Building a Legacy of Peace

Dr Lawrence E. Carter Sr., Dean of the Martin Luther King Jr International Chapel at Morehouse College, Atlanta, USA was in Malaysia on October 19, 2006 to officiate the ‘Gandhi, King, Ikeda: A Legacy of Building Peace’ exhibition at Wisma Kebudayaan SGM, Kuala Lumpur. The following is Dean Carter’s opening speech at the GKI exhibition.

How very happy I am to see you. This has been an absolutely splendid experience and I got to meet some of the wonderful religious leadership in this community. We had a very informative and rich discussion and I learned a great deal about what you are doing peace-wise here in Malaysia.

The Gandhi, King, Ikeda award, exhibition, prize, video and book are created by Morehouse College to celebrate the lives and work of three men from three different cultures and countries whose common path of profound dedication to peace, spirituality, one-world and unity has been recognised internationally. Mahatma Gandhi’s civil disobedience and non-violent demonstrations won greater freedom and ultimately independence for 400 million citizens of India after three centuries of British rule. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr’s commitment to peace and justice inspired the American non-violent movement for civil and human rights giving voice to the hopes and dreams of the dispossessed throughout the world.

Dr Daisaku Ikeda’s work as a leading Buddhist philosopher, author, educator, humanist, founder and social activist has led to the non-violent democratising of Japan’s feudalistic social structure and an international grassroots initiative of inter-cultural and interfaith dialogue and co-operation for global peace and ethically-based justice. I have come today to speak about the new superpowers - peace and non-violence. We are standing at a crossroad of life on earth. We come from different backgrounds to initiate a consciousness of active non-violence among youth and adults globally.

What You Are, The World Is.

The choices we make now will create a future in which not only we but our children will have to live and die. We intend to give our children a world neighbourhood that is better than the one we have received. A world not of weaponry but of living tree. A place in which our children may learn compassionate emotion, compassionate listening, expecting respect, empathetic communication, unconditional love, non-judgemental justice where you do not participate in negativity.

But, my brothers and sisters, you cannot have what you are not willing to be. If you want peace you have to be peaceful. What you are, the world is. And without your transformation, there can be no transformation of the world. You cannot give away what you do not possess. You must be the ideal itself to transform the national presidencies and the political culture of prime ministries.

Violence is like a disease. It affects everyone but it has a way of hitting the youngest among us the hardest. 100 million died in the 20th century in war and violence. A the beginning of the 20th century, the deaths were predominantly among soldiers but by the end of the century 80% of the deaths were civilian and unfortunately the majority of these were women and children.

Nobel peace prize laureate Betty Williams from Northern Ireland spoke at Morehouse College recently and she informed us that half of the population of Iraq is under 15 years of age. We must seek to vaccinate ourselves with a non-violent consciousness lest we become known as a generation of youth-killers. We must live according to what is possible in the outcome. We must learn to live in the results for which we pray. We need in our neighbourhoods a campaign equal to our capacity to love and to be creative. We must care and act on the consciousness of peace like F. W. de Klerk of South Africa.

Love the whole, not just the parts

Governments cannot give us peace. "We give peace to one another and we must start with our children," said Gandhi. A lady by the name of Barbara Marx Hubbard in the United States who ran for vice-president on the democratic ticket and came very close to winning the nomination tells us that there is a great shift going on and we are about to move en masse from homo sapien sapien (which simply means being conscious that you are conscious) to the next stage which remain being able to love the whole and no just the parts. It is said, by many, that over 15 million people in the United States and a much larger number around the world has already crossed over from homo sapien sapien to homo universialis. The next stage to be able to love the whole and not just the parts, to be a universal human. That’s what Gandhi, King, Dr Ikeda, Shirin Ebadi (an Iranian Muslim, judge and human rights activist), Michael Nobel and Prince Hassan of Jordan have done. They are all architects of peace.

The questions this afternoon to everybody in the room is: Can you love the whole? Can you embrace the world and not just the parts? Not just people who look like you, eat like you and live where you live. Or are you only capable of loving the parts?

Gandhi, Dr King, Dr Ikeda, Judge Shirin Ebadi, Dr Nobel and Prince Hassan believe that violence does matter. You must be the change you wish to see. Be the change. Don’t just preach it, practise it. Don’t just dream about it, live it. Be the thing itself. Don’t give lip-service, give life-service. Don’t politicise over non-violence, download it into your biodata. The peace that you want in your heart and the peace that you want out in the world, that peace is born from compassionate emotion and unconditional love.

Dr Carter (right) viewing the 'Gandhi, King, Ikeda: A Legacy of Building Peace' exhibition at Wisma Kebudayaan SGM after the opening ceremony on October 19, 2006. Joining him are MERCY Malaysia co-founder Dr Ashar Abdullah (left) and SGM General Director Choo Kong Fei (middle).

An Alternative View of 9/11

Gandhi’s quotation “Be the change,” gives you some idea of the ground of upholding the principle of non-violence. Now this quotation “Be the change you wish to see,” originated with Gandhi in 1906 when the campaign for Indian rights began to take root among people in South Africa fulfilling the writings of Count Leo Tolstoy of Russia. The year was 1906 but are you aware of the exact date? It was September 11, 1906. Gandhi conducted his first non-violent campaign.

Now hearing that, you have an alternative way to view 9/11 ‘01, the occasion when the New York World Trade Towers collapsed, triggering the opening of the hearts of the people of the world. So that for the first time in history, the hearts of the largest number of people in the world opened up and they could embrace the suffering on the entire planet.

The tragedy is, as you well know, our hearts didn’t stay open for very long and we soon went back to business as usual. It takes this kind of trigger, always, to get us to realise we are not separate on this planet. I also am a Malaysian and you are Americans. Martin Luther King, Jr’s words are indeed prophetic, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Dr Ikeda has founded two universities built on a pedagogy of peace, co-operation, not competition. The first university in the United States so founded is in the Orange County, California. He has institutionalised the philosophies of non-violent communication, of Gandhi and King.

Gandhi, King, Ikeda, as the video told you, an Indian Hindu, an African-American Christian, and a Japanese Buddhist each acknowledged an American white man, a transcendentalist named Henry David Thoreau, 1837 graduate of Harvard University. They all acknowledged him as the one who tutored them on civil disobedience and non-violence, on methods to deal with unjust governments.

Getting Out of Boxes

The best solutions and methods to our current planetary crises have come to us through a cross-fertilisation that literally belts the world. But you will never find these solutions and methods like to the crisis in North Korea if you are not willing to get out of some boxes. The age box, the race box, the gender box, the faith box, the nation box, the ideology box. An African proverb says: “He who never travels thinks his mother is the best cook.”

9/11 ‘01 are 9/11 ‘06 are calls from the universe that we are not separate. In the case of Thoreau, his inspiration to be a transcendentalist was acquired from a French woman, Madame Germaine de Stael. And she says that she was influenced by German philosophers. They were probably all white men. Let not this fact be lost on you. Prince Hassan, a Jordanian, an Arab Muslim was the first recipient of the Gandhi, King, Ikeda Community Builders prize conferred by a predominantly African-American all-male and predominantly Christian college. We did that deliberately because we wanted to get out of some boxes to demonstrate that we are not separate from the rest of the world.

Women Lead the Way to Non-Violence

Likewise, stepping out of the box of male-chauvinism and sexism, Gandhi frequently acknowledged that he was taught non-violence by his wife, Kasturba. Gandhi started his career with a violent temperament. The fact that his wife was a good unassuming Hindu woman is probably the reason most of us were not aware of her non-violent effect on the Mahatma. Isn’t that typical - women do the work and men get the credit? Women, you should have shouted, “That’s right!” You can’t let yourself be intimidated by all the masculinity sitting around you. During the years when Gandhi was in jail, his wife made his speeches and ate his non-violent diet and she aroused the women to get involved. It was the way she responded to his violence that literally changed the course of history. Gandhi indicated that women have a natural predisposition for providing non-violent leadership.

Men give orders but women bring order. Gandhi announced to the world in order for him to free India he had to become a woman. Women have some virtues that men ought to emulate. Personal power results from a balance of masculine and feminine forces. The spiritualisation process in men as well as women is a feminising process. It is a quietening of the mind. Once again Gandhi, King, Ikeda, Ebadi, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Nobel, de Klerk, Mandela, Prince Hassan, define the faith not by its boundaries but by its roots. You must prepare yourself to love the whole and not just the parts. Don’t limit your faith’s greatness by the name of your religion.

Peace Room

In Washington DC there is a war room in the White House that tracks clandestine activities, the threat of nationalised evil and blueprints for wars scattered around the world. But in the Martin Luther King, Jr International Chapel at the Morehouse College, Atlanta, Georgia, which is the world’s most prominent religious memorial to Dr King, there we have a peace room which tracks peace and non-violent successors - heroes and heroines of inclusivity, champions of moral justice, unconditional love, sustainability education, environmental education, peace education and human rights education.

[ Courtesy February 2007 Cosmic]