Seeds of Peace Vol.30 No.3 Sep.-Dec. (2014)

I am on a flight taking my first trip to Alaska, sitting next to Ajan Sulak. We were invited by Buddhist and Sufi friends here to give talks on several issues: dimate change, the political situation in Siam, and socially engaged Buddhism. We first met our friends from Alaska when they came to the World Sacred Music Festival in Chiang Mai in the year 2000. The idea for the festival was proposed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama as a way to employ the arts to create beauty for the sustenance of humankind during the coming age of the new millennium. Fourteen years after the music festival, our friendship still remains. Now it has borne new fruit in our trip and activities together, as well as in the fact that INEB will soon have another chapter of socially engaged Buddhists in Alaska.

Coming highlights of INEB activity in the last 4 months of this year are the INEB Advisory and Executive Committee meeting along with the International Buddhist Platform for a Pluralistic Society in Mandalay on the 2529 November. Since violence erupted between Buddhists and Muslims in Burma in the past two years, INEB partners inside the country have focused on working to address this situation through a number of public events on interfaith collaboration. The idea has been to emphasize and to bring out the potentials for social harmony in the country.