9 SUTRAS ON PEACE
Raimon Panikkar
1. Peace is participation in the harmony of the rhythm
of Being
Peace does
not alter the rhythm of reality. It is not static, nor dynamic. It is
not even a dialectical movement. And it doesn't mean absence of forces or
polarity. Being is rhythmic, it is rhythm, a-dualistic integration of movement
and rest. Western technocratic culture, by cultivating acceleration, has upset
the natural rhythms: it is without peace.
2. It is difficult to live without external peace;
impossible without internal peace.
Every day,
after the last world war, a thousand people die as victims of war. There
are millions of refugees, children on the streets and people dying of hunger
all over the world. This human degradation of our race must not be minimized.
But if internal peace exists, there is still hope. On the other hand, internal
peace cannot be enjoyed if our human and ecological environment is the victim
of violence and injustice. In that case, internal peace is an illusion. And no
authentic sage (from Buddha to Christ) locks himself up in selfishness and
self-sufficiency.
3. Peace: it is not won for oneself, nor is it imposed
on others. It is a gift of the Spirit
Peace does
not come from masochistic spirituality or from sadistic pedagogies. The
regimes imposed do not found peace for those who receive them: child, poor,
family or nation. We lack the more feminine attitude of the recipient. The
nature of peace is to be a grace, a gift. It is the fruit of a revelation: of
love, of God, of the beauty of reality, it is the existence of providence, the
goodness of creation, hope, justice. It is Gabe and Aufgabe, gift and
responsibility.
4. Victory obtained by violent defeat of the enemy
never leads to peace
Most wars
have found justification in response to earlier peace treaties. The
vanquished reappear and demand what has been refused them. The repression of
evil itself does not have lasting results. Peace is not the result of a
dialectical process of good versus evil. The young rabbi of Nazareth invited us
to grow wheat and weeds together. Peace flees the field of the victorious
(Simone Weil). Victory is always over people; and people are never absolutely
bad.
5. Military disarmament requires cultural disarmament
Western
civilization has developed an arsenal of armaments, qualitatively and
quantitatively; there must be something inherent in this culture: a spirit of
competition, subjectivity, a tendency to neglect the field of feelings, a sense
of superiority, universality, etc. on the destruction of armaments, without
paying attention to the more fundamental questions, is an example of this
spiritual state. Then cultural disarmament - a prerequisite for peace -
is at least as difficult as military disarmament. It implies a critique of
culture and a genuinely intercultural approach.
6. No culture, religion or tradition can solve the
problems of our world in isolation
Today no
religion could provide universal answers (if only because the questions are not
the same). Unfortunately, at a time when most traditional religions tend
to shed the mantle of imperialism, colonialism and universalism, the so-called
"scientific" worldview seems to be collecting the cultural heritage
of these attitudes. Here the word pluralism should be mentioned.
7.
Peace belongs mainly to the order of mythos, not of logos
Shalom,
pax, eirene, salam, Friede, shanti, píng-an…: Peace is polysemic; has numerous
meanings. My notion of peace may not be peaceful for someone else. Peace
is not synonymous with pacifism. It is a myth, something that is believed in as
a given. But it is not irrational, on the contrary it makes the act of
understanding intelligible. Peace was once signed in the name of God; in our
age, peace seems to be an emerging unifying myth and it is also in its name
that war is waged. The mythos is not to be separated from the logos, but the
two should not be identified.
8.
Religion, the way to peace
Religion
has always been regarded in the past as a way of salvation. Therefore
religions were factors of interior peace for their own followers and of wars
for others. It is a fact that most of the wars in the world have been religious
wars. Today we are witnessing a transformation of the very notion of religion:
religions are ways of achieving peace (it does not mean reducing them to a
single denominator). And the road to peace is revolutionary: it demands the
elimination of injustice, selfishness and greed.
9. Forgiveness, reconciliation, dialogue: only they
lead to peace
Punishment,
indemnity, restitution, reparation and the like do not lead to peace, they do
not break the law of karma. To believe that restoring the broken order
solves the situation is a gross, mechanistic, and immature way of thinking.
Lost innocence demands redemption and not the dream of a rediscovered paradise.
The way to peace is forward and not backward. Human history demands
forgiveness. To forgive it takes a force that goes beyond the mechanical order
of action-reaction, it takes the Holy Spirit, Love, pillar of the universe.