Dear Thay, dear Sangha. I was at the Riverside Church in New York in 2001 when you came to give a talk shortly after September 11th. This was the same location where Dr. King came to give his speech against the Vietnam War, a position we remember with gratitude was influenced by his time with you.

You spoke to your own experience of the tragedy of war, and you were among the only voices I can remember at the time who advocated for seizing the moment to work for peace. Many of us in these times now may be feeling fear, anger, despair when we see so many wars waged in our name. As you did with Dr. King, can you advise us how we might transform these feelings into compassion and into active peacemaking?

As you know, I was in America when the September 11th took place. That day I was going from Deer Park to the north of California to organize retreats and public talks. And loading the bus, we heard about the event. I was supposed to give a talk in Berkeley four days later. And we could experience the collective energy of fear and anger in America. Fear and anger.

We know that the collective energy of compassion can be very healing, but the collective energy of fear and anger can be very dangerous. It can start a war at any time. So my purpose in giving the talks was to ask Americans to practice mindful breathing in order to calm down their feelings, their emotions. That is the most important thing to do.

And that is why in the talk taking place in Berkeley, four thousand people attended. We wear our saṅghāṭī, the orange color robe, and we practice meditation on compassion and try to calm down, to help people calm down. You can see the suffering on the face of the people that day. And we knew that after the talk, people suffer less. You just look at their face and you know that people suffer less after a guided meditation on compassion and calming down.

But that is only for a few thousand people. The talk in the Riverside Church had the same purpose. And we advised our friends in America not to do anything yet, not to say anything yet. The first thing to do is to calm down and then begin to look into the situation and ask the question, why they have done such a thing to us? Have we done anything that make them so angry at us, that make them so desperate that they could commit such an act?

I proposed that according to the tradition we belong to, I proposed that America organize sessions of deep listening. We should invite many wise Americans to come and help us to listen. And we invite the people in America who feel that they are victims of social injustice and so on to come and tell us about their suffering. And we proposed that sessions of deep listening like that within America can be televised so that everyone can follow.

That is to listen to your own suffering, to our own suffering, and understand our own suffering before we want to listen to the suffering of the people on the other side. It is very faithful to our practice. You listen to your own suffering first before you listen to the suffering on the other side. And after you have done deep listening in your own country, you may turn to the people over there and use loving speech.

"Dear friends over there, we have suffered a lot. We don't understand why you have done such a thing to us. Have we done anything in order to try to destroy you as a people, as a religion, as a way of life? We may have done something or we may have said something that give you the impression that we want to destroy you as a people, as a religion, as a way of life, but in fact we do not have that intention.

So please tell us what we have done, what we have said that have given you that kind of impression. We know that you must have been very angry at us to have done such a thing to us. We would like to listen. Please tell us from your heart, tell us about your suffering and our lack of skillfulness in making you suffer." And that is what I proposed to America at that time.

And this is a process of restoring communication and reconciling. And last spring, the spring of this year, I went to Korea and I gave retreats, we gave retreats and public talks. And there was one public talk in the south attended by many people, maybe twenty thousand people. And they announced to us that they were going to organize a huge ceremony of prayer for peace between the south and the north.

The north now has nuclear weapons and they sound to be belligerent. And the south is fearful and they are afraid that a war will break out very soon. So in that talk I said that, "Dear friends, the danger is not the nuclear weapons. The danger is the fear." If you look deeply into the north, you see the amount, the huge amount of fear.

When the president of the south visited America, the north may think that there should be a scheme to attack the north. So they are very fearful. And they are doing their best in order to show that they are not afraid, they are ready to fight and to kill. So the belligerent attitude outside in appearance shows that there is a big fear inside.

And if you see that fear, you are not angry at them anymore. And you know that the best thing is to try to help removing that fear of the people in the north. But in order to do that, you have to remove the fear in you first, because you are also afraid. And that is why a prayer for peace is not enough. Coming together and praying is not enough. You have to create, you have to organize retreats for politicians, school teachers business leaders, and help them to look deeply, to calm themselves down, to remove their fear by understanding. And when you are free from fear, you can help the North to do the same. So it's not by political maneuvering that you can solve the problem. It is that kind of practice that can remove fear and anger in us, that can make us more peaceful and compassionate.

And when you are more peaceful and compassionate, you can help the people on the other side to do the same, to be a real peacemaker. And that is the process we have learned from the Buddhist tradition. As North Korea and South Korea have had Buddhism as their spiritual tradition, we believe that they can make good use of that tradition in order to practice, in order to get out of this difficult situation. And I think the same thing should be true here in the Middle East, in Europe, in America, and so on.

[One sound of the bell.]