Daily Encouragement: Quotes From my Buddhist Mentor
A daily dose of wisdom
Religion cannot exist apart from the aspiration to realize peace, and contributing to that goal is the primary mission of religious practitioners.
— Daisaku Ikeda (from Quotations by Daisaku Ikeda)
The simple act of pushing a button. It would be great if establishing peace on the planet was as easy as pushing a button. I’d be pushing the sucker all day long. Unfortunately, I expect it’s going to be a bit more work than that.
There are fingers poised over some pretty scary buttons — like nuclear bombs for instance. There are all kinds of life conditions and moods at play inside the persons with these fingers.
On the one hand, there is everything natural and extraordinary about life with its long evolution and on the other, there’s the button capable of making most life on the planet extinct. What’s left are those who remain ignorant or apathetic to the nuclear dangers confronting humanity. We must choose.
There are many of us who are taken in by the techno-talk that amplifies the messages of national security linked to that button. Nuclear deterrence is no more than a hypothesis about human psychology and behavior. It does not protect people from a nuclear attack. It is unproven and unprovable. Nuclear deterrence may or may not work, but we know that it cannot provide physical protection against a nuclear attack. Those who believe in it do so at our common peril. We must dismantle the button and the potential annihilation it represents.
The great Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote, “Since the appearance of visible life on Earth, 380 million years had to elapse in order for a butterfly to learn how to fly, 180 million years to create a rose with no other commitment than to be beautiful, and four geological eras in order for us human beings to be able to sing better than birds, and to be able to die from love. It is not honorable for the human talent in the golden age of science, to have conceived the way for such an ancient and colossal process to return to nothingness from which it came through the simple act of pushing a button.”
What he said.
Keep the faith.