သီတဂူဆရာတော် ဂျေရုစလင် မိန့်ခွန်း

Your Venerable
Your Excellency Mr. President / Prime Minister of Israel
Excellencies
Dhamma Friends
Ladies and Gentlemen

Good morning,

It gives me great pleasure to be invited to this Summit Meeting of Israel-Asia Faith Leadership organized by Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the American Jewish Committee in collaboration with World Council of Religious Leaders with the noble theme to create better understanding and relationship between religious, intellectual and political leaders of Israel and Asia. I sincerely believe that frequent meetings of this kind would be highly conducive to the strengthening of world peace and stability.

The world today is full of chaos, full of crimes, full of miseries, full of evils, and full of violence. The nations are arming themselves to their teeth. Arm races among great countries are most frightening and the weapons they are using are highly destructive that people are living insecure lives.

The historic pages of world history have been marred by many atrocities and cruel wars, the root cause of which is evil mind that generates unpleasant situations and miserable events. The starting point of miserable events is selfish thought of egocentric human beings. The source of competition and conflict is the thought of jealousy or unhappiness over other's progress and success.

Today, I'm very much pleased to share one of the salient teachings of the Buddha over the power of mind, which is largely instrumental in establishing individual peace. This plays a very powerful stepping stone to to the promotion of world peace and stability.

We, human beings, are mysterious beings with inconceivable potentialities. Noble characteristics and criminal tendencies are latent within us. These may rise up to the surface of our lives at any time unexpectedly without using strength and power. These potentialities or tendencies are dormant within us in various degrees.

Within the powerful complex human's mind, we find a treasure vault of virtues and wisdom, then we find a rubbish heap of wickedness and corruption. By developing these respective characteristics, we may become either a blessing or a curse to humanity. We human beings, are consisted of both mind and matter. One of the Buddha's messages in (Manopubbangama Dhamma)- mind is forerunner, mind is chief in life, mind is the master of man, mind moulds the human life, mind makes happiness and suffering, mind creates beauty and ugliness. Therefore, human beings are architects of their own lives. Thus, in order to create our beautiful life or beautiful world or peaceful world, we must mould our mind to be beautiful and peaceful first.

Every religion calls upon their followers to live a moral way of life and to attain mastery over the mind and to cultivate purity of heart. Whether it is the Bible or the Koran, or the Veda, or the Ti-Pitaka, all scriptures call for peace, amity and harmony. From Jina to Jesus, all great founders of all religions have emphasized it with virtues of tolerance and non-violence. But the world we live in is often driven by religious conflicts and sectarian strife, or even the war of brutal fighting. Because we usually attach importance only to the outer shell of religions and we overlook the universal truth or the inner core of religions. The result is a lack of love, compassion, tolerance, forgiveness and self-understanding in the mind.

When there is no peace within individual, then there could not be peace in the world. Violence and peace never can coexist. The only way to achieve inner peace is insight meditation. This is non-sectarianism but scientific result-oriented technique of self-observation and self-realization of the truth. 

Practice of Insight Meditation brings some unprecedented result -- that is -- experiential understanding of how mind and body are interacting.

Whenever negative emotion arises in human mind such as craving, jealousy, hatred, anger, ignorance and so on. These negative spirits trigger unpleasant sensations within the body. On the other hand, positive states sometimes arise in the mind such as tolerance, love, compassion, sympathetic joy and wisdom. At that time, mental actions create happiness and pleasant sensations within the body.

Every moment to moment, the mind generates hate or love, compassion or cruelty, sympathy or jealousy, positivity or negativity, pleasantness or unpleasantness and selfishness or selflessness. So the entire mind is flooded with pleasant sensation or unpleasant sensation all the time. Insight meditation reveals that mental action precedes every physical and vocal action, determining whether that action would be wholesome or unwholesome. That is why we must find practical methods to create pure and peaceful mind.

The practice of insight meditation can be used for keeping balanced mind and sound health. By exercising insight meditation, everyone can remove mental disease of negativities and can achieve balance of mind. The balanced mind will make unbalanced world balanced, stable mind will make unstable world stable and peaceful mind will make the violent world peaceful.

People of any faiths can practice such insight meditation without discrimination of caste, colour and creed. At the same time, they may follow their own religions and traditions in peace and harmony. There is no need for conversion of religion. A common source of tension and conflict create negativity only. Therefore, conversion is only for changing negative mind to positive mind. As an observer, one will find a society to live in peace and harmony in its natural setting.

Today in the world, we see clearly various degrees of spiritual pollution like discontentment, dissatisfaction, disagreement, argument, demonstration, strikes, violence, invasion, aggression, and tension, etc. These spiritual pollutions are always creating bad consequences to human societies and human environment.

This is the manifestation of unbalanced and untrained mind. They are motivated by negativities latent within human mind. We all understand that we need to protect our environment and society, removing such mental pollutions.

People are searching for a place of peace and tranquility. However, it can not be found in this materialistic world. So, let us change our mind from negativity to positivity. Removing such pollutants of negativities while seeking forbearance and selflessness promotes peace and harmony among human society as well as balanced mind and healthy relationship between human society and its natural environment. This is what all human beings have to practice for individual and world peace.

May all beings be free from aversion. May all beings be happy.

May Peace and Harmony prevail in every corner of the world.

Venerable Dr. Ashin Nyanissara (D.Litt., Ph.D.)
Chancellor of Sitagu International Buddhist Academy
Honorary Professor of International Theravada Buddhist Missionary University
Chairman of International Association of Theravada Buddhist Universities
Chairman of the board of director of Theravada Dhamma Society of America

12-9-2016

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