Maha Ghosananda (1929-2007
The world lost one of the most revered and important figures in twentieth and twenty-first century Buddhism when Semdech Preah Maha Ghosananda, Supreme Patriarch of Cambodian Buddhism and a six-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, died at Cooley Dickinson Hospital, Northampton, MA, early on the morning of March 12th. Less an advocate for nonviolence than the very embodiment of it, he was often referred to in the media as the “Gandhi of Cambodia”—a fitting moniker for a man who modestly described his quite astonishing form of socially-engaged Buddhism in this way: “I was making peace with myself...I was making peace with myself…When you make peace with yourself, you make peace with the world.”
Maha Ghosananda was ordained in the Cambodian Buddhist Order of Theravāda Buddhism at the age of fourteen. As a young monk, he studied with such luminaries as Samdech Preah Sangha Raja Chuon Noth, Bhikkhu Buddhadhasa, and Nichidatsu Fujii, and also earned a doctorate in Buddhist Studies from India’s Nalanda University. He was studying with Ajahn Dhammadaro at his forest hermitage in Thailand when refugees from his country first began to flee from the horrors of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime. By the mid-1970s, he had left the hermitage completely and was serving full-time in the refugee communities along the Thai-Cambodian border. Among other activities, he established temples in many of the camps, ordained new monks, and distributed tracts to survivors with a quote from the Dhammapada: “Hatred can never be appeased by hatred, hatred can only be appeased by love.”
As one of relatively few Buddhist monks to survive the Cambodian genocide, he was instrumental in preserving the country's unique Buddhist heritage. (The New York Times estimates that of the 60,000 Buddhist monks practicing in Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge, only about 3,000 were alive by the time the Vietnamese captured Phnom Penh.) Almost immediately following the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, he had returned to begin teaching, establishing temples, and revitalizing Buddhism in Cambodia. In the years that followed, he would also establish temples and train monastic practitioners in immigrant communities throughout North America, Europe, and Australia.
The late 1980s and early 1990s saw tremendous changes for Maha Ghosananda on several fronts. In 1988, he was elected Supreme Patriarch of Cambodian Buddhism by his peers in the sangha. At around the same time, he moved to Leverett, MA, at the request of a Cambodian community there. (He would divide time between Cambodia, Leverett, and Providence, RI, until his death.) With the publication of an exquisite book, Step by Step: Meditations on Wisdom and Compassion (published by Parallax Press and still in print), his distinctive, powerfully elegiac and enormously compelling teachings became available to a much wider audience. Speaking to Tricycle: The Buddhist Review on the occasion of their first issue in the fall of 1991, he said:
- [What is Buddhism?] Knowing how to eat. Why to eat and where to eat and what to eat. And with whom to eat. And for whom. Life is a process of eating. We try to eat other people but do not let them eat us. And the Buddha cries when he sees this suffering.
- It is a law of the universe that retaliation, hatred, and revenge only continue the cycle and never stop it...Reconciliation does not mean that we surrender rights and conditions, but rather that we use love. Our wisdom and our compassion must walk together. Having one without the other is like walking on one foot; you will fall. Balancing the two, you will walk very well, step by step.
As the walks continued and drew attention from the international media, Maha Ghosananda was honored with both Japan’s Niwano Peace Prize and Norway’s Rafto Human Rights Award for his work. In addition, as mentioned above, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize six times. Among those who cited him for the honor were U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell (who nominated him twice), the American Friends Services Committee, and an anonymous Nobel Peace laureate.
Commenting on his death in a post to the Buddhist_Chaplaincy Yahoo! Group, Beth Goldring of the Brahmavihara/Cambodia AIDS Project, wrote that Maha Ghosananda’s death is “the kind of loss that cannot be measured.” Indeed, we’ve lost a living Buddha…
Written: Danny
