This week the Indiana Center for Middle East Peace hosted four Tibetan Buddhist monks from the Tashi Kyil Monastery, exiled to Dehra Dun, India, from Tibet. This is the fourth time ICMEP has hosted the monks in the last 17 years in partnership with the Tibetan Mongolian Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center in Bloomington, IN. They created a World Peace Sand Mandala at the Allen County Public Library downtown, gave talks at the Insight Meditation Group in Fort Wayne and the Indiana Buddhist Temple (and our friend, the abbot, Bhante Devananda) in Hoagland, and public performances in Goshen, IN (for Michiana Voices for Middle East Peace) and at Plymouth Congregational Church in Fort Wayne.
I’ve been asked, “How is it that an organization dedicated to peace in the Middle East is hosting Tibetan Buddhist monks?” There are primarily two reasons, one personal, one political.
The personal. When I lived in St. Louis, I was one of the leaders of the St. Louis World Religions Dialogue group (from 1981) and a member of the Friends of Tibet (from 1987), serving the large Tibetan refugee community in St. Louis. In September 1993, these two organizations hosted H. H., the Dalai Lama as the keynote speaker for our World Day of Prayer for Peace at Saint Louis University Church. Representatives of ten religious traditions in the metro St. Louis area read scriptures and prayers and the Dalai Lama spoke of compassion, lovingkindness, and peace with justice to the 1200 attendees. I served as Master of Ceremonies and was the Dalai Lama’s (and his entourage) host for his time in St. Louis. An activist for Tibet for the last 38 years.
The primary reason ICMEP hosted the monks this week is that we are “a voice of conscience for peace, justice, human rights, and intercultural encounter.” As such, as much as the monks focused on peace, lovingkindness, and compassion, it was not lost on any of us that these monks live in exile because of a brutal Chinese regime’s occupation and ethnic cleansing of Tibet.
ICMEP’s consistent message is that Israel’s Zionist agenda, no matter their protestations to the contrary, is the extermination of not only the Palestinian people, but of their culture, the erasure of Palestine from human memory. The very definition of genocide.
So we see the parallels between the genocide undergone by the people of Tibet, the people of Palestine (in the last 75+ years), and the indigenous peoples of South Africa (having thrown off apartheid) as well as in our country (for the last two-and-a-half centuries), but also their courageous liberation struggles and resistance. We unequivocally stand with them!
And the MOST URGENT need for our own commitment and costly solidarity – time, resources, energy – with them and with all peoples suffering at the hands of cruel, inhumane, and murderous settler colonial regimes – like China, Israel, South Africa, the US, and others. So we at ICMEP have used the monks’ presence this week to recommit ourselves to this important work.
We at ICMEP invite you into those spaces within your own communities to commit yourselves to peace, justice, human rights, and intercultural encounter. COSTLY SOLIDARITY!