May 2010

IBC Holds Forum for Arms Down! Campaign

The International Buddhist Congregation (IBC) of Rissho Kosei-kai sponsored a special meeting on May 23 under the theme "IBC Forum for Arms Down! Campaign" in Fumon Hall at Rissho Kosei-kai headquarters in Tokyo. Forty-one people, including foreign residents in Tokyo and neighboring areas, took part.

The event was organized to encourage and help more members of IBC and foreign residents in Japan to deepen, through dialogue in English, their understanding of the significance of promoting the Arms Down! Campaign for Shared Security, a worldwide campaign collecting signatures to petitions calling for every nation to reduce its military expenditure of nuclear and conventional weapons and reallocating the money to achieving the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals by 2015.

Following an opening address by Rev. Katsuji Suzuki, minister of IBC, Rev. Koichi Saito, minister of the Sumida Dharma Center in Tokyo, spoke on the peace activities his center conducted in New York in May. Twenty members of the Sumida Dharma Center, mainly from the Men's Group, collaborated with members of Rissho Kosei-kai's New York Dharma Center in gathering signatures for the Arms Down! Campaign in Central Park. The two Dharma Centers' activists also prayed at the site of the former World Trade Center for victims of the September 11 attacks.

After Rev. Saito's speech, Dr. Miriam Levering, international advisor of IBC, gave a keynote address. Then Dr. Sunil Siriwardane from Sri Lanka, a lecturer on English conversation at Shohoku College at Atsugi City, Kanagawa Prefecture, gave a speech titled "A Buddhist Perspective on War and Peace." He said that the Buddhist approach to peace is based on practice of the Four Immeasurables: lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. The event concluded with a question-and-answer session.

[back to News Archive]