As Muslims flee Myanmar, cardinal exhorts Buddhists to have compassion
May 26, 2015
As members of Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya Muslim community flee the Southeast Asian nation by boat, Cardinal Charles Maung Bo exhorted the nation’s Buddhist majority to have compassion.
The prelate urged the government “not to allow discourses of hatred to subvert its glorious tradition of compassion ... A community cannot be demonized and denied its basic rights to name, citizenship, and right to community.”
“The great seers and monks of the great Therevada Buddhists are [a] beacon of compassion to the world,” Cardinal Bo continued. “This religion mainstreams compassion as the noblest virtue-- compassion not only for living things, but even for living beings. A death of a leaf should break the heart of a disciple of dhamma [Buddhist teaching]. Surely the disciples of dhamma would not allow human beings, women and children, to die, unwept, unsung in the abyss of merciless seas.”
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Further information:
- Yangon Cardinal: Myanmar has a moral duty to resolve the Rohingya crisis (AsiaNews.it)
- Papal appeal for Asian migrants and refugees (CWN, 5/25)
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