Tenzin Palmo

To create world peace, we must eradicate delusion, anger, and desire. That's
it. What more is there to say?

The world we inhabit is the world we prepare for ourselves. The universe
is held together by the collective karma of the beings who inhabit it.
Therefore, the kind of world that we experience is the result of the seeds of
all the actions (karma) of body, speech, and mind that we have created in
the past. If we continually create violence through unskillful actions of
body, speech, and mind, we cannot expect there to be peace. It is not
enough to draft a proposal that says, "From now on, we are going to hold
hands and be peaceful," because we have already created the causes for a
very aggressive society.

Our society is based on greed and violence. Even our entertainment
reflects this, so how can we hope to achieve peace simply by mouthing
platitudes? Little children watch cartoons where the characters blow
people up. Both boys and girls at two and three years of age imitate these
cartoons, trying to blow each other up with whatever they find. Their idea
of play is pretending to kill each other: "Bang, bang, bang!" We also take
for granted the amount of meat we eat in the world. Animals are raised in
intolerable conditions and then slaughtered. Millions of animals are killed
everyday. We need to reflect on the results of the karma that comes from
our greed.

As long as we have traces of these unwholesome actions in our minds,
and these actions are encouraged by society, we cannot expect to enjoy
universal world peace. We cannot enjoy peace if we are not creating the
causes for peace. Even peace organizations are often plagued by aggression.
In one interview, while advocating peace causes, John Lennon suddenly
became very angry and aggressive. He was perpetuating war by juxtaposing
"us" so neatly against "them," the enemy. That is what war is about:
pitting "us" against "them." If peace organizations have this mentality,
how will we achieve peace? This mentality is reflected in environmental
programs for saving whales, for example. Concern escalates into anger,

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