirts of Leeds, where the city, in the face of bogs and fens and scrubby moorland, loses its will to go on. Leeds back then was poor. And hard, and this toughness found its apogee in my school. It was a place where bullying and violence saturated the air like the Leeds rain.
snitched—but much more through the huge social pressure, the law which says, Thou Shalt Not Tell. And there were more subtle pressures. Drawing attention to the fact of being bullied meant adding to the humiliation. It was exposing your weakness to further ridicule, to mockery and to pity. But Dean had something the rest of us lacked. He had an older brother, called Paul. Paul was just a year older, and so similar to Dean in his scrawny neatness that they could pass for twins. One break time, Paul saw Dean take a punch from Merton. He then calmly took Merton by the collar and dragged him across the yard toward the school, and the headmaster’s office. Merton was by far the larger and stronger of the two, and he rained down punches and kicks on Paul. We heard them land with either the crunch of knuckle on bone, or the softer, almost wet sound of knuckle on cheek. Merton’s mates joined in, turning the procession into a gauntlet. They jeered, they kicked, they tried to prize Merton away. But Paul still held on, still marched toward the office. He was bleeding by now, and his neat hair was tousled, his blazer torn. But on he went.
and just. And in the soul of every human, there is something that makes us bow our heads before such things. So what was it that made this act from Paul so brave, so right, so courageous? Well, there was the physical danger involved. There was the huge social pressure to overcome. And there was the simple justice of the act. And is there a lesson to be drawn from all this? Well, there is one, I think. I am haunted by those little acts of cowardice—not helping Sarah, not resisting the petty tyrants infesting the power structures of modern life. I wish that I had made my stands. And I imagine that, in contrast, Paul and Dean will always remember that moment of bravery in the playground, when courage and justice made them mighty. ❖ July 2012
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A New Measure of Power An interview with Rev. James Lawson In the late 1950s, James Lawson moved to the southern US state of Tennessee and, as as southern secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, began training students in Nashville in nonviolent direct action. Prior to that, he had spent over a year in jail as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. The students Lawson trained launched sit-ins and other protest actions to challenge segregation in Nashville. Many of them became key figures in the Civil Rights Movement.
In our July 2012 print edition, the introduction to this article erroneously described Rev. Lawson as holding the position of southern director of the Congress of Racial Equality in the late 1950s. He was in fact southern secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (1958-1960).
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Civil Rights activists stage a sit-in protest at a whites-only lunch counter in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1960. These protests thrust Civil Rights into the national consciousness.
SGI Quarterly: Do you remember a particular moment after you became involved in the Civil Rights Movement when you felt afraid? James Lawson: I recall a number of moments of fear. But, I should say to you that those are isolated moments, and that from the beginning of my involvement character requirements froze out any fear. I was going to finish my graduate degree and then probably move south to work in the movement. I had spent three years in India in ’53–’56 and then came back to Ohio for graduate school. I shook hands with Martin Luther King for the first time on February 6, 1957. I had been practicing and studying nonviolence from a Gandhian perspective of methodology for 10 years. And so as we met and talked, he said I should come south immediately. I said to him, “OK, I’ll come just as soon as I can,” which meant that I dropped out of graduate school and moved.
There was no fear in making that move. I don’t recall a single moment as I traveled around the South that I was frightened or fearful. And as we began the movement in Nashville, I wasn’t aware of any moment of fear there. I was expelled from the university—I had reenrolled at Vanderbilt University. I was made the target of many public attacks. This is the movement that produced Diane Nash, Congressman John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette and C. T. Vivian, and a whole wide range of other people. Well, some of those people write about the fears they had in doing what they were doing. I had no such fear as we did it. Why? And of course for Diane and John Lewis and others, their fears largely evaporated as soon as we got past the first public demonstrations. Because they realized that they were fighting against that which is wrong—they knew that segregation was wrong, but they had
Photo credit: Everett Collection/Aflo
An example of the fortitude of the Nashville students was seen during the Freedom Rides. In 1961, a group of activists planned to travel by bus through the southern states to challenge the segregation of public transport. In Anniston, Alabama, a bus they were traveling on was firebombed by members of the Ku Klux Klan, and the Freedom Riders were savagely beaten, narrowly escaping being lynched. When the movement’s leaders decided to suspend the journey, the students in Nashville were determined that violence should not be seen to triumph over nonviolent protest and, in place of the injured riders, continued the journey at the risk of their lives. Their actions gave vital impetus to the development of the Civil Rights Movement around the country. Described by Martin Luther King Jr. as the foremost nonviolence theorist in the world, Rev. Lawson, now in his 80s, remains a vibrant voice for social justice.
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Photo credit: © Charlotta Janssen (www.charlottajanssen.com)
not been given any clues as to how to go after defeating it. Our workshops in Nashville gave them the tools. Once we got past the first two weeks of demonstrations and once we got past the first violence and the first arrests, they had no fears. Operating on fear is an issue of character. Courage is not merely, or primarily, the absence of fear. It is the taking on of tasks and concerns that are larger than the fear. It is discovering how to face your fears and moving through them as a whole person. That is what is essential. I know the testimonies of some of these persons with whom I worked back then; they found the conquest of fear. Now, for all of them there may have been certain times when the fear was very strong, but they managed by virtue of the tasks they had assigned themselves to walk through those fears and overcome them. SGIQ: How did you train young activists in nonviolence? JL: I gave them concrete experiences of black people, Europeans and others in nonviolent behavior in situations of conflict. I gave them a picture of Jesus of Nazareth as a nonviolence practitioner, and an interpretation of his life from the point of view of his direct action. I especially gave them the methodology of Gandhi, as I and others had come to summarize it in 1957–58, and made him and his independence movement a major illustration of what nonviolent power can do. I put together a curriculum that helped them see that there were people not much different from ourselves who had decided that there was a better way of changing evil, rather than imitating it; and that Gandhi had called all of that nonviolence. Secondly, we worked on the scenery of segregation, what it was about, what downtown Nashville was about and how it deprived people. Then we did a series of role-playing exercises to help them face the possibilities of certain scenarios in their lives both at a personal level and then at the concrete level of the campaign we were devising. I gave them the tools to live with tension and fear and to have a different vision and recognize that they have the resources within themselves to exercise that different vision.
With fear, if you follow it from the perspective of adrenalin, it will mislead you in your humanity. But if you follow the fear through the perspective of your character at its best or through the task of doing good—justice that needs to be done, the tasks at hand—then the fear becomes an ally for your work.
In the Nashville movement in 1960, there developed a spirit that came to laugh at all three of those threats. In our movement—among our students and among our adults as well—those threats were destroyed in our minds and in our hearts and in the activity of the movement. So those powers that society had in Nashville
Painting of the mug shots of James Lawson taken after his arrest for a nonviolent protest in Jackson, Mississippi, by artist Charlotta Janssen
“Courage is not merely, or primarily, the absence of fear. It is the taking on of tasks and concerns that are larger than the fear.” SGIQ: Is it right to say that the courage of the activists created a change in the hearts and attitudes of their opponents? JL: Well, there is such a thing as a spirituality of nonviolence, the inner resources that one can shape and exercise that allows for the conquest of fear in a great variety of personal and social situations. In the movement back then, society used two or three major tools to reinforce the racism. There was the threat that if you do not adhere to it, you are going to be punished. The second threat was the threat of actual violence. The third was that you would be arrested. And so in our workshops we tried to deal with all three of those elements by which Jim Crow segregation was put in place.
for preserving segregation were no longer there in the minds of the people in the movement. During the bus boycott, Martin King said that the movement saw the “emergence of a new negro” in Montgomery, because people who joined the bus boycott basically told society, “You can threaten us, but it won’t mean anything to us. You can use violence against us. We are not going to be intimidated by it, and you can arrest us and we are not going to fear going to jail for the cause.” When the city government took out warrants against some 90 or 100 black folks in the boycott, people shocked the community and the police and the mayor, because they went to the police station to turn themselves in. The police had never heard of such a thing. July 2012
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SGIQ: Is nonviolence a strategy, or is it more than that? JL: I know there are people who do it only as a “tactic.” But I don’t know what that means, because we human beings are not “tacticians.” We have more going on in our minds and in our spirits. For human beings to act, we must have faith—confidence, trust—in what we do, whatever the methodology is, whatever the tactic is. And if we have doubts and fears that what we are doing will not work, we’re finished. When Gandhi says nonviolence is a social science for social change, I think he’s including the intellect, the heart, the personality, the emotions, the tactics, the methodology and the philosophy that you have to develop to make this work. And I think it does become a lifestyle, just as
when you launch a professional military career you develop a lifestyle, or when you become a lawyer you develop a lifestyle. In that lifestyle I think you can analyze methods and tactics versus spirituality, character. But in human beings it becomes a whole cloth, a whole garment. Today in Western civilization we have this massive mythology that the way you effect change is through violence, and that violence offers effective change. So nonviolence comes along and it has a critique of war, a critique of violence. We don’t think violence has worked. SGIQ: Many people are concerned about the state of the world. What do you think is necessary to galvanize people to stand against social injustices today? JL: Basically to figure out that you do the kind of politics that was represented by the Civil Rights Movement. The politics of participation and engagement, developing the empowerment of people who bend their power together to put into the public agenda a new measure of power that can challenge the old powers. When people collectively come together and strategize and plan, working together and acting together, they create a power that they can effectively use in their situation to effect change. ❖
Rev. Lawson presiding over a meeting calling for the desegregation of public facilities
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Chouchou interviews women in South Kivu
Chouchou Namegabe Dubuisson is a radio journalist from the city of Bukavu in Kivu, the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The region has for many years been mired in militia conflicts spilling over from the Rwanda genocide and fueled by competition over lucrative mineral deposits in the area. The conflict in Congo has claimed over five million lives and been marked by brutal sexual violence against women. This is sometimes incorrectly assumed to be rooted in the culture of the region. Sadly, sexual violence is a tactic of terror in conflicts around the world. In 1999, Chouchou began broadcasting the testimonies of rape survivors and advocating for the rights and protection of women. In 2003, she founded South Kivu’s Women’s Media Association (AFEM) to train women journalists and defend the rights of women through the media. Her work won her the Knight International Journalism Award in 2009.
Photo credit: (left) Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
When the first group was arrested and officially booked, other people gathered. So there were some 90 other people outside the jail waiting to be booked and wanting to be booked and very cheerful about it. Well, that had never happened before in this country in these dimensions. So it was astonishing that blacks who had stayed in place for 60 years, now suddenly are asking to be arrested. The threat of the jail is no longer an issue.
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An Undaunted Voice An interview with Chouchou Namegabe Dubuisson
SGI Quarterly: What was the reaction when you first started to talk on the radio about the problem of rape in DRC? Chouchou Namegabe Dubuisson: People were shocked. They said, “How can you talk about sex openly on the radio?” It’s a taboo. It wasn’t easy. We started to sensitize people and say,
SGIQ: Is awareness about rape changing? CND: Yes. We have done a lot of sensitization of communities and have also worked with many NGOs to empower women. There has been a change. Some survivors have been reintegrated with their families. I’ll give you an example of a young girl. She was 13 when she was raped, and she had a baby. She had been taken into the forest with her mother, but they managed to escape. I met her after she heard the testimony of another woman and came to us. There are many women who were hiding what had happened to them, and after hearing the testimonies on the radio, they have come to us. They say that telling us their story is the first step to healing their internal wounds. I rented a house for that girl, because every time people discovered her story, she had to move. I had to tell her, “No, don’t leave your place. It’s your story, don’t hide it.” She found a fiancé, but he left her when he found out her story. But when she got a second fiancé, I told her she had to tell him her story. He accepted her, and they married and had a child together.
“There are many women who were hiding what had happened to them, and after hearing the testimonies on the radio they have come to us.” “It’s not a problem of sex, it’s a big problem of the community.” We didn’t even have a word to talk about rape, so we had to borrow a word from Kiswahili from Tanzania, and we started talking about ubakaji. It was a new word for eastern Congolese people. So it was the media that sensitized people and told them that there’s a problem now that is affecting women and we have to act. Survivors were rejected—first by their families. This happens even though, when the militias attack the villages, they rape women in front of their husbands and children, in public. It’s a planned strategy, a way of terrorizing the community.
SGIQ: Do you feel afraid doing your work? CND: We’ve been threatened many times. They told me, “We’ll take you, and you won’t even have a second to call for help.” And other members of our organization have been threatened that they will be killed. The threats are anonymous. SGIQ: Have you ever considered stopping? CND: Sometimes I think about that but, no, I have to do my job. But sometimes when I have to talk about the stories and the atrocities that are happening I do feel I want to stop, because I don’t see change. But I get courage from
the women with whom I work and the survivors. When you see them smile—you can’t believe that they would be able to smile after what has happened to some of them. So, I have to continue. SGIQ: It must take courage even to listen to their stories. CND: It is difficult. I am pregnant now. Recently in one attack where the militias killed people and raped women, they found a woman who was seven months pregnant, and they cut the baby out of her belly. When I heard that, I was traumatized. And when you listen to the many atrocities that the women face. . . unimaginable things. I used to think that rape was done for sexual needs, but no. It’s a strategy to destroy. SGIQ: Do you manage to feel hopeful amidst all of this? CND: Sometimes I feel like I’ve lost hope. But I can’t lose hope, because I am working. It’s not only me, many people are involved in the fight. One day things will change. And when I do advocacy, I propose solutions. The first thing is peace and security. And the other problem is the illegal exploitation of mineral resources. It’s a cycle. The international community doesn’t like to talk about it although it’s a big problem, and they know that they have a responsibility for the presence of the FDLR (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, a rebel group) in the eastern part of Congo, who are committing the atrocities on women. Powerful countries should pressure Rwanda to accept their return. Then I think the eastern part of Congo could live in peace. We are working to empower women. And we think that solutions will come from women, when they have power. That’s my hope. And to talk about the problem is to act. When you make the problem known, it will bring solutions, somehow, though we don’t know how. ❖ July 2012
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Ikeda: Yes, others might think they’re trifling concerns, but to those actually facing such issues they’re very serious. Small things matter. What may look like a small act of courage is courage nevertheless. The important thing is to be willing to take a step forward . . . No matter how wonderful our dreams, how noble our ideals, or how high our hopes, ultimately we need courage to make them a reality. We can come up with the greatest ideas or plans in the world, or be filled with boundless compassion for others, but they will all come to nothing unless we have the courage to put them into action. Without action, it’s as if they never existed . . . Youth representative: If courage is the engine that drives our lives, it follows then that those with powerful engines will be at an advantage. Ikeda: Yes, the courageous have the strength to forge ahead, calmly traversing life’s ups and downs and advancing steadily toward the summit of their chosen goals and dreams. Courage is a powerful asset. Those who lack courage stray from the SGI President Ikeda welcoming Rosa Parks to the Soka University of America campus, Calabasas, 1993
Excerpts from a discussion between SGI President Daisaku Ikeda and Soka Gakkai youth representatives.
Daisaku Ikeda: Whether or not we have courage has a crucial bearing on the direction of our lives. People who have courage are happy. Youth representative: I think that everyone wishes they had courage. Our high school members offer many examples of situations in which they wish they could bravely take the initiative. For instance, when you know that a friend is making a terrible mistake, but you don’t
“Small things matter. What may look like a small act of courage is courage nevertheless.” say anything because you’re afraid it will destroy your relationship; or being too fainthearted to lend a helping hand when you see a person with disabilities in distress on the street; or even something as simple as being afraid to ask questions in class or after school . . .
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correct path and succumb to apathy, negativity and destructive ways. They run away from hardship, seeking only to live a life of ease and comfort. Consequently, those who lack courage cannot devote themselves to the happiness of others, nor can they improve themselves or achieve anything important or lasting. It’s as if their engine has suffered a malfunction . . . It was the German poet Goethe who declared that the loss of possessions and reputation is an insignificant thing because you can always set out to restore them, whereas the loss of courage is the loss of everything . . . If you summon your courage to challenge something, you’ll never be left with regret. How sad it is to spend your life wishing, “If only I’d had a little more courage.” Whatever the outcome may be, the important thing is to take a step forward on the path that you believe is right. There’s no need to worry about what others may think. Be true to yourself. It’s your life, after all . . . Youth representative: Talking about being brave enough to stand up for your beliefs reminds me of Rosa Parks . . .
Photo credit: © Seikyo Shimbun
The Power of Courage
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Ikeda: Mrs. Rosa Parks spent her life fighting against the discrimination and persecution of African-Americans. She is a brave woman. Racial discrimination was terrible in the 1950s. In those days, Mrs. Parks lived in Montgomery, Alabama [where such discrimination was deeply entrenched] . . . Then, one fated day—December 1, 1955—Mrs. Parks got on a bus to ride home from work. She sat down in a seat in the colored section, and the driver told her to give up her seat to a white person. It was only expected that she’d comply, since she was an African-American and those were the rules. Everyone had up to then, including Mrs. Parks. But that day was different. She was fed up with being persecuted. “No,” she said. She refused to give up her seat. That one word went on to have a tremendous effect on the American Civil Rights Movement and the dismantling of institutionalized discrimination . . . Mrs. Parks said: “I had no idea that history was being made. I was just tired of giving in. Somehow, I felt that what I did was right by standing up to that bus driver. I did not think about the consequences. I knew that I could have been lynched, manhandled, or beaten when the police came. I chose not to move, because I was right.”
challenge daily life. In our families and among our friends, we should clearly state our opinions so that things will move in a positive direction. Youth representative: Usually we think of courage as taking part in some wild adventure, performing some daredevil feat that no one else can. But we’re talking about something different, aren’t we? . . .
Ikeda: It’s a matter of perseverance. A mother’s desire to raise her children into fine adults, no matter how hard she has to work to do it, is a very noble form of courage. The other side of courage is compassion. They’re two sides of the same coin . . . Courage must be backed up by justice and compassion. [My mentor Josei] Toda used to say, “True compassion
Photo credit: © Peter Cade/Getty Images
Youth representative: That’s the crucial part: “Because I was right.” . . . Ikeda: She did what she did because she believed it was the right thing. That’s courage. Courage is always identical with what is right, with justice. It comes from the wish to do what’s right, to build a just society, and to be a good human being. If we are to do good, not only for ourselves, but for humanity and the world as well, we need courage. Courage is the power that makes such actions possible— actions that may not call attention to themselves but really shine with the brilliance of good. Putting an end to school-yard bullying is also an act of courage. So is enduring hardships and surviving tough circumstances. And so is trying to live an honest, decent life, day after day. In contrast, people who are lazy and apathetic or who have fallen into bad ways are products of not having the courage to
“If you summon your courage to challenge something, you’ll never be left with regret.” Ikeda: True courage means carrying out peaceful, just and beneficial activities. True courage is to live honestly and tenaciously. This is the most priceless courage; it is steadfast courage, sound and healthy courage. It’s people who have no courage who steal, who oppress, who kill and maim, who threaten lives with weapons, who wage war. People do such evil things because they are cowards. They have no courage. Cowardice is dangerous . . . Youth representative: Courage is a very down-to-earth thing, isn’t it?
is very difficult for ordinary mortals. Emotions get in the way, or we just can’t be bothered. Compassion is necessary, but it’s hard for us to sustain it. We can, however, sustain courage. So though we know compassion is important, what we can actually do is be courageous.” And in fact, if we act with courage, we find that our compassion for others actually grows deeper. Courage is the ultimate virtue that we can strive for . . . So whatever you may have to challenge, I say to you, “Have the courage to take a step forward!” ❖ July 2012
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The Fabric of Daily Life The SGI Quarterly asked people from around the world to reflect on the meaning of courage in their lives
Living for Others Mora Gibbings, Cambodia
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uring the Khmer Rouge period in Cambodia, I survived because I reached the point where you’re so afraid that you’re not afraid anymore. You have to fight. One time, when I was 16 years old, two guards came to take me and my cousin away. They accused me of having spiritual beliefs because I was burning incense. We knew we would be taken somewhere; we didn’t know where, but we would never be seen again. But I stood up to them. I said “No!” I knew if they really wanted to take me, they could. But at the last minute, I had to do something. Even if they took me, I would not be sorry, because I did something. Luckily, they let us go, and we were safe. Looking back, I think, “How could I be so strong?” When you reach a point
where you think you might die, you have to fight. The Khmer Rouge time was physically very hard. Living in Australia now is also not easy. Sometimes it can even feel harder, because at least in Cambodia everyone was in the same situation. When my second daughter was born here in Australia, I felt very lonely. In Cambodia when you have a baby, all the neighbors come round. One time especially, I got very depressed. I asked myself, “What am I living for?” But I got up and went outside and bought flowers for myself. I told myself that I have to live on for my family and for my baby. That saved me. If I had not been strong enough to get up from my bed at that moment, I might not
have survived. You live for others—that’s what makes you alive. Living only for yourself is not the way for a human being to live.
A Succession of Moments Dr. Mulenga Kasoma, Zambia
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e tend to think of courage as great acts by extraordinary people. Over the years, in my life as a mother and in my work as a medical doctor, I have realized that life isn’t a matter of milestones, but consists
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of moments. It’s the same with courage. Courage does not always mean doing something extraordinary or brave: it’s part of your daily life or work. In 2006, I started work at a small district hospital where I was the only doctor. Everything was so overwhelming. Most patients could not access even basic health care services because of distance. A lot of patients who were HIV positive could not access antiretroviral treatments, and many were dying in the remote villages. I proposed to the District Health Office that since the patients could not come to us, we needed to go to them. I decided to seek funding to make this possible, and to
my surprise various international agencies provided support, enabling us to start a mobile health service in villages. We faced many challenges, and at times almost gave up. We managed to enroll more than 4,000 HIV/AIDS patients and reach thousands more, especially children and pregnant women. This led to improvement in health indicators like reductions in maternal and infant mortality. In 2009, we were awarded the United Nations Public Service Award for Improvement in Service Delivery. It was a very proud moment for the country but especially for our small district. Courage is all those moment-tomoment decisions and actions in our daily lives that bring us closer to being the person we were meant to be. Courage is being able to pick yourself up every time you fall, but more importantly it’s realizing you don’t drown by falling in water, but by staying there. Courage means always trying, even though things may seem impossible.
FEATURE
Pursuing My Path Glenis Paul, Barbados
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n my late teens, I moved to New York City to study at one of the best art colleges in the US. The New York art world schooled me enough to know that our individuality is our most precious resource. Most of my art school colleagues were very dismissive of my work because I chose to address black themes, and many of them believed there was nothing new to be said. This pushed me to look at my work more critically and consequently helped me be a better artist. Instinct told me that moving to a place where I was even more of a minority could become a great opportunity. My partner and I gave up our apartment and jobs and moved with our four-month-old son to China. Many of our friends called us brave, but we simply believed in the vision of the future we saw for ourselves. When we arrived in China,
we could not even say “Hello” and certainly not the name of the place we wanted to go to. I’ve learned that courage is not only needed in the face of danger. I am currently pursuing my Master’s degree in art at the China Academy of Art. As a dark-skinned, muscular woman living here, slowly learning the language and culture, I find myself having to challenge the negativity directed at me daily because clear white skin is the social norm for beauty. Courage for me means battling every day the doubt that inevitably sets in because of the random looks, giggles, and the occasional rude outbursts telling me I am the opposite of what is considered beautiful. These
are issues I address in my artwork, and I hope that an honest, heartfelt assessment can result in a real catalyst for change for women around the globe.
Fighting On Daihachi Furuoka, Japan
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was bullied when I was in junior high school, and ever since then, I’ve wanted to become strong. When I entered university, I joined the school’s kickboxing club. I was clumsy and felt I had no talent, but I devoted myself to practice with hopes of becoming stronger. As a result, when I was a junior, I became an intercollegiate kickboxing champion. Upon graduating, I became a professional kickboxer. However, things didn’t go as smoothly as they did when I was a student—every day was a struggle as I faced the harsh reality of professional sports. I continued to lose, and practice became so distressing that I eventually stopped, and wasn’t able to fight in matches for two years. Even during such times, my wish to become stronger and gain a championship title never disappeared. I also wanted to respond to my family and friends who were supporting me.
Returning to my starting point of why I wanted to become a kickboxer, I mustered my courage once again and became determined to continue pursuing my dream. From that moment on, I began winning steadily, and last year I reached second place in the bantamweight championships. My next step is to become champion. In combat sports, it’s a constant struggle against fear and anxiety. However, as soon as the match begins, I feel nothing but the will to win, and all of my fear and anxiety vanish. There is no greater courage than continuing to have hope and pursue a big dream, without giving up. It’s not easy to continue challenging oneself. Life would be much easier if I didn’t have to try so hard. However, that would be living a life of regret. If I determine to fight and win no matter what, I can continue to advance no matter what. July 2012
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have happened on both sides.” They told me of all the bombings and all the atrocities they had experienced, and I said, “I can also talk about bombings which have killed thousands of innocent people. But that will not solve the problem. The problem will only be solved if we sit and talk, and that’s what we have come here for.” We stayed there for five days and we bonded as mothers and sons. We were able to come back and tell people that it is not as it is portrayed. They are human beings. For me, a child’s life, no matter what color the uniform, is very precious. Because of that, both sides respected me for what I stood for and never for a moment tried to use my moving back and forth to and from Sri Lankan children play on a beach in the north of the country
A Mother’s Fearless Heart From an interview with Visaka Dharmadasa three years since the end of the bitter 26-year civil war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Visaka Dharmadasa had two officer sons in the Sri Lankan army. In 1998, her younger son was among 600 soldiers who went missing after a battle near the town of Kilinochchi. His remains were never recovered. For Visaka, it was the beginning of open-ended, agonizing uncertainty. She rallied other mothers to lobby the military to help trace the missing, forming the nonprofit group Parents of Servicemen Missing In Action. Visaka also began to seek ways to bring the conflict to an end so that other mothers would not have to experience the pain she endured and later founded the Association of War Affected Women. Here, she describes her efforts to engage the enemy in dialogue.
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e requested permission to go to the LTTE area. Finally, after much difficulty, the Ministry of Defense gave a letter to our organization saying that we can go to Wanni. Seven mothers went to meet the LTTE. I can still remember someone from the Ministry of Defense telling me, “You don’t know who you are dealing with, they are not human beings. Don’t go there.”
the LTTE areas to bad advantage. When LTTE committed human rights violations, when they killed unarmed policemen, I walked into their office and scolded them. I told them, “If you are going to do these things, if you are going to ask for justice, then you have to practice it.” I did this. I didn’t have much to lose. The definition of security has to be articulated as women see it. And how I define security is, “if you want to be secure,
“There were youngsters around us on bicycles with automatic guns hanging from their shoulders. But I never felt scared for a moment. I don’t know why.” We traveled in a van. There were youngsters around us on bicycles with automatic guns hanging from their shoulders. They started riding around our van. We were all women, except the driver. Their husbands and families trusted me and let those mothers come with me, so it was an enormous responsibility. But I never felt scared for a moment. I don’t know why. We didn’t go pleading that they have to pity us. That was not our approach. What I told them was, “As much as you are proud of your striped uniform, we are very proud of plain color uniform. Things
make your enemy secure, because then the enemy will not be an enemy anymore.” If you know that what you are doing is right, no one can make you scared. We walked into the LTTE office not to hurt but for the benefit of everybody. Maybe they didn’t understand the first time or the second time or the third time. But by the fourth time, they definitely understood. That’s why they opened the doors to us without even checking us. They trusted me, because I was doing what was right, as a mother. If your conscience says it is right, then there is no fear. ❖
Photo credit: © Sven Torfinn/Panos Pictures
This May marked
FEATURE
Beginning It By Howard Hill
Howard Hill, based in London, UK, describes how his new life began at 50.
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or 20 years, I worked in the TV industry as a writer/director, latterly producing documentaries about movies and music. In June 2002, my contract came to an end, but I was feeling very confident and sure that I would soon find new work based on my extensive experience. However, the TV industry was undergoing a revolution spearheaded by the advent of reality TV. After months of fruitless job hunting, I had a conversation with an established producer who told me that, though he admired my work, sadly no one was making programs like that any more. I knew instantly that this spelled the end of my career. I was rapidly approaching my 50th birthday and my debts were spiraling, and suddenly I had no career. So what to do now? The only other thing I had any aptitude for was computers. I’d had a Macintosh for several years, and due to over-curiosity had frequently had to spend
in which someone was describing the new digital mixing consoles coming onto the market that enabled one to mix music digitally in much the same way that DJs usually work with vinyl. The next day I went to purchase one, and a few days later found myself persuading my local pub landlord to let me start DJing once a week in an upstairs room. Since those first nervous gigs, I’ve gone on to have a number of residencies in bars, clubs and restaurants, as well as playing marathon sets of up to nine hours for lavish parties, and I have just completed my 40th broadcast on the American dance station Frisky Radio. Over the past few years, I have reflected frequently on what that lecturer said about the importance of courage. It occurred to me that courage in itself is something of an abstract concept. What makes it real is the addition of another word—action! It is courageous action that can change the world. I think many people wrongly think that courage is a quality that they either have or don’t have, or alternatively hope that at some point courage will flood their lives and enable them to take a step forward into the unknown. However, from my experience of starting on new journeys at a time when many people think that they are looking toward retirement, I have come to realize that being courageous
hours learning to fix it. Maybe I could make some money offering my services locally . . . Some years before, I had attended a lecture about Buddhism during which the speaker remarked that the Buddha nature manifests in our lives as courage. This was certainly what I needed now. A couple of weeks later, I found myself walking the streets on a freezing cold day stuffing flyers through letterboxes. I found myself sadly reflecting that at this “I now see courage as an essential point, I was hoping to have established a more element of a happy life.” stable life. However, as my courage returned, my next thought was, “The sun is shining, I does not mean that you are not terrified am living in a city I love, and this afternoon or frightened. What is important is that I have my first client.” The phone soon you take action, even though you might be began to ring with many local clients and terrified. my new career had begun. The future is always uncertain and can After a couple of months, I began to often be frightening, so I now see courage yearn for a new creative outlet. My lifetime as an essential element of a happy life. I passion has been music, and in particular am frequently encouraged by a couplet the whole dance music genre that emerged attributed to Goethe: “Whatever you can in the late 80s. One evening at a party do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has with friends, I overheard a conversation genius, power and magic in it.” ❖ July 2012
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The Question of Courage By William Ian Miller Athenian courage is superior to Spartan courage. His claim is that courage came naturally to Athenians, while Spartans had to be force-fed theirs by laborious, state-imposed training: “The prize for courage,” he says, “will surely be awarded most justly to those who best know the difference between hardship and pleasure and still are never tempted to shrink from danger.” Wishful thinking? Rigging the criteria of the prize for courage? Or just trying to buck up the citizenry for the war about to be embarked upon?
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William Ian Miller, Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, is the author of The Mystery of Courage (Harvard University Press, 2000) and several other books exploring subjects as diverse as revenge, aging and Icelandic sagas. See www-personal. umich.edu/~wimiller/.
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ourage is first among virtues in heroic epic and in cultures of honor. Men cared to be known for their courage. It not only took courage to fight well, but the issue often being fought over was who had more of it. Courage was competitive. Men were ranked according to the degree of courage they possessed. Arguments arose as to what counted as truly courageous, what the perfect form of the virtue was, and what were lesser though still worthy semblances of it. Not only philosophers theorized about courage: warriors, politicians and spectators did so as well. The stakes were high, and so there emerged a politics of courage, a jockeying to define your performances as worthier than your competitor’s. Thus we have Pericles of Athens arguing—and trying to convince his fellow citizens—that
Move now to Sparta some 30 years earlier. One Spartan, Aristodemus by name, was denied the first prize for courage at the Battle of Plataea in 479 BCE, though he had rushed forward in fury and routed a large force of Persians. The prize was instead given to Posidonius, a man who had fought bravely but held his place in the phalanx line. Aristodemus’s courage was judged inferior because he wanted to die in battle to redeem honor he had lost at Thermopylae, whereas Posidonius had fought bravely without any wish to die. Posidonius knew something of a good life. He wanted to come away alive if he could, though he would die if he must. Sounds like a perfectly reasonable way to rank the two performances, but Herodotus, to whom we owe the story, smells a fish; in his view Aristodemus was easily the most courageous fighter that day. The Spartans simply were not going to give a prize to Aristodemus, because he was Aristodemus and his deeds, no matter how effective and how glorious, did not count. Why? A year earlier, Aristodemus had been one of Leonidas’s 300 at Thermopylae, but Leonidas had excused him along with another man, Eurytus, for having severe eye infections. The two nearly blind men retired to a place several miles to the rear. Word of the battle came to them: Eurytus ordered his slave to lead him back to the battlefield to rejoin his comrades to die with them, while Aristodemus took advantage of his excuse to stay away. Eurytus was Aristodemus’s bad luck, for they made a sorry contrast. Aristodemus returned to Sparta, to unrelenting shame and loathing.
Contrasting Courage The politics of courage is with us today. People still care intensely about courage, and
Photo credit: © De Agostini/Getty Images
The Power of Shame
Photo credit: © David Silverman/Getty Images
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we’re still trying to stack the deck in our own favor. Determining who has courage, what actions count, who gets the prize, is disputed now no less than in the Iliad. Look whom we call heroes and claim are courageous. In our day, we hear people praised for their courage for getting in an elevator if claustrophobic, getting on an airplane if stricken with fears of flying, investing in a Silicon Valley start-up, or, if a politician, for taking a position that might cause his approval rating to drop for a few weeks, while a Tibetan who incinerates himself for a cause he conceives much greater than himself is deemed fanatic or an example of the cheapness of life “over there,” as was the case when the average Japanese soldier in World War II did deeds for which Americans won Medals of Honor, or Brits Victoria Crosses. Some might lament the debasing of courage’s coin, for it is surely debased, but others might rejoice that the virtue has been rescued from danger and death, softened and broadened, making it more easily available to all by eliminating risk to life and limb, while still employing martial metaphors to describe takeovers and acquisitions, the so-called entrepreneurial risk. And not just undertaking monetary risks, but courage is ascribed to resisting the temptation of pleasure too: the courage to resist lust or gluttony. But it was ever thus. Theories of courage cannot escape tendentiousness. Indeed, Plato claims that philosophers, not warriors, are the purest exemplars of courage. The former, he says, do not fear death because they know life is really something best gotten over with, while the latter face death because of a greater fear of shame. He tries to preempt criticism of this preposterous claim by putting it in Socrates’ mouth as he awaits death. No one doubted Socrates’ courage. He was rather vain about it himself and, as a younger man, had won quite a reputation as a fearless soldier. Needless to say, Plato’s view is hardly disinterested; one detects the influence of the philosophers’ lobby. Some of the braver
A visitor contemplates images of the Holocaust in an exhibition dedicated to the Nazi death camps at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial’s museum in Jerusalem, Israel
people I have met do not happen to be in humanities departments. A good portion of the wondrousness of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s stand at Little Round Top at Gettysburg in the American Civil War was that he managed it even though he was a classics professor.
Fortitude vs. Aggression The broad view of courage, the view that would make resisting pleasure a matter of courage, is hardly the dominant view, nor is it a recent invention of the American
only courageous against pain or fear, but mighty to contend against desires and pleasures.” Plato thus may well be the first to grant courage to a recovering addict or to the person who says no to a tempting adulterous affair, thus emptying courage of precisely what makes it the theme of the greatest stories ever told. The stricter martial view gets its classic formulation in Aristotle, who makes courage a matter of risking life and limb in war for one’s country, kin or people. The martial view is easily the dominant
“The death camp and Gulag of the 20th century, the horrors of evil governments, succeed in making survival itself its own kind of courage.” self-esteem and self-help movements. Plato articulates it in an early dialogue. Socrates asks Laches, a well-known general, to define courage, and when Laches comes up with a quite reasonable definition from combat—“remaining at one’s post and not running away”—Socrates presses him to expand it to include those “who are not
view, informing heroic literature and songs of triumph from Judea to the Germanic North all the way out to Iceland. Indeed, it is nearly a universal view of courage, and the broad view must be understood as a reaction to it, an attempt to steal a bit of martial courage’s luster, democratize it, or in a less friendly way of putting it, dumbing July 2012
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“Some might lament the debasing of courage’s coin . . . courage is ascribed to risking the temptation of pleasure too: the courage to resist lust or gluttony.” warring ideologies: heroic aggressive honor vs. Christian and Stoic fortitude. (I apologize that my account is a Western one; were I to add in the East it would exceed my comfortable knowledge base.) The contrasts are not only substantive but also stylistic. Offense tended to be noisier, favoring intense expenditures of energy in short bursts with long, lazy intervals in between: gender it male. Defense required stolidity, constancy and, above all, endurance: call it feminine if you are so inclined. And the historical record is filled with examples of those who were courage itself on defense, but of rather mediocre virtue on offense, and vice versa.
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And then the ambiguous cases, offense or defense is not clear, of self-immolating Buddhist monks who brought down the Diem regime, for whom taking it was a form of dishing it out.
The Courage of Defense The courage of offense was and remained, with some notable exceptions, the preserve of men and, by widespread ideology across a multitude of cultures, upper-class men. The courage of defense, by obvious necessity and by definition, was no less at home on the battlefield than the courage of offense. But defensive courage had within it seeds of expansion, for it was called to do service in a multitude of miserable and horrific conditions, not just on the battlefield. Look how the courage of defense begins to colonize other domains. The ability to take it, not to dish it out, becomes the prize-winning form of courage, resulting in an express ticket to heaven when it came in the form of martyrdom, specifically Christian martyrdom. The hagiographical sources devoted to martyrdom put courage, as much as faith, squarely in issue, and rather make the former more to be marveled at than the latter. And women were no less eligible than men, rather more so in fact, for some of the most stunningly heroic of martyrs were women: Saints Blandina in the second century and Perpetua in the third. They couldn’t be broken morally, even though every part of their bodies had been broken. But nonetheless, the passivity of being racked, flayed, fed to beasts in these saints’ lives was reconceptualized as offensive action by the martyrs. The martyr was depicted as a gladiator, a fighter, wrestling with the devil, delivering blows as she lay bound, roasted and spitted. Martyrdom and the courage of defense borrowed its laudatory metaphors and imagery from offense; it was parasitical on aggressive courage for all its diction, for its songs of glory. In the Germanic North, it took quite a dose of disbelief to accept a God who let himself be crucified, so the crucifixion was recast as a battle against the cross itself and the battle was extended to the next day; by having Christ’s descent into hell look ever more like a military campaign against Satan, passion became action. Offense retained its conceptual allure even when the action was turning one’s cheek to get slapped again, for as Paul recognized in his reformulation of the Sermon on the Mount’s message, forgiveness and passivity were offensive weapons. In Paul’s words: it was like pouring hot coals on the heads of your enemies. Passivity and forgiveness in the Stoic and Christian scheme were just moves in the honor game of
Photo credit: David Oliver/Getty Images
it down (so as to make it more readily available to the intellectually inclined). Yet even within the confines of the narrower battle-oriented view of courage, two basic conceptions warred against each other as to which best represented the purest form. In a nutshell: was courage best exemplified by offense, marching into the teeth of danger, the charge; or was it best exemplified by defense, by refusal to quit one’s post, by not backing down, by patient suffering over time? Later, this dispute was captured by
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challenge and riposte, and again it was courage and toughness that was being contested. You think that slap on the face hurt? Here, take another shot, you cannot touch me. As war became more mechanized, the virtues needed to endure, the courage of defense, martyr-like fortitude, began as a practical matter to dominate the battlefield itself, despite the charge never losing its primal allure. The image to keep in mind is the trenches of the Great War, where for all the extraordinary courage it took to go over the trench top, months could go by before one had to charge. And in the meantime, one had to suffer unrelenting mud, cold, filth, constant shelling, gas, the ubiquitous corpses and the stench of their rot, and the
Moral Courage My politics of courage keeps mostly confined to the narrower Aristotelian view of facing real danger to life and limb, the courage demanded by war, feud and mean streets. So I will expand my account to raise the question of moral courage. Moral courage—the concept, that is—as distinguished from plain old courage, is a rather recent development; the term does not appear in English until the 19th century. It took a largely pacified society for people to think to distinguish stand-up-in-meeting kind of courage—the courage of risking ridicule, humiliation, loss of employment or social ostracism for speaking out against injustice, or of defying immoral or illegal orders from a
Photo credit: Gérald Gambier
“Women were no less eligible than men, rather more so in fact, for some of the most stunningly heroic of martyrs were women.” rats who ate them, the flies that hatched maggots in them, and the pain and itch of the lice and your own rotting trench feet. Take away the gas and shelling and some of the corpses and you have the endurance required of Roman legions doing duty on the Rhine, who mutinied on occasion because of the sheer misery of the cold and wet and a term of service that never seemed to end. By World War II, Eisenhower could formulate “real heroism” as “the uncomplaining acceptance of unendurable conditions.” The death camp and Gulag of the 20th century, the horrors of evil governments, succeed in making survival itself its own kind of courage, seeking to avoid death at all costs, thus turning traditional courage and cowardice on their heads. Tales of escape and corresponding tales of rescue, life-saving rather than death-dealing or death-enduring, begin to elicit their share of courage prizes: Victoria Crosses, Pour le Mérites and Medals of Honor become almost as likely to be won by medics and stretcher bearers as by the man who storms the machine-gun nest.
superior—from plain old courage. Before then, to stand up against the judges trying to burn your neighbor as a witch or your cousin as a heretic could get you burned as one too. Your life was on the line. The young girl from the projects who testifies against the drug dealer whom she saw kill his girlfriend is showing plain old courage; her life unfortunately is very much on the line, and likely to be very short because of her testimony. We need no recourse to moral courage to find her worthy of admiration. But moral courage bears one telling requisite that in some domains distinguishes it from physical courage. Moral courage is lonely courage. Physical courage is no less courageous for having the support of comrades on the left and right in a shield wall, and when it must be carried out alone, it is all the more admirable. But moral courage loses no small part of its virtue when it is backed by a substantial support group. It takes little courage, moral or otherwise, for instance, to speak out against war or against Israel’s policies in a university setting in the Western world.
A stained glass window commemorating the martyrdom of Saint Blandina
Moral courage, though, cannot dispense with physical courage. Imagine the person who quite alone speaks out against an injustice in a meeting hostile to the moral and just position he voices, but who retracts his statement as soon as someone threatens to punch him once the meeting breaks up. Moral courage, to be entitled to its morals, or to its courage, cannot let itself be squelched by a threatening glance, or even by a good beating. Recall that girl testifying against the drug dealer, who was shaking like a leaf on the stand. No coward she. ❖ July 2012
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PEOPLE
SGI members’ experiences in faith
I completed the challenging application process. In March 2003, I learned that SUA had accepted me as a member of its pioneering third entering class with a full scholarship and grants. At SUA, I encountered students who were not only brilliant but also deeply committed to the cause of world development. I gained lifelong friends and teachers who constantly motivated me to think deeper, work harder and create value in any and all circumstances. Based on Mr. Ikeda’s philosophy of peace and individual empowerment, upon graduation, I decided to become a socioeconomic development practitioner who can help initiate a peaceful solution to the problems in northeast India, where I’m from, which has been plagued by insurgency and poverty. In Jaipur, India
In Pursuit of Wild Dreams By Erendro Leichombam Singh, USA
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was born and raised in Manipur, India, where my parents ran a small restaurant on a college campus. My parents, though hardworking, were always fighting with each other. My father was violent and had a drinking problem. I was an angry kid and got into fights. In 1999, when I was 16, a family friend introduced me to the SGI. I sensed the genuineness of SGI members, but practiced inconsistently. In 2001, I hit rock bottom. My high school results were so poor that I couldn’t get into a college of my choice. My father was furious. Having grown up in tough conditions, he wanted his son to succeed in a way he never could. One night he got very drunk and beat me up. My mother cried bitterly but could do nothing. Life became hell. I decided there was only one way out: to leave my family and start a new life. With some cash from my mother, I arrived in New Delhi, thousands of miles away from home, alone and directionless. I would have suffered alone had it not been for the SGI members’ support. They prayed with me, and we studied Nichiren Buddhism and SGI President Daisaku Ikeda’s writings together. Their sincerity, courage and compassion lifted me out of the darkest hour of my youth, gradually
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filling my heart with hope. Asking myself, “What do I want to do in life?” I sought answers in President Ikeda’s writings. His words pierced my heart like an arrow: “You must challenge yourself in something, it doesn’t matter what. Then by making consistent effort, the direction you should take will open up before you quite naturally. It’s important, therefore, to have the courage to ask yourself what it is that you
I determined to go to the institute where some of the best development practitioners gather, the school that would best equip me to carry out my vision—the Masters Program in International Development at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. With every challenge, the courage I gained from my Buddhist practice was behind me. In 2010, I was accepted to Harvard University with a full scholarship.
“How could I, who could hardly afford the next bus ride, dream about living and studying in America?” should be doing now at this very moment.” Six months later, I heard about Soka University of America (SUA), which had just opened that year. My heart leapt at the idea of studying at a university founded by my mentor, but a part of me said: “Poor you, you will never have the chance . . . maybe in the next lifetime.” How could I, who could hardly afford the next bus ride, dream about living and studying in America? But the more I practiced Buddhism, the more daring I became in my hopes. I started practicing seriously, praying and summoning up courage to pursue the impossible. After almost two years of hard work,
In March 2012, while still a student, I founded a nonprofit organization, The Manipur International Centre, with the mission to help realize peace and development in Manipur and northeast India. I intend to lead this organization in line with the Buddhist principles of nonviolence, courageous dialogue, human rights and the sanctity of human life. I have also mended my relationship with my father, who has transformed from a reckless man into the most loving dad who cares deeply for and enjoys his family. I have realized that with faith, one can transform any circumstance. ❖
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A Sign of Hope By Kenichi Kurosawa, Japan
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started working with a water supply company when I was 24 years old. During the recession in the 1990s, it went bankrupt. I was employed by another company until that also went bankrupt. The same thing happened in my third job. However, my Buddhist practice pushed me to continue doing my best, regardless of my situation. Impressed by this attitude, one of my clients encouraged me to set up independently, and in May 2005, I established my own plumbing company,
broken out after the tsunami blinded me. My eyes filled with tears of frustration as I searched. At last I found her. She was alive! Ten days later, I went to search for my belongings where my house once stood. A familiar black handle was visible under the debris. I found my handheld drill which I had been using for a long time in my work as a plumber, its case cracked and the drill inside covered with mud. I held it in my hand with deep emotion and wiped off the mud. Since the earthquake, I had been battling a sense of helplessness in my heart,
hope from the message on the signboard, I would be happy. At first, I didn’t understand the true significance of making this signboard, but I wanted to respond to the encouragement of my mentor, SGI President Daisaku Ikeda, who I felt truly understood our pain and suffering and had urged us to hold our heads up high. Throughout this past year, many people have expressed their appreciation for the signboard, telling me that they were truly encouraged by it and that it has given
Photo credit: © Seikyo Shimbun
The 10-meter-long sign that Kenichi (left) erected amidst the rubble of his destroyed town reads, “Let’s keep going, Ishinomaki!”
which made a name for itself for honesty and rapidly prospered. In December 2009, I redesigned my house into a home-cum-showroom—a dream come true. Then on March 11, 2011, the great earthquake and tsunami struck northeastern Japan, sweeping away everything and leaving my hometown of Ishinomaki completely devastated. When the tsunami struck right after the earthquake, I clung on to a pine tree and survived. The snow fell continuously on that dark moonless night, and I endured the freezing cold throughout the night. At the break of day, the waters started to recede. I began searching for my wife, Kayoko. I kept slipping and falling in the black sludge. The ground was covered with debris. Smoke from the fires that had
but with the drill in my hand, I felt as if hope had begun to rise from beneath the mountain of debris. Not wanting to be crushed by the feeling of helplessness, I decided to make a large signboard as proof of my determination to get back on my feet. Two friends joined me in assembling scrap wood with some screws we found in the rubble. With a sincere prayer for reconstruction, we began painting the words, “Ganbaro! Ishinomaki” (Let’s keep going, Ishinomaki!). On April 11, exactly a month after that fateful day, the signboard, 1.8 m x 10 m, could be seen in the devastated city, standing in the ruins of my home. Everyone was grappling with despair, sorrow and helplessness. If I could help even a single person feel a glimmer of
them the courage to move on. A number of newspapers around the country printed photos of the sign, which became a symbol of the undefeated spirit of Ishinomaki. I have realized that during trying times, it is especially crucial that we take just that one step forward. I was eventually offered a new job and also got a loan from the bank. Now, a year later, I am busy with plumbing jobs, servicing boilers and so on, around the city. My next goal is to rebuild my home and showroom. After going through everything that’s happened over the past year, I have made an unshakable determination that I will not continue to suffer. I will definitely transform suffering into strength. That is my mission. ❖ July 2012
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GLOBAL CITIZENS
An essay by SGI President Daisaku Ikeda from a series based on his meetings with inspiring individuals from around the world Sunday in 1980. Archbishop Romero lifted his voice. “At one village, I was told a terrible account: On March 7, near midnight, a truck filled with soldiers . . . broke into a house and threw the entire family out. They raped four young girls, savagely beat their parents and warned that if they said anything, they would pay the consequences.” The archbishop went on sharing the “events of the week” that had not been reported by the newspapers or television. His sermon was heard by the entire nation, carried on a radio program broadcast by the Church. It had not originally been Archbishop Romero’s intention to speak on political matters in church. Yet the situation in his country was so desperate that he felt he could no longer remain silent. Should religion be content only addressing matters of the afterlife? No. Absolutely not. The archbishop ended his sermon with a plea to every soldier and police officer in El Salvador, some of whom sat before him in the audience. “Brothers, each one of you is one of us. We are the same people. The campesinos you kill are your own brothers and sisters.” People began to clap. The archbishop was right!
SGI President Ikeda with Rector Sermeño in Tokyo, 2000
Rosendo Mauricio Sermeño— The Imperative of Peace “Violence is never the answer to violence. If we desire the fruits of peace, we must sow the seeds of peace.”
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I
t was quiet inside. The air was taut with tension as people packed the cathedral, anxious to hear Archbishop Oscar Romero’s sermon. There had already been far too many deaths in El Salvador. The horror of violence blanketed this small Central American country. People fearfully wondered, “Will I be next?” The tiny minority of the rich lived in fear of the guerrilla insurgents, afraid of being kidnapped or killed. The great majority of ordinary citizens feared the ruthless oppression of government forces. Soldiers were free to kill people on the spot, to arrest and torture them, or simply to “disappear” them. In 1977, an entire village was massacred as a warning to anyone who dared oppose the government. Since the start of 1980, killings had averaged 10 per day. Voices of outrage and grief swept across the land. The sermon was delivered on March 23, a
“In the name of . . . our tormented people who have suffered so much . . . I beseech you, I beg you, I order you, in the name of God, stop the repression!” The next day, Archbishop Romero was assassinated. He was murdered in the middle of Mass, the bullets piercing his chest and face. Sparked by this act of terror, full-scale civil war erupted in El Salvador. This was exactly what the archbishop had risked everything to avoid.
“Keep People Ignorant” “The underlying cause of the El Salvadoran civil war was, to put it simply, because the path to democracy had been closed.” So explained Rector Rosendo Mauricio Sermeño of the Latin American University of Technology when I met him in April 2000. The fighting had shut down the national university, and young people no longer had the opportunity to pursue their education. Rector Sermeño, a courageous and spirited educator,
Photo credit: © Seikyo Shimbun
By Daisaku Ikeda
Photo credit: © Yuri Cortez/AFP
GLOBAL CITIZENS root within us even for a moment. For could not bear watching this tragedy As Armand Calderón Sol, who they express a nauseating disregard for unfold, so he and those who shared his became president of postwar El Salvador, life. They embody the delusions that lock vision together established the Latin observed: “What we seek from the bottom humankind into endless cycles of war. American University of Technology. of our hearts is a culture of peace. It is Violence is never the answer to violence. If “The literacy rate in our country is low,” a philosophy that treasures tolerance, we desire the fruits of peace, we must sow Rector Sermeño explained. “The powerful human rights and cultural values. The the seeds of peace. elite believed that an uneducated public challenge for humankind today is to I asked Rector Sermeño what had been was easier to control. The authorities advance our human revolution and sought to suppress the people’s construct a peaceful society.” capacity for critical thought.” His words make it clear Oppression led to despair, that the only path to peace is which in turn intensified the for human beings to change our attacks of the insurgents. “We culture, our way of thinking, have no choice but to fight,” they ourselves. This is an appeal declared. The guerrillas bought that issues from the depths of weapons with ransom money suffering endured by a country gained by abducting the rich and shattered by war. As such, it powerful. They destroyed telegraph carries an incalculable weight. and telephone lines, and crippled Against this backdrop, the the transportation network. Buses moral leadership of Rector were bombed as a way to punish Sermeño, who kept lit the beacon their owners. of education through the long Eventually, even those who night of terror, shines all the more sympathized with the rebels began brightly. to speak out against this strategy. The rector literally risked Archbishop Romero had his life in order to teach, leaving detested violence. To him, violence, his home even when gun battles for whatever reason, was wrong, a had erupted and curfews were sin. He saw a difference between imposed. “All I could think of was officially sanctioned murder at my students,” he recalled. “I could the hands of the military and not bear to think of young people police and the acts of those being deprived of the opportunity fighting against that brutality. to learn.” Nevertheless, violence could not be How does this educator, with condoned. Killing is wrong and life his great love for humanity, define irreplaceable. Where, then, was a education? “It is a process,” he solution to be found? says, “that teaches people to The one thing clear to all was cherish and respect all living A Salvadorean mother holds a portrait of her son during a rally of relatives who lost their that, if the goal was to subdue the things.” children in military operations during El Salvador’s civil war rebels, violent repression was the I must agree. Education worst possible way to achieve it. should not be based on or limited by the key to finally ending the civil war in So long as the root causes—the a nationalist agenda. Education must 1992, after 12 long years of conflict. His immense gulf between rich and poor and a cultivate the wisdom to reject and resist answer was to the point. “The basic cause political system that denied citizens their violence in all its forms. It must foster was that both parties realized that, no human rights—remained unchanged, it people who intuitively understand and matter how hard they tried, they could did not matter how many guerrillas were know the irreplaceable value of human never defeat the other side.” killed. New recruits would rise up, one after beings and the natural world. What had become clear was that no another, from the ranks of peasants and the I believe such education embodies the amount of armed struggle could bring streets of slum districts. timeless struggle of human civilization to peace. The fighting had resolved nothing. create an unerring path to peace. The Path to Peace It was time to talk, time to think of the The lessons imparted by the civil war in Every leader claims to be working for children’s future. All over the country, El Salvador are profound. Every war, when the sake of the people. Every war is fought there were children who had never known viewed from the undistorted perspective in the name of peace. No war, however, is life without war. of life’s sanctity, is a “civil war” waged by without its victims. True courage is not found in settling humanity against itself. ❖ “That’s war, after all. Some sacrifice differences with military force. Rather, we Excerpted from The World is Yours to is inevitable!” We must be fully vigilant must find the courage to engage in dialogue! Change (Asahi Press, 2002). against such views, not letting them take That is when humanity truly triumphs. July 2012
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AROUND the WORLD
Appreciating the Lotus Sutra Celebrating the 50th anniversary of its founding, the Institute of Oriental Philosophy (IOP) held its 27th annual conference in conjunction with the opening of the exhibition “The Lotus Sutra—A Message of Peace and Harmonious Coexistence” at Soka University in Hachioji, Tokyo, on March 24. On display were some 150 items including reproductions of Lotus Sutra manuscripts in Sanskrit, Khotan Saka, Uighur, Chinese, Tangut, Tibetan and Mongolian. A famous facsimile of the Gilgit Lotus Sutra Manuscripts, which were likely transcribed between the sixth and seventh centuries and were discovered in Kashmir after 1,300 years, was also on display. These manuscripts, written on white birch bark, are considered to be among the oldest extant Buddhist manuscripts. The IOP conference, which was held at Soka University from March 24–25, was titled “Global Civilization and the Mission of Buddhism” and welcomed guest speakers including 20 scholars from throughout Japan and overseas, such as noted Buddhist scholars Dr. Lokesh Chandra and Professor Nirmala Sharma from the International Academy of Indian Culture. Dr. Lokesh Chandra is the director of the International Academy of Indian Culture, life trustee of the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, vice president of the Indian Council
Lotus Sutra manuscripts
for Cultural Relations, chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research and general director of Tagore International University. He gave a commemorative lecture titled “Three Jewels of the Lotus Sutra—India,
China and Japan” in which he explained that the heart of the Lotus Sutra is about developing deep empathy and helping alleviate the suffering of all beings.
Zealand Aotearoa organized a public concert in Wellington’s Civic Square on April 12. Among the performers were award-winning musicians Don McGlashan and Warren Maxwell. Over 400 people attended the concert. SGI-NZ representatives also attended a Mayoral reception held at the Wellington City Council Chambers on April 14, where a “passing the flame” ceremony was held as youth representatives took responsibility for working for a nuclear-weapon-free world. Speakers included Sir Geoffrey Palmer, former Prime Minister of New Zealand; Graham Kelly, former Labour Cabinet Minister; renowned peace and women’s rights campaigner Dame Laurie Salas and longtime antinuclear activist Laurie Ross. Councillor Helene Ritchie, who proposed the historic nuclear-weapon-free declaration on April 14, 1982, commented, “Now is the time to pass the flame on to a new generation of young activists who will ‘think global and act local’ on this most important issue facing the world.”
Don McGlashan performing
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SGI-Spain hosted the ninth Interfaith Discussion organized by the Madrid Community Interfaith Dialogue Association (ADIM) at the SGISpain Soka Culture Center in Rivas-Vaciamadrid, Madrid, on March 24. Discussions centered around the topic of religion and ecology and the role of religions in promoting sustainability.
Photo credits: (clockwise from top) © Seikyo Shimbun; SGI-Spain; SGI-NZ
Celebrating a Nuclear-Weapon-Free Wellington Religion and Ecology In commemoration of the 30th anniversary of Discussed at Interfaith the city’s Nuclear-Weapon-Free Declaration, the Event Wellington City Council together with SGI-New
AROUND the WORLD
Chinese Ink Wash Painting Exhibition
Poetry for Peace in Dubai SGI-Gulf (Emirate of Dubai) held a “Poets Conference” at Dubai Knowledge Village (DKV) on February 16, where six poets shared poems in Arabic, English, Hindi and French. SGI President Ikeda’s poems “Hope Is Life’s Treasure” and “August 15—The Dawn of a New Day” were read. Supporters of the event included Dr. Ayoub Kazim, managing director of DKV, and Dr. Shihab Ghanem, a renowned poet from the United Arab Emirates who supervised the translation of Mr. Ikeda’s book The World Is Yours to Change into Arabic. SGI-Gulf is registered in Dubai as an educational organization to contribute to building a culture of peace through promoting human values and friendship. It hosts peace education and cultural events in partnership with Dubai Knowledge Village, a special zone in Dubai devoted to education and human resource management.
The works of 15 contemporary Chinese ink wash artists were on display at Soka Gakkai Malaysia’s Wisma Kebudayaan Center, Kuala Lumpur, from March 10–25. The event included a talk by participating
artist Yuan Ye, director of Zhejiang International Art Exchange Centre, on current trends in the development of contemporary Chinese ink paintings.
Photo credits: (clockwise from top) SGM; © Seikyo Shimbun; © Seikyo Shimbun
Treasures from the Forbidden City
The Court Dining Table from the Palace Museum
From March 29 to May 8, the exhibition “The Palace of Heaven on Earth: Works from the Palace Museum in Beijing” was shown at the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum (TFAM)
in Hachioji, Tokyo, in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the normalization of diplomatic relations between Japan and China. The opening ceremony was held
on March 28, and some 600 guests attended, including representatives from 15 embassies. The exhibition depicted the eventful lives of women, including empresses and women of the court, who lived in the Imperial Palace in Beijing, once known as the Forbidden City and currently the Palace Museum. It also shed light on the life of children within the Imperial Court and the teachings of child-rearing set forth in The Four Books and Five Classics. Special displays depicted nine scenes of the virtues and education of women according to Confucian philosophy. On display were some 200 items from the Palace Museum ranging from paintings, crafts, clothing and accessories to jewelry. One feature was a recreated dining scene from the Qing Court with tableware used by empresses such as the Empress Dowager Cixi and concubines. The Palace Museum is the world’s largest palace and was home to 24 successive emperors of the Ming and Qing Dynasties that ruled China over a span of 550 years from 1368. TFAM was founded by SGI President Ikeda in 1983. It is widely recognized for its active role in promoting international cultural exchange, and in 1990 it received an official commendation from the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs. July 2012
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AROUND the WORLD
Antinuclear Weapons Exhibition and Panel Discussions
Launch of New Centre for Applied Buddhism The launch of the Centre for Applied Buddhism, a new center of study for investigating contemporary ideas and their relationship with Buddhist philosophy, took place at the SGI-UK Taplow Court Culture Centre on March 31. The new center has been set up to continue and expand on the work of the Institute of Oriental Philosophy UK, which closed last year. The center will focus on Buddhism and its application to people’s lives and look into topics such as psychotherapy, war and peace, economics, science, the digital world, creativity, the environment, ethics, gender and sexuality. For more information on the center’s work, which will include seminars and conferences, visit www.appliedbuddhism.org.uk.
The SGI’s antinuclear weapons exhibition on display
SGI-Germany organized a showing of the SGI’s antinuclear weapons exhibition “From a Culture of Violence to a Culture of Peace” at Christ Church in Mainz, from March 2–23. Guest speakers at the opening ceremony included representatives of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. In conjunction with the
exhibition, SGI-Germany hosted two panel discussions at Christ Church. At the first, guest speakers discussed the potential health hazards of nuclear power plants, while at the second, women peace activists from three different generations spoke about their work to promote peace, primarily in respect to the abolition of nuclear weapons.
From left: Ven. Amaranatho, Dr. Michele Lamb, Dh. Maitrisara and Jamie Cresswell
The 56th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW56) convened at the UN Headquarters in New York from February 27 through March 9 under the theme of “The empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication, development and current challenges.” Representatives from the SGI UN Liaison Office in New York were actively involved in the planning process of the NGO Consultation Day which took place in New York on February 26. In cooperation with Global Action to Prevent War, they also helped organize an informal networking reception to strengthen connections between peace and disarmament experts and CSW participants at Global Action’s head office on February 7. The SGI cosponsored the Virginia
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Gildersleeve International Fund’s (VGIF) parallel event titled “Rural Woman and Girls: issues in reproductive health” on February 29 at the Church Center opposite the UN Headquarters. On March 5, the SGI hosted a workshop with the theme “Rural Women—Learning for Empowerment” at the Church Center. Discussions centered primarily around the question of the meaning of empowerment, how it can be achieved and how women living in rural areas can become economically empowered. Special attention was given to the role of dialogue and learning in addressing these issues. VGIF cosponsored the event. Guest speakers were former United Nations Under-Secretary-General and High Representative of the United Nations Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury; Olivia Mugabirwe, executive director of PeerLink
Initiative Uganda and a member of the Ugandan Federation of University Women; Michaela Leslie-Rule, senior storyteller from See Change Evaluation; and Sharon Brennen-Haylock, senior liaison officer of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Liaison Office. Presentations were followed by interactive dialogue sessions.
Olivia Mugabirwe of PeerLink Initiative Uganda giving a presentation
Photo credits: (clockwise from top) SGI-Germany; Dhammarati; SGI-OPI
SGI Cosponsors Parallel Session to UN Commission on the Status of Women
AROUND the WORLD
Children’s Peace Exhibition in Malaysia Soka Gakkai Malaysia (SGM) hosted the SGI’s exhibition “Building a Culture of Peace for the Children of the World” at the SGM Wisma Kebudayaan center in Kuala Lumpur from April 14–29. The event was part of SGM’s Month of Sustainable Development, which included community cleanup efforts. At the opening, Dr. Victor P. Karunan, deputy representative of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Malaysia, spoke about how investment in children is a key strategy to achieve national development goals. He stated, “Wars and conflicts are created and nurtured by adults not children. We need to work with children and young people to strengthen their
Launch of Chinese-Language Websites of Nichiren’s Writings Two Chinese-language websites featuring the writings of Nichiren were launched on April 28 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the publication in Japanese of his complete writings (Nichiren Daishonin gosho zenshu) on April 28, 1952. The sites, in Traditional and Simplified Chinese versions, contain over 400 letters written by Nichiren to his followers, as well as treatises addressed to leading figures in
Photo credits: (clockwise from top) SGM; SGI-Cameroon; © Seikyo Shimbun
Sustainability Exhibitions in Cameroon
the Kamakura shogunate. Traditional and Simplified Chinese versions are available at cht.sgilibrary.org and chs.sgilibrary.org respectively. An Englishlanguage translation is already online at www.sgilibrary.org/writings.php. In addition, Chinese-language versions of the Lotus Sutra and the Soka Gakkai’s Dictionary of Buddhist Philosophy (containing 17,000 entries) have also been made available online.
Memorial Tree Plantings Held in India
At the Soka Bodhi Tree Garden
capacity and role in advocacy for peace and conflict resolution.” SGM youth representative Lim Ti Ying stated in her welcoming remarks that the youth of SGM are determined to start from themselves in building peace. Screenings of SGI President Daisaku Ikeda’s educational animation series for children were held on weekends of the exhibition period. Children of all ages also took part in a variety of educational activities called “Culture of Peace and I.” “Building a Culture of Peace for the Children of the World” was produced by the SGI in 2003 to support the United Nations’ Culture of Peace initiative.
On March 24, Bharat (India) Soka Gakkai members planted trees at the Soka Bodhi Tree Garden, located in a suburb of New Delhi, in memory of those who lost their lives in the magnitude 9.0 earthquake that devastated large areas of the Tohoku region in northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011. The trees were planted following memorial tree plantings at Soka Gakkai centers throughout Tohoku proposed by SGI President Ikeda in an effort to encourage all those affected by the tragedy.
The joint SGI and Earth Charter International environmental exhibition “Seeds of Hope: Visions of sustainability, steps toward change” was shown for the first time in Cameroon at the Multi-purpose Sports Complex in Yaoundé from March 17–24. The French-language version of the “Seeds of Change: The Earth Charter and Human Potential” exhibition was displayed simultaneously. The exhibitions also traveled to Douala where they were shown at the Salle des Fêtes d’Akwa from March 19–21, with the support of the city’s Urban Council, and at the French Cultural Center from March 26–30.
For more news about SGI activities around the world, visit www.sgi.org.
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ON VOCATION
A series in which SGI members discuss their approach to their profession
Legal Challenges
Joëlle Troeder, born and raised in Brussels, Belgium, has been practicing Nichiren Buddhism for 19 years. After earning her Master’s in Law at Université libre de Bruxelles and a Master’s in International and European Law at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, she worked as a lawyer at the Brussels Bar. Since 2010, she has been a partner at a law firm in Brussels.
What area of law do you practice, and why did you become involved in it? Joëlle: I practice three areas of law: criminal, rental and commercial. Before I began working as a lawyer at the Brussels Bar, I studied European and International Law, and dreamed of becoming involved in human rights. Gradually, I started to realize that human rights is actually an integral part of every legal case, particularly in criminal law. For the last three years, I have also assisted in a law class at the main university in Brussels. I enjoy being in contact with the younger generation. Birgit: My main occupation is the practice of family law, but I also defend clients in criminal law cases. My clients are mostly children or victims of domestic violence or even sexual abuse. In the beginning, family law was not my favorite field. However, I had more and more clients asking for help in this field. Through my personal experience of my parents marrying and divorcing each other twice over, I well understand what families go through when parents separate. What aspect of your work do you find most rewarding? Joëlle: I like all aspects—meeting clients, pleading in court, doing research in libraries, participating in negotiations, doing expert appraisals, writing the minutes of proceedings, thinking about strategies. They are all part of the same challenge: how to solve a situation in the best way, how to alleviate somebody’s
What is the most difficult position you have found yourself in at work? Birgit: The most difficult for me are situations where I feel powerlessness, because the judge, the authorities, the institutions or experts involved are indifferent, ignorant of the truth or lack the hope or courage to take a decision; or because lawyers influence the court using
Birgit Rosenbaum was born in Aachen, Germany, and raised in Cologne. After earning a Master’s in Law, she went on to obtain a Doctorate at the University of Kiel. She obtained certification from the Bar Association of Cologne, and is currently working as a certified specialist in Family Law. Birgit has been practicing Nichiren Buddhism for 14 years.
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suffering, how to restore someone’s dignity. Birgit: My clients are often in financially or socially very difficult positions. In some cases, the youth welfare office has decided to take away their children despite the fact that they take good care of them. In other cases, women have been oppressed by violent or addicted spouses. When my efforts have helped improve the situation of children and realize justice for a parent, I feel very happy. And when I am able to help my clients stand upright again, have hope again, giving up their role as a victim or leaving behind the role of an offender, this is the most rewarding for me.
dirty, sometimes illegal methods. In one instance, my client was so threatened by her former spouse, supported by his lawyer, that she wanted to withdraw the action. In such a situation, I pray to bring forth wisdom, power and courage. Many times, I realize that I have to open my heart toward my opponents or some of the parties involved—this is the beginning of change. If through wisdom and dialogue I am able to reach the hearts of parties involved, we can always find a solution which is good for all. This is a real victory for me. Joëlle: A couple of years ago, I defended a young man
Photo credit: Bruce Forster/Getty Images
“Every experience I was confronted with, even the worst, could be used to create value.”
ON VOCATION
“Many times, I realize that I have to open my heart toward my opponents or some of the parties involved—this is the beginning of change.” who was clearly innocent, but was involved in a drug trafficking case because of his girlfriend. Despite my best efforts, he was convicted and spent four years in prison. I was deeply affected by this. A senior colleague encouraged me greatly, explaining that however hard our work may be, we need to treasure every victory, engraving it in our hearts, to help give us hope for the future. I also understood that my responsibility is to do my best as a lawyer and to have no regrets. I understood that as a lawyer I am not a magician, and that the person I assist or defend also has his or her own causality.
assigned: “Above all, it is important to deepen your understanding of what this work is about, and of yourself, without forgetting your original inspiration.” She was perfectly right. Gradually, by encountering all types of situations, I was able to deepen my understanding and also realize that every experience I was confronted with, even the worst, could be used to create value.
Photo credit: Jeff Cadge/Getty Images
What has your work taught you about the importance of dialogue? Joëlle: In my work, there is continuous dialogue: first within myself, then with the client, with the other lawyers, with the judges. In reality, not everyone wants to have a dialogue, in which case one must be quite resolute whilst remaining respectful. Birgit: I really believe in the power of dialogue. Lawyers are masters of words. But sometimes we fight with words as if they were swords. Then dialogue turns into war. In these cases, taking a break or simply listening carefully to understand the other party is a very important aspect of true dialogue. I make great efforts not to fight with my words but to use my verbal ability in a peaceful way. How has Buddhism changed or affected the way you approach your job? Birgit: Without Buddhism, I would not be able to muster the courage to do my job. As Nichiren Daishonin says in his writings, “A sword is useless in the hands of a coward.” Buddhism has helped me discover that even in the worst circumstances there can be a hidden win-win solution. My Buddhist practice helps me find hope and courage and inspire my clients with my hope and courage. Joëlle: In the law faculty of a university, you study the content of law and how the judiciary works, but in fact you learn nothing about concrete problems and how to behave as a lawyer in many different situations. I would call my Buddhist faith and training my “University of Life,” and that is what I now consider as being of the greatest importance to my work. Before I began working as a lawyer, a senior in faith who had been a lawyer for many years gave me very simple advice when I was facing dilemmas over the cases I was being
How do you see the mission of lawyers in society? Birgit: Lawyers should proclaim the truth and fight for justice, where this is necessary. We should bring humanity and fairness into court. We should support our clients’ aims without being unfair to the other people involved. We should exert ourselves to find—ideally together with the other parties—a solution that is best for all involved. We should aim for lasting peace between those involved, or lasting protection for our client if the first aim is impossible. Joëlle: You can work as a lawyer for many reasons; it can be a very cynical world. Personally, I see my mission as a lawyer as I see my mission in every field of my life: I try to restore the human dignity of the person in front of me, and I try to help this person give the best of him- or herself as a human being. ❖ July 2012
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BUDDHISM in DAILY LIFE
T
“This sublime reality has always existed but manifests only under certain conditions.”
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July 2012
he Lotus Sutra, which is regarded in Nichiren Buddhism as the teaching in which the Buddha reveals the full truth of his enlightenment, is a largely allegorical description of Shakyamuni Buddha interacting with a great gathering of disciples. At a key point, a magnificent “treasure tower” suddenly appears from out of the earth. Its vast dimensions stagger the imagination, and it is adorned with seven kinds of treasures. “Tower” here is a translation of stupa—a dome-like structure built to house the relics of the Buddha. As the astonished assembly looks on, a voice speaks from inside the tower praising Shakyamuni and attesting to the truth of his teaching. Shakyamuni opens the tower to reveal seated inside a Buddha named Many Treasures who, we learn, lived and died in the incalculably distant past. Shakyamuni explains that this treasure tower appears anywhere in the universe that the Lotus Sutra is being preached. He enters into the tower and takes a seat beside Many Treasures. The tower and the entire assembly are raised up into space, where, in “the Ceremony in the Air,” further amazing events unfold. All of this is an elucidation, in rich symbolism, of the unfathomable Buddha nature inherent within the life of all people. In Buddhism, the Buddha represents the ideal of human development and perfection. Shakyamuni, with his great compassion, wisdom and courage, embodied this ideal, becoming a model for his followers. After his death, however, Buddhism became shrouded in mystique, and the ideal of Buddhahood came to be seen as an almost unattainable goal divorced from actual reality and at contrast with mundane human existence. The teachings of Nichiren (1222–82), on the other hand, are based on the Lotus Sutra’s premise that the world of Buddhahood is an intrinsic part of the lives of all people, which we are capable of manifesting as we are. The emergence of the treasure tower can be seen as an explanation of the actual relationship between the rarified ideal of Buddhahood and everyday life. Nichiren interprets the treasure tower as symbolizing the ultimate reality, which he identified as Nam-myoho-
renge-kyo. The Buddha Many Treasures represents the eternally enduring world of Buddhahood. This sublime reality has always existed but manifests only under certain conditions. Shakyamuni Buddha represents here a mortal Buddha, or Buddhahood manifest and active in this transient, actual world. Shakyamuni’s act of seating himself beside Many Treasures represents the fact that these two aspects of the Buddha—the eternal and the transient—are the same. In a letter to a follower, Nichiren explains where the ultimate reality exists. It is in the depths of the lives of all people. He writes, “No treasure tower exists other than the figures of the men and women who embrace the Lotus Sutra.” The attributes and qualities of the Buddha are already within the life of each individual. The purpose of the Lotus Sutra, and the mission of those who practice it, is to activate the qualities of the Buddha inherent in the depths of life and bring them into the world. The Lotus Sutra is what connects these two realities. Nichiren formulated the practice of chanting Nam-myoho-rengekyo as the means of practicing the Lotus Sutra—of enabling the treasure tower to emerge within our lives. As a tool for this practice he inscribed a mandala—the Gohonzon—which depicts, in Chinese calligraphy, the Ceremony in the Air, and is a representation of the Buddha nature present in all things. Nichiren describes the seven treasures adorning the treasure tower as representing the virtues of “hearing the correct teaching, believing it, keeping the precepts, engaging in meditation, practicing assiduously, renouncing one’s attachments, and reflecting on oneself.” Significantly, these qualities are not those of an august Buddha-like figure so much as those of one who is striving to attain Buddhahood. It is through effort and striving that the qualities of the Buddha nature inherent in our lives become manifest. To see the treasure tower is to recognize our inherent Buddha nature. It is to be cognizant of and to uphold the great dignity of life—our own and others.’ Faith in the inherent Buddha nature is essentially what distinguishes a “Buddha” from a “common mortal.” As SGI President Daisaku Ikeda writes, “The ‘tower adorned with the seven treasures’ is the grand and dignified original form of our lives.” ❖
Photo credit: Imagezoo/Getty Images
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Quarterly
A Buddhist Forum for Peace, Culture and Education
Living with Courage Cover Photo: Playing basketball at Nkhulambe Secondary School in Blantyre District, Malawi © Alfredo Caliz/Panos Pictures
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