By JESSE SOWA
Gazette-Times reporter
Loving and being friendly with your enemies can help you achieve inner peace and possibly contribute to world peace. Happiness for all and suffering for none.
Those were the overwhelming messages from six Tibetan Buddhist monks of the Gaden Monastery in India during a 90-minute service Sunday morning at the Majestic Theater, sponsored by the Unity Church of Corvallis.
The monks have been traveling around the United States and holding services since September and plan to continue for about another 11 or 12 months. The monks, who came from Eugene, will be traveling to Canby for three days and then returning to Eugene for another day before continuing their trip.
“Genuine peace, it should be springing from one’s within,” said the lama, Geshe Ngawang Lungtok, through an interpreter during a 30-minute speech to the audience of about 150.
To achieve internal peace, a person must eliminate the factors that make him or her unhappy or suffering. Warm feelings should be generated toward strangers as well as family and friends.
“That kind of training is very difficult, but it is very necessary,” the lama said. “If you reduce a feeling of (emnity) toward others, it will create a sense of happiness within you.”
All religions, in some form, the lama said, focus on generating compassion and lovingness for all. Religious people should be an example for others by bringing happiness to others.
“Your spiritual progress should be based on helping others. If not, stop harming others,” he said. “Peace and spiritual progress should walk hand in hand together.”
Following opening messages and prayers, the monks — sitting in chairs facing the audience and dressed in their traditional yellow and burgundy robes — chanted and played music using horns, a drum, a bell and cymbals. Wangchok said the 10-minute presentation is normally performed for about 18 1/2 hours in their home monastery.
Monk Lobsang Wangchok used the people in the monks’ home of Tibet as a case in point for how to avoid violence at all costs.
More than 1 million Tibetans died when the Chinese destroyed the Gaden Monastery near Lhasa, Tibet, in 1959. More than 120,000 people fled the area, over the Himalayas and into India, where the monks began to rebuild the monastery in 1969. Two million Tibetans died during the Chinese invasion of Tibet.
Tibetans are a people who “turn the other cheek” and do not fight back with violence, he said.
“If there’s going to be a new humanity, the Tibetan people are a prime example,” Wangchok said.
“We think if you have a problem in your family, you don’t make war on a family member,” he added. “People have to sit down and try to understand one another. We really feel violence provokes more violence.”
Fittingly the gathering joined hands near the end of the service to sing The Peace Song, which begins:
Let there be peace on Earth, and let it begin with me.
Let there be peace on Earth, the peace that was meant to be.
Jesse Sowa covers public safety and general assignments for the Gazette-Times. He can be reached at jesse.sowa@lee.net or 758-9521.
