Maha Ghosananda in the Cambodian refugee camps in northern Thailand
(told by Jack Kornfield, captured here)
And he decided to open a temple, in the middle of one of the biggest refugee camps — 50 or 100 thousand people in these tiny, little bamboo huts. [He] got permission from the UN […] and built a platform with a little roof over it, and put an alter with the traditional, Cambodian Buddha.
It was a camp with the Khmer Rouge underground, lots of them, and so they put the word out that if anyone went to be with this monk, when they got out of the camp back to Cambodia they would all be shot.
So we wondered who if anyone would come? […] And 25,000 people poured into the central square around this temple. And Maha Ghosananda sat there and he was a scholar, he spoke 15 languages, he was an extremely kind hearted human being who suffered enormously and transformed it into the kind of compassion that we think of the Dalai Lama…
There he was […] sitting, looking out at 25,000 people who had suffered immense traumas, and you could see there was a grandmother and the only two surviving children that she had, or an uncle and niece, and their faces were the faces of trauma, and of survivors.
And I thought, what is he going to say to them?
And he sat very quietly for a long time, just in their presence. And then he put his hands together, in this kind of modest way, and began to chant […] in Cambodian and in Sanskrit, or Pali, the Buddhist language, one of the first verses from the Buddhist texts that goes:
Hatred never ceases by hatred
But by love alone is healed
This is the ancient and eternal law
And he chanted it over and over in Khmer, and in Sanskrit/Pali, and pretty soon the chant was picked up and in a little while 25,000 people were chanting this verse with him. And I looked out and they were weeping, many of them because they hadn’t heard their sacred chant for years. But also because he was offering them a truth that was even bigger than their sorrows….
And they were sitting in the middle of the healing energy of the dharma of the teachings of the heart that can liberate us.