Cambodia: video for peace (Serene life).A new Khmer-language video about the link between peace and the inner life was launched in Cambodia on 9 May. The Serene Life features a leading Buddhist monk monk: see monasticism. , Maha Ghosananda, and is produced by David and Alan Channer of Grosvenor Productions, London. It follows on from their documentary The Serene Smile, also in Khmer, made in 1995. The premiere was attended by 700 people including senior Buddhists and government officials. Maha Ghosananda told them that the film showed the advantages when the heart followed peace and truth and compassion. These values, he added, could only be beneficial if they were followed by people and society. `If a society is to have peace there must first be peace in the individual and the way to peace is not only though prayer and meditation meditation, religious discipline in which the mind is focused on a single point of reference. It may be a means of invoking divine grace, as in the contemplation by Christian mystics of a spiritual theme, question, or problem; or it may be a means of attaining but also through our thoughts and behaviour,' he went on. `If we have hatred, ambition and anger, we will have no peace at all but if we leave these out of our hearts and replace them with kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and justice then we and our society will enjoy peace and happiness.' The 24-minute video is sponsored by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation The Konrad Adenauer Foundation (Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung) (KAS) is a German research foundation associated with that country's Christian Democratic Union. It was founded in 1956 as the "Society for Christian Democratic Education Work" and renamed after the former , Friends of Moral Re-Armament Moral Re-Armament: see Buchman, Frank N. D. , UNDP UNDP United Nations Development Programme UNDP Unión Nacional para la Democracia y el Progreso (National Union for Democracy and Progress) (Carere) and Oxfam UK/Ireland. Nearly 500 copies of the video have been purchased so far for distribution to senior Buddhist monks, members of parliament, civil servants and NGOs, pagodas and schools. The Konrad Adenauer Foundation has also funded the printing of 6,000 copies of study-notes to accompany The Serene Life. Tep Vong Tep Vong (b. 1932) is a Cambodian Buddhist monk, currently the sangharaja of the Cambodian Mohanikaya monastic fraternity. He was the youngest of seven senior monks re-ordained under Vietnamese supervision in 1979 in order to provide a core leadership group for the , leader of the nation's Mohanikay sect of Buddhism, one of the two primary branches of the religion in Cambodia, said the video `will help foster a more peaceful Cambodia'. |
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