As we mark 75 years this week since the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I find myself recalling a story I heard from a professor and Buddhist priest who showed me great kindness when I was student in Kyoto, Japan. During a lecture for Buddhist priests working here in the United States, the professor shared how the Buddha’s teachings helped him when he was a young man struggling to come to terms with his experiences as an atomic bomb survivor. He was young boy during the war living at a Buddhist temple in Hiroshima where his father was the priest. On the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, he was at home playing in the kitchen. He had propped himself up with one hand on the breakfast table and one hand on the back of a chair, so that he could lift his legs up off the ground and swing them back and forth in a rocking motion. When the atomic bomb detonated above Hiroshima, the shock wave propelled his body through the air and down a hallway, lodging his body in an alcove.
There was a kindergarten at the temple, and he was particularly fond of one of the young teachers. At the moment the bomb exploded, she had been standing outside the temple to greet the children who were arriving for the day. When the boy ventured out into the temple courtyard after the blast, he saw that his teacher was badly burned, recognizable only by the tattered remains of the dress she had on that morning. He described how she held her arms out in front of her in the haunting posture that I have seen in drawings at the Atomic Bomb Memorials in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The professor had maintained remarkable composure up to that point in recounting his childhood memory of the bombing but recalling the sight of his beloved kindergarten teacher so badly burned, he began to sob.
The professor described how he carried a deep anger with him during years that he was growing up in occupied Japan after the war. He said that it was the Buddha’s teachings on the law of cause and effect that ultimately enabled him to find some peace of mind and come to terms with his experience. The Buddha taught that everything we experience in the present is the result of what has been done and what has not been done in the past. The conditions of every moment of our lives are the result of actions in the past. Each result that comes to fruition from the past, in turn, becomes the cause for a new experience or circumstance to arise. The suffering brought on his family and community by the atomic bomb was not a divine punishment. It was the result of human calculation and wartime logic. Atomic bombs were developed in a time of war, and so they were used in that war.
Seventy-five years later, the effects of those atomic bombs continue to reverberate in our lives. In my education growing up in the United States, I was taught that the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were decisive in ending a long and bloody war. I was taught that the bombs saved countless American and Japanese lives that would have been lost if the United States had launched an invasion on the main islands of Japan. My grandfather was a combat pilot in the U.S. Army Air Force during that war. It may be the case that I am alive today as the result of those bombs.
And yet, when I reflect upon that history now, my heart is filled with great sadness at the tremendous human suffering caused by the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My life has been made possible by great sacrifices of others. With that awareness, I share my teacher’s sincere wish for a world free from nuclear weapons. I share his wish for a world in which we are ever mindful of the law of cause and effect and the cost in human suffering of the decisions that we make.
The Rev. Henry Toryo Adams was ordained as a Buddhist priest in Kyoto, Japan at the Nishi Hongwanji temple in September 2008. He began working as a minister in the Buddhist Churches of America in 2010, serving temples in Oxnard, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and Guadalupe, before coming to San Mateo in 2013. He is a native of Minnesota.
Those two bombs sure stopped the war and the Imperialist Japanese Army who was responsible for horrendous crimes in China, the Pacific and the entire Southeast Asia. I thank God Truman has the courage to drop those two atomic bombs thereby saving countless American men from the ultimate invasion of mainland Japan. I will celebrate the anniversary and remember instead with sadness the unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
The Reverend could have asked the teacher whether he was sobbing because of the onslaught caused by the Japanese resulting in millions of deaths or because of what was 'done' to him?
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Those two bombs sure stopped the war and the Imperialist Japanese Army who was responsible for horrendous crimes in China, the Pacific and the entire Southeast Asia. I thank God Truman has the courage to drop those two atomic bombs thereby saving countless American men from the ultimate invasion of mainland Japan. I will celebrate the anniversary and remember instead with sadness the unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
The Reverend could have asked the teacher whether he was sobbing because of the onslaught caused by the Japanese resulting in millions of deaths or because of what was 'done' to him?
"The best way to stop war is not to start one." From "Philip's Code: No News is Good News - to a Killer."
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