I wanted to share a story of peace and love this Christmas. Jack Kornfield is a story teller that touches my heart. I have decided on one of his stories. And this story of faith and endurance is one of my favorities. I hope you enjoy it.
"Once, I was working with a friend and teacher, Maha Ghosananda, the "Gandhi of Cambodia". He was one of the few monastics to survive the Cambodian genocide, and in response, he decided to open a Buddhist temple in a barren refugee camp filled with Khmer Rouge communists.
In the hot and crowded camp were fifty thousand villagers who had become communists at gunpoint, and had now fled to the Thai border. When the bamboo temple was nearly finished, the Khmer Rouge underground threatened to kill any who went there.
In spite of this, a temple gong was rung, and on its opening day, more than twenty thousand people crowded into the dusty square for the ceremony. Now in front of him were the sad remnants of other broken families; an uncle with two nieces, a mother with only one of her three children. Their schools had been burned, their villages destroyed, and in nearly every family, members had been executed or ripped away. Their faces were filled with sorrow. All of Maha Ghosananda's family had been killed. I wondered what he would say to people who had suffered so greatly.
Maha Ghosananda began the service with the traditional chants that had permeated village life for a thousand years. Though these words had been silenced for years, and their temples destroyed, they still remained in the hearts of these people whose lives had known as much sorrow and injustice as any on earth.
Then Maha Ghosananda began to chant one of the central teachings of the Buddha, first in Pali and then in Cambodian, reciting the words over and over:
Hatred never ceases by hatred,
but by love alone is healed.
This is the ancient and eternal law.
As he chanted these verses over and over, hundreds, then thousands began to chant with him. They chanted and wept. There were the tears of the Dharma falling on their parched hearts, for it was clear that the truth of this chant and their longing for forgiveness, was even greater than the sorrows they had to bear. "
Peace to all
love Norma
