Peace and Ecology Activist Satish Kumar Visits Iolani School
by Peter Greenhill
Internationally renowned peace activist Dr. Satish Kumar made a visit to Iolani School on Tuesday, April 25th, as a guest of the Iolani Peace Institute.
Speaking to a large audience in the chapel before lunch and speaking again in Seto Hall in the evening, Dr. Kumar made an indelible impression on students and adults alike.
His talks were entitled “Peace, Nonviolence, and Spirituality for Our Time.”
Born and raised in India, the seventy-year-old Dr. Kumar was a Jain monk for nine years and then fell under the strong influence of Mahatma Gandhi’s movement. He discontinued being a monk and went out in the world to promote peace and nonviolence in as many ways as he could think of.
One of them was the focus of much of his daytime presentation in the chapel: his 8,000-mile peace pilgrimage on foot from India to America. He and his friend E.P. Menon embarked on their journey with absolutely no money, which created the opportunity for them to experience the generosity and compassion of people of all cultures, races, and ages in much of the world. They began at the grave of Gandhi and ended at the grave of John F. Kennedy, meeting such influential proponents of peace as Bertrand Russell and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dr. Kumar ended by fielding questions from the audience, and one question enabled him to explain the way our simple everyday actions, such as throwing away a plastic cup, can be part of a chain of cause and effect that contributes to violence in the world, even in places that are thousands of miles from where we live. Thus, we can see the interconnectedness of all things and how this relates to peace, which he defined as a way of life we can cultivate through both thoughts and actions.
In his evening presentation, Dr. Kumar structured his remarks around the three-part definition of the Sanskrit word shanti, which means peace. The three types of peace embodied in the word are inner peace, peace with people, and peace with nature. He went into quite a bit of depth on these subjects, captivating his audience with the breadth of his knowledge, the joy he naturally seemed to exude, and the variety of his wisdom.
One of the world’s foremost authorities on sustainability and an ecology that recognizes the sanctity of all things in nature (“reverential ecology”), Dr. Kumar explained how a sustainable way of life leads to the reduction of many forms of violence. The life currently led by industrialized countries, he says, is simply not sustainable and leads ultimately to different forms of violence. We must change our ways, he says, to prevent ecological and social damage in the near and distant future.
As his final point, Dr. Kumar explained that spirit and matter embody one another, a reflection of the unity of all things, and thus spirituality permeates everything in life. By meeting with groups and individuals all over the world for fifty years; by helping to found Schumacher College in England, a college of holistic graduate studies; and by editing Resurgence Magazine, a magazine on ecology, art, and spirituality, Dr. Kumar continues to live his beliefs and make a lasting impact on people around the globe. To have someone of his experience and wisdom share his ideas with the Iolani and Hawaii communities was a rare and unforgettable privilege.
For more information, go to www.resurgence.org or e-mail the Iolani Peace Institute at pgreenhi@iolani.org. You can learn more also from Dr. Kumar’s many books, such as You Are, Therefore I Am, No Destination, or The Buddha and the Terrorist. His books are available from www.chelseagreen.com and other websites.
