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When Will The Bombs Stop Falling - July 2006 |
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Written by Rev. Mariko Nishiyama
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Thursday, 13 July 2006 |
Editor's Note - This is an excerpt from the July 2006 issue of the Buddhist Wheel
Strong winter rains have given way to clear, cloudless skies as the summer season arrives. The hot summer greets the O-Bon season observed in Hawaii from June through August. For Jodo Shinshu practitioners, the true meaning of Obon is not “prayers for the dead.” The question each day (including Obon) is how to live and struggle in the infinite light-life of Namo Amida Butsu—the unconditional gift of wisdom-compassion—by which all beings awaken and genuinely live. Jodo Shinshu believes that the dead are not mere memories who revisit at regular intervals. They are always with us, helping us remember the pains we seem to repeat over and over. May we learn from the torments of hell we create as human beings everyday so that we may discover a deeper humanity that binds individual, society, and the fragile world we live in.
In the winter issue of ISLAND SCENE, an article entitled “Paradise Lost: an event in time is gone but not forgotten,” by Craig DeSilva, begins with a quote by then President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1956), “Humanity has now achieved, for the first time in its history, the power to end its history.” He goes on to write:
In July 1946, the U.S. Navy set off an atomic bomb on Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands, about 3,000 miles from Hawaii. The first atomic bomb dropped in peacetime, it was also the first in the series of text explosions more powerful than the bomb on Hiroshima. More than 60 blasts were unleashed in the Marshall Islands from 1946 - 1958. The most powerful of them, called Bravo, was 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb on Hiroshima. People in nearby islands were sickened from radiation fallout. Hundreds of Pacific islanders were displaced from their ancestral homelands and forced to live in cramped neighboring islands ridden with famine, rats and disease...Although the Marshallese have since been allowed to return to their home—and their islands continue to be rehabilitated—the lingering health effects continue. Survivors developed cancer and other health problems, and babies were born with birth defects.
According to Beverly Keever, journalism professor at the University of Hawaii, “Within a decade of the Bravo shot, more than 90 percent of the children who were under 12 years old at the time of the explosion developed tumors.” She continues, “Today, Marshall Islanders have one of the world’s highest rates of abnormalities of the thyroid, which often results in cases of retardation, cretinism and stunted development.”
August 6th and 9th mark the 61st anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The death toll of the two bombings approached 275,000 human lives. Through the rationality of war, death tolls record an unbroken line of hero worship and glorious patriotism to serve national policy; the U.S. is no exception.
Bringing the terrible war at hand to an end will not happen overnight. Already, American military casualties have crossed the 2,500 mark. All people the world over must demand of politicians and rulers, the immediate and necessary halt to armed conflict. Like Shinran Shonin, we must deplore and lament the capacity of human beings to do terrible harm and pain to humanity and the natural environment.
Ultimately, however, we cannot blame only our politicians; the real responsibility rests with ourselves and each other for not willing to make better choices. It is not an easy path—we have no choice but to transverse the path of human life, sustained by the Other Power.
Amida Buddha embraces all life
in all forms.
All are integral parts of infinite life:
birds, fish, animals, grass, plants,
trees, and yes, even humans.
Nothing is excluded—from the
most complex to the smallest
invisible cell.
All awaken to truly live in Amida
Buddha’s infinite life.
Namo Amida Butsu.
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