Peace Week at UMaine Features Buddhist Activist Sulak Sivaraksa
Contact: George Manlove at (207) 581-3756
ORONO — Sulak Sivaraksa, Thailand’s most prominent lay Buddhist social activist and author — and visiting Libra Professor — will lead Peace Week discussions Oct. 26-Nov. 4 at UMaine.
Peace Week is an annual series of lectures sponsored by the university Peace Studies Program.
Sivaraksa is widely known as a major figure in the international socially engaged Buddhist movement. He has been deeply concerned with environmental destruction and has organized groups, including Buddhist monks, to preserve local environments, principally forests that are essential to village economies.
Sivaraksa, the author of “Seeds of Peace” among other books on Buddhism and peace, also was the founding editor of the “Social Science Review,” Thailand’s leading intellectual journal until it was suppressed by the government in 1976, and he established the first of many foundations to inspire young Thais to dedicate their lives to social justice. One of his best known is “International Network of Engaged Buddhists,” which sponsors publication of “Seeds of Peace,” a journal titled after his book and published several times a year. He has written hundreds of essays and articles in Thai and several collections of essays in English, including an autobiography, “Loyalty Demands Dissent,” and “Global Healing.”
The American Friends Service Committee has nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, although he is the recipient of a well-known international award, the Right Livelihood Award.
“For this campus to have him come here is quite a feat,” says Hugh Curran, adjunct professor of Peace Studies. “He is very much unlike what you would expect an activist to be. He is a kind of scholar activist.”
Curran invited Sivaraksa to come to UMaine under a joint Libra Professorship through the Peace Studies Program and Philosophy Department after meeting Sivaraksa at Harvard University, where he was a visiting professor recently. Sivaraksa also has been a visiting professor at Swarthmore and Smith colleges.
“He is a major voice on peace and environmental issues,” Curran says.
Sivaraksa’s environmental views include fierce criticism of government and commercial exploitation of nature on both national and global levels. He believes that the qualities of simplicity, responsibility and care are essential to the preservation and conservation of nature, and that we have to return to a mindful awareness of the interdependence of human beings and nature.
His environmental ethics are based on the Buddhist principles of a deep respect for nature and the well being of all. He has established a conference center (an Ashram) on the outskirts of Bangkok for contemplative and socially engaged educational purposes.
Critical of global consumerism and international development motivated by profit and greed, Sivaraksa has said the world faces a crisis “that demands a revolution no smaller than the one that led Europe out of the Middle Ages.”
After attending the University of Bangor in Wales in the early 1960s, Sivaraksa earned a law degree in Thailand and became a university lecturer, publisher and editor.
His schedule at the University of Maine is as follows (Sessions noted below are free and open to the public):
Tuesday, Oct. 26, Keynote Speech for Peace Week, 101 Neville Hall, 7-9 p.m.
Thursday, Oct. 28, Socialist & Marxist Luncheon Series: A talk on “A Buddhist Response to Free Market Fundamentalism,” Bangor Lounge, Memorial Union, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Monday, Nov. 1, Philosophy Colloquium, Levinson Room, The Maples, A talk on “A Buddhist Analysis of Self,” 7 p.m.
Tuesday, Nov. 2, Meditation Session, Drummond Chapel, Memorial Union, 5-6 p.m.
Thursday, Nov.4, A talk at the Peace & Justice Center of Eastern Maine, 170 Park St., Bangor, 7 p.m.