A Lantern for Peace: Closing the Cycle

Three flames and a lantern

This post is an update of one I posted to The Green Pen 20 years ago. It seems appropriate again (or still!) today, as nuclear ambitions and fears continue to poison the politics and relations of nations.

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July 18, 2005

The red lantern contains three flames. Taken from their parent flame, the three flames have traveled thousands of miles from Japan to the United States to close the cycle. The parent flame was rescued from a burning home in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. That flame (photo above, taken on a 2007 trip to Japan) has been kept alive ever since, along with others like it and the significance of what they represent, by a team of monks who have walked back and forth between Hiroshima and Nagasaki for 60 years.

Now, a delegation of Japanese monks and government figures have brought the child flames in the red lantern across the ocean on a tall ship, the Nippon Maru. Last Saturday, July 16, 2005, was the 60^th anniversary of the first atom bomb explosion at the Trinity test site near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Last Saturday, the monks with the lantern began their walk from Pier 35 on the Embarcadero in San Francisco to Trinity, right to Ground Zero, where, on August 9, 60 years after the last explosion of an atom bomb in warfare at Nagasaki, they will hold a silent vigil, extinguish the flames – and thus close the cycle.

In Asian tradition, 60 years completes a cycle, a lifetime. People who surpass their 60^th birthday are thought to be starting a new life. Let this moment mark the end of the life of nuclear warfare and the start of a life of . . . of . . . of what? Not just of nuclear peace, not just of the absence of nuclear or any other kind of war, but of profound peace – in our hearts, our families, our communities, our nations, our world.

A few quotes on the subject:

“...peace is the wholeness created by right relationships with oneself, other persons, other cultures, other life, Earth, and the larger whole of which all are a part.”
-- Earth Charter

“Peace. It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart.”
-- Anonymous

“The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”
-- Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974)

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction....The chain reaction of evil--hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars--must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

“To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.”
--Confucius