NORTHERN IRELAND: There was a sense of east and west harmoniously converging in Belfast yesterday when the Dalai Lama and Ulster poet Michael Longley provided separate meditations on the difficult subject of forgiveness.
The exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader, who was on the second day of his three-day visit to Northern Ireland, and Longley were opening the new development centre of Mediation Northern Ireland, which will deal with issues of conflict-resolution.
The Dalai Lama, as is his wont, spoke a very simple language of peace, love and forgiveness in sometimes faltering English. Longley was very impressed. "It's like hearing Jesus thinking aloud," he said.
The monk and the poet tentatively and tangentially broached the hard subject of how people afflicted by the Northern troubles might achieve some form of truth, reconciliation and forgiveness.
At the opening ceremony, Longley read from his poem Ceasefire, written at the time of the IRA ceasefire in August 1994 and inspired by the manner in which Gordon Wilson forgave the IRA killers of his daughter, Marie, who lost her life in the Enniskillen bombing of 1987.
The poem tells of how the King of Troy, Priam, softened the heart of Achilles when he went to recover the body of his son Hector, concluding with the powerful lines of Priam saying:
I get down on my knees
and do what must be done.
And kiss Achilles' hand,
the killer of my son.
The 70-year-old Dalai Lama, on his second visit to Northern Ireland in five years, had his own parable about the healing power of forgiveness.
He told of an elderly Tibetan monk who spent almost 20 years in a Chinese gulag, where he suffered physical and mental torture. When the monk eventually was freed to live in India, he told the Dalai Lama that his greatest fear had been that he would lose his "compassion towards the Chinese".
Such forgiveness may not have benefited the Chinese, but it certainly saved the heart, spirit and mind of the old monk, said the Dalai Lama. There was a lesson there for people in Northern Ireland, he implied, if they could find the strength to grasp it.
"The only weapon is compassion, and compassion brings patience and forgiveness. With forgiveness then the real peace, real reconciliation, is possible . . . Out of forgiveness the person himself or herself gets the best reward," he added.
The Dalai Lama has lived in India since fleeing from Chinese soldiers in 1959. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for his non-violent struggle for freedom in Tibet.
