Maha Ghosananda

Maha Ghosananda was a Cambodian Buddhist monk who helped rebuild Buddhism in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge years and led the Dhammayietra peace walks.

Maha Ghosananda. Photo: nyana_ponika, CC BY-SA 2.0

Historical figure details
Roles	Buddhist monk; elected a Supreme Patriarch in 1988; leader of the Dhammayietra peace walks
Born	Takeo province
Country	Cambodia
Subjects	Religion & Spiritual Life; History & Remembrance

Early life

Maha Ghosananda was born in Takeo province. The historian Raoul Jennar gave his birth year as 1924, and wrote that he studied in Cambodia, Thailand and India and became a monk in 1943. When he died, a senior Cambodian monk who had known him since childhood said he was 81.

Exile and return

He lived in exile from 1975 to 1979, the years of Democratic Kampuchea, when the Khmer Rouge denounced Buddhism. In the late 1970s he visited the refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border. He handed out Buddhist texts there and later set up Wats for Buddhists the Khmer Rouge had driven out.

After the Khmer Rouge government fell in 1979, he was among the first monks to come home and teach a new generation of Buddhist leaders. In 1988 his fellow monks elected him a Supreme Patriarch of Cambodian Buddhism for his work in restoring the religion. In the late 1980s he moved to western Massachusetts, invited by a Buddhist order in Leverett. The Cambodia Daily wrote that the order worked to do away with weapons.

Dhammayietra peace walks

The Dhammayietra, or Pilgrimage for Peace, was a walk across Cambodia that Maha Ghosananda led each year. His walks through the country in the early 1990s, during the civil war, made him widely known. In 1991 he set up the Dhammayietra Center for Peace and Nonviolence in Phnom Penh, which he headed and which organized the walks.

In April 1994 a walk he led toward Pailin was caught in crossfire between government and Khmer Rouge forces. One news report said that two marchers were killed.

In March 1998 he and more than 1,000 others set out on the seventh walk, from Kampong Cham through Kratie and Stung Treng to Banlung in Ratanakiri. The route of about 550 kilometers (340 miles) passed through areas of illegal logging, and the walkers planted trees at every stop. "We say every tree is a Bodhi tree," he told the walkers, referring to the tree under which the Buddha reached enlightenment.

Before the national election of July 1998, a walk set out from Battambang province on June 22 and crossed 15 provinces to calm voters' fears of violence. At its end, more than 2,500 monks, nuns and others walked in pairs from Wat Than by way of Wat Phnom to the Royal Palace. In front of the palace he told the crowd: "We are the Cambodian people united working for peace, happiness and the elimination of violence in Cambodia."

In 2003 he and at least ten monks made a walk of 651 kilometers (405 miles) over 47 days through the country.

Recognition

In 1998 he was awarded the Niwano Peace Prize, presented in Tokyo, for his work for peace in Cambodia and for understanding between religions. In the mid-1990s he received three nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1998 The Cambodia Daily wrote that he had been nominated in each of the six years before.

In 1999 he spoke at the ceremony at the Buddhist Institute that marked 30 years since the death of Chuon Nath. He said that he had learned a great deal from Chuon Nath, in Buddhism and beyond it.

He founded Wat Sampov Meas in Phnom Penh. In 1998 he trained foreign walkers there before the seventh walk.

Death

Maha Ghosananda died in March 2007 at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts. The Voice of America (VOA) Khmer service wrote that he had been living in Rhode Island. Kim Kang, who chaired the Elderly Buddhist Monk Committee in Richmond, Virginia, told VOA Khmer that his body should be kept in glass so that followers could pay their respects later.

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