title, the Buddha, means “the enlightened or awakened one”—and shared his insights with the world.
The Buddha taught that the world’s suffering is the result of unfulfilled craving. Our desires upset the equilibrium of our minds, giving rise to thought patterns that create artificial polarities such as mine/yours, desirable/undesirable, and love/hate. This fragmentation of our awareness of the world encourages a fixation on self, which the Buddha argued is itself an illusory construct created by craving, and this in turn breeds animosity toward those whom we fear pose a threat to the self’s satisfaction. Violence, then, springs from self-deception spawned by the failure to control craving. It’s a habit of thought that risks becoming so engrained as to seem natural.
To shed the delusional tendency to violence, the Buddha recommended a regimen of behavioral therapy: gradually rid oneself of craving by recognizing that desires only enslave and that it’s better to be free, and practice behavior that encourages the letting go of craving. The Buddha summarized this teaching in the Four Noble Truths, recommendations for cultivating inner equilibrium and a right relationship with the world.
One of the central principles in the Buddha’s teaching is the importance of nonviolence, or ahimsa. If we control our cravings, we control the fear, ignorance, egoism, and self-deception that create violence. Not wishing to suffer ourselves, we recognize that it’s wrong to inflict suffering upon any living thing. One of the most eloquent expressions of this commitment to nonviolence is in the Brahmajala Sutta, a summary of Buddhist ethics from the Theravada tradition. In it, the Buddha instructs his bhikkhus or monks by using himself as an exemplar. He tells them that he “abstains from the destruction of life. He has laid aside the rod and the sword, and dwells conscientious, full of kindness, compassionate for the welfare of all living beings.” He has laid aside all weapons, mental as well as physical, doesn’t take what isn’t given, blocks his ears to idle chatter or hurtful words, doesn’t start or end quarrels, and strives to be trustworthy by refusing to utter falsehoods. The Buddha’s point is that nonviolence, the mastery of craving which too often leads to rancor and strife, is both the path to and the fruit of enlightenment.
28 February
Linus Pauling
28 February 1901—19 August 1994
Prophet of Sanity
After his death, the magazine New Scientist named Linus Pauling one of the greatest scientists of all time. But during his lifetime, particularly in 1962, when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his anti-nuclear weapons work, many people in the United States saw him as at best a Soviet stooge. A decade earlier, the State Department had refused him a passport because of his activism. Life magazine called the conferring of the Nobel Peace Prize a “weird insult [to the people of America] from Norway.” The Senate Internal Security Committee, the Senate equivalent of the House Un-American Activities Committee, blasted him as a mouthpiece for the “Communist peace offensive” against American military preparedness. And his own colleagues in the chemistry department at Caltech studiously avoided congratulating him.
But Pauling, who’d already won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research into chemical bonding, was immune to Cold War–era paranoia. As he said in his 1962 Nobel lecture, he was convinced of two things: “The only sane policy for the world is that of abolishing war,” and it was the responsibility of the very scientific community that helped develop “terrible weapons” like those that destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima to take a lead in eliminating them. Pauling spoke from conviction but also from an uneasy conscience. Although he had declined to participate in the Manhattan Project during World War II, he did work on projects that had direct military application.
Due partly to the horrors of the world war and partly to the influence of his pacifist wife, Pauling became an outspoken advocate of nonviolence immediately after Germany and Japan surrendered. In 1946 he joined the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, an organization chaired by Albert Einstein devoted to the elimination of nuclear weapons. He was one of the distinguished signatories of the 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto, a declaration cowritten by Einstein and British philosopher Bertrand Russell calling on the leaders of the world to seek nonviolent alternatives to international conflicts. In the late fifties he began agitating for a ban on above-ground nuclear testing, arguing that the radiation fallout was much more damaging to public health than government experts admitted.
The culmination of Pauling’s anti-nuclear work was his cooperation with a Missouri-based organization called Committee for Nuclear Information. Pauling collaborated with other scientists in what has come to be called the “Baby Tooth Study,” a long-term project that established indisputable links between nuclear testing and radiation poisoning by measuring levels of strontium-90, an element dispersed in above-ground testing, in the baby teeth of American children. The study frighteningly demonstrated that above-ground testing contaminated grasslands with strontium-90, which was then passed on to children through cow milk. It was a chilling conclusion and quickly led to a moratorium on open-atmosphere nuclear testing.
1 March
Loung Ung
1970—
Worth My Being Alive
By the time she was eight years old, Loung Ung’s parents and two of her siblings were among the two million Cambodians killed by Pol Pot’s brutal Khmer Rouge regime. Prior to the Khmer takeover in 1975, Ung and her family lived a comfortable life in the capital city of Phnom Penh, where her father was a senior police officer. Because of their wealth and her father’s rank, Ung’s family was targeted by Pol Pot’s thugs. They were forced to evacuate Phnom Penh, her father was taken away by soldiers and never seen again, and Ung was put in a training camp for child soldiers. She finally escaped to a refugee camp in Thailand with the aid of her older brother Meng.
Ung was one of the lucky refugees who managed to get out of war-torn Southeast Asia. Through the auspices of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, she eventually wound up with a foster family in Vermont when she was ten years old. During the next few years she attended high school, living more or less like a typical American teen except for recurring nightmares about her ordeal in Cambodia.
After graduating from college, Ung returned to Cambodia to be reunited with the members of her family who survived the Pol Pot years. The devastation she encountered there, even fifteen years after the Khmer Rouge had been defeated, horrified her. She was especially struck by the number of adults and children she met who were maimed from stepping on undetonated landmines left over from the war years. An estimated four to six million of them are still scattered just beneath the ground throughout Cambodia.
Shortly after her visit to her homeland, Ung, determined to do something about what she witnessed there, got involved with the Campaign for a Landmine-Free World. For several years she toured the United States, speaking at colleges and universities, churches, and other venues to tell her own story and to raise support for a multilateral agreement to impose a ban on the use of landmines. (Several nations throughout the world have since signed onto an anti-landmine pledge. The United States isn’t one of them.) In 2000, she published a best-selling memoir, First They Killed My Father, which described the Pol Pot years; raised awareness about Cambodian genocide, child soldiers, poverty, AIDS, and child prostitution; and served as a vehicle for her anti-landmine activism.
For Ung, her participation in the campaign to ban landmines is “the chance to do something that’s worth my being alive”: helping to heal Cambodia’s wounds and to rid other countries of explosive remnants from past war that continue to maim innocent men, women, and children. But her activism does something else as well. “The more I tell people,” she says, “the less the nightmares haunt me. The more people listen to me, the less I hate.”
