Wednesday, July 31, 2024

A01712 - Ajahn Sumedho, American Buddhist Monk and Disciple of Ajahn Chah

Ajahn Sumedho

"Yesterday is a memory

Tomorrow is the unknown

Now is the knowing."

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Luang Por Sumedho — Founding Abbot

Luang Por Sumedho was born in Seattle, Washington in 1934. After serving four years in the US Navy as a medic, he completed a BA in Far Eastern Studies and a MA in South Asian Studies. In 1966, he went to Thailand to practice meditation at Wat Mahathat in Bangkok. Not long afterwards, he went forth as a novice monk in a remote part of the country, Nong Khai, before receiving full ordination in 1967.

A year of solitary practice followed. Although fruitful, it showed him the need for a teacher who could more actively guide him. A fortuitous encounter with a visiting monk led him to Ubon province to practice with Luang Por Chah. He took dependence from Luang Por Chah and remained under his close guidance for ten years.

In 1975, Luang Por Sumedho, established Wat Pah Nanachat, International Forest Monastery where Westerners could be trained in English. In 1977, he accompanied Luang Por Chah to England and took up residence at the Hampstead Vihara, with three other monks.

Luang Por Sumedho was made an Upachaya (ordination preceptor) in 1981. Since then he has given upasampada (Bhikkhu precepts) to more than a hundred aspirants of many nationalities. Luang Por Sumedho was integral in establishing the Forest Sangha tradition in the United Kingdom. He was central in establishing Amaravati Buddhist Monastery and Chithurst Buddhist Monastery. He remained as senior incumbent at Amaravati Buddhist Monastery in Hertfordshire until November 2010, at which time he handed over the duties of abbot to Ajahn Amaro. Luang Por Sumedho is now based in Thailand where his monastic life began in 1966.

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Ajahn Sumedho (b. Robert Karr Jackman, July 27, 1934, Seattle, Washington) is an American Buddhist monk. He was ordained in 1967 and was instrumental in establishing Wat Pa Nanachat in Thailand and the Cittaviveka and Amaravati monasteries in England. One of the most senior Western representatives of the Thai Forest Tradition of Theravāda Buddhism, Sumedho is considered a seminal figure in the transmission of the Buddha's teachings to the West.

Ajahn Sumedho, also known as Luang Por Sumedho, was born Robert Karr Jackman in Seattle, Washington, in 1934.^[1]^[2] (Sumedho is his Dhamma name, and Ajahn, meaning "teacher", and Luang Por, meaning "venerable father", are honorific terms.) During the Korean War he served for four years from the age of 18 as a United States Navy medic. He then did a BA in Far Eastern studies and graduated in 1963 with an MA in South Asian studies at the University of California, Berkeley. After a year as a Red Cross social worker, Jackman served with the Peace Corps in Borneo from 1964 to 1966 as an English teacher. On break in Singapore, sitting one morning in a sidewalk café, he watched a Buddhist monk walk by and thought to himself, "That looks interesting." In 1966, he became a novice or samanera at Wat Sri Saket in Nong Khai, northeast Thailand. He ordained as a bhikkhu (Buddhist monk) in May the following year.

From 1967 to 1977 at Wat Nong Pah Pong, he trained under Ajahn Chah. He has come to be regarded as the latter's most influential Western disciple. In 1975, he helped to establish and became the first abbot of the International Forest Monastery, Wat Pa Nanachat in northeast Thailand founded by Ajahn Chah for training his non-Thai students. In 1977, Ajahn Sumedho accompanied Ajahn Chah on a visit to England. After observing a keen interest in Buddhism among Westerners, Ajahn Chah encouraged Ajahn Sumedho to remain in England for the purpose of establishing a branch monastery in the United Kingdom. This became Cittaviveka Forest Monastery in West Sussex.

Ajahn Sumedho was granted authority to ordain others as monks shortly after he established Cittaviveka Forest Monastery. He then established a ten precept ordination lineage for women, "Siladhara".

Until his retirement, Ajahn Sumedho was the abbot of Amaravati Buddhist Monastery near Hemel Hempstead in England, which was established in 1984. Amaravati is part of the network of monasteries and Buddhist centers in the lineage of Ajahn Chah, which now extends across the world, from Thailand, New Zealand and Australia, to Europe, Canada, and the United States. Ajahn Sumedho played an instrumental role in building this international monastic community.

Ajahn Sumedho's imminent retirement was announced in February 2010, and he retired in November of that year. His successor is the English monk Ajahn Amaro, hitherto co-abbot of the Abhayagiri branch monastery in California's Redwood Valley. Ajahn Sumedho returned to Amaravati Buddhist Monastery near Hemel Hempstead in England in 2020 and now resides there.

Ajahn Sumedho *(seated beneath the shrine)* in conversation with a bhikkhu, just before Amaravati's daily meal

Ajahn Sumedho is a prominent figure in the Thai Forest Tradition. His teachings are very direct, practical, simple, and down to earth. In his talks and sermons he stresses the quality of immediate intuitive awareness and the integration of this kind of awareness into daily life. Like most teachers in the Forest Tradition, Ajahn Sumedho tends to avoid intellectual abstractions of the Buddhist teachings and focuses almost exclusively on their practical applications, that is, developing awareness and wisdom in daily life. His most consistent advice can be paraphrased as to see things the way that they actually are rather than the way that we want or don't want them to be ("Right now, it's like this..."). He is known for his engaging and witty communication style, in which he challenges his listeners to practice and see for themselves. Students have noted that he engages his hearers with an infectious sense of humor, suffused with much loving kindness, often weaving amusing anecdotes from his experiences as a monk into his talks on meditation practice and how to experience life ("Everything belongs").^[3]

A meditation technique taught and used by Ajahn Sumedho involves resting in what he calls "the sound of silence".^[4] He talks at length about this technique in one of his books titled The Way It Is.^[5] Ajahn Sumedho said that he was directly influenced by Edward Salim Michael's book, The Way of Inner Vigilance (republished in 2010 with the new title, The Law of Attention, Nada Yoga and the Way of Inner Vigilance and for which Ajahn Sumedho wrote a preface).

The Sound of Silence is also the title of one of Ajahn Sumedho's books (published by Wisdom Publications in 2007).^[6]

Publications

References

^ "Male Monastic Community » Amaravati Buddhist Monastery". Amaravati Buddhist Monastery.
^ "Buddhist Masters and Their Organisations: Ajahn Sumedho". www.buddhanet.net.
^ "Ajahn Sumedho - teachings". forestsangha.org. Retrieved January 18, 2016.
^ "The Sound of Silence" (PDF). abhayagiri.org. Retrieved September 28, 2016.
^ "The Way It Is". amaravati.org. Retrieved January 18, 2016.
^ "The Sound of Silence". Wisdom Publications. Retrieved January 18, 2016.

Tuesday, July 30, 2024

A01711 - William Calley, Convicted of Mass Murder in the Vietnam War My Lai Massacre

William Calley, Convicted of Mass Murder in My Lai Massacre, Dies at 80

Hundreds of Vietnamese civilians died at the hands of American soldiers, but Lieutenant Calley was the only one found guilty.

Lt. William L. Calley, Jr. at Fort Benning, Ga., in 1971. During his trial he showed no remorse for the killings of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians.Credit...Joe Holloway, Jr./Associated Press

By Robert D. McFadden

Published July 29, 2024Updated July 30, 2024, 12:15 a.m. ET

William L. Calley Jr., who as a young Army lieutenant during the Vietnam War was the only American convicted in the murder of hundreds of unarmed, unresisting Vietnamese civilians in the atrocity known as the My Lai Massacre, died on April 28 in hospice in Gainesville, Fla, according to Social Security Administration records. He was 80.

The cause of his death is not publicly available. Family members of Lieutenant Calley did not immediately respond to requests for additional information. His death was first reported by The Washington Post.

Nearly 56 years after the killings of as many as 500 women, children and older men by Americans who attacked with automatic weapons, grenades and bayonets; raped girls and women; mutilated bodies; killed livestock, and burned the village, My Lai (pronounced Mee Lye) still reverberates as one of the worst outrages of a brutal and divisive war.

On the morning of March 16, 1968, Second Lieutenant Calley, a 24-year-old platoon leader who had been in Vietnam just three months, led about 100 men of Charlie Company into My Lai 4, an inland hamlet about halfway up the east coast of South Vietnam. The Americans moved in under ambiguous orders, suggesting to some that anyone found in the hamlet, even women and children, might be Vietcong enemies.

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While they met no resistance, the Americans swept in shooting. Over the next few hours, horrors unfolded. Witnesses said victims were rousted from huts, herded into an irrigation ditch or the village center and shot.

Villagers who refused to come out were killed in their huts by hand grenades or bursts of gunfire. Others were shot as they emerged from hiding places. Infants and children were bayoneted and shot, and an unknown number of females were raped and shot. A military photographer took pictures.

Although Lieutenant Calley’s immediate superiors knew generally what had happened, the atrocity was covered up in military reports that called it a successful search-and-destroy mission. It took nearly a year and a half — and persistent efforts by a few soldiers and an independent investigative journalist, Seymour M. Hersh, who later won a Pulitzer Prize for his disclosures — for investigations to grind forward and the story to reach a stunned world.

By then, Lieutenant Calley, a short, stocky man scorned by his troops and fellow officers as an insecure leader who could hardly read a map or a compass and who seemed to lack common sense in the field, had been promoted to first lieutenant and awarded a Bronze Star with oak leaf cluster and a Purple Heart.

On Sept. 6, 1969, he was charged with the mass murder of civilians at My Lai. He was one of 25 people charged in the case, including two generals accused of misconduct. But charges against the generals, and 10 other officers and 7 enlisted men accused of murder or suppression of evidence, were dropped. Six men were court-martialed, but all except Lieutenant Calley were acquitted, among them Capt. Ernest Medina, the company commander.

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Lieutenant Calley’s trial in Fort Benning, Ga., opened in November 1970. He was accused of personally killing 102 civilians. Many soldiers refused to testify. But eight witnesses, in often shockingly graphic testimony, said the lieutenant had herded sobbing, cowering villagers into a ditch and the hamlet center and shot them in bunches, and had ordered his troops to kill as well.

The number of victims at My Lai was never fixed precisely. The Army did not count the bodies. The official American estimate was 347, but a Vietnamese memorial at the site lists 504 names, with ages ranging from 1 to 82.

Lieutenant Calley, in three days of testimony, expressed no remorse and insisted he had only followed orders by Captain Medina to kill all the villagers, quoting him as saying that everyone in the village was “the enemy.” The captain denied saying that, insisting he had meant his order to apply only to enemy soldiers.

In March 1971, Lieutenant Calley was convicted of the premeditated murder of “not less than” 22 Vietnamese and sentenced to life in prison. Americans, long divided over Vietnam, were overwhelmingly outraged, calling him a scapegoat for a long chain of command that had gone unpunished. Many blamed the war itself, or said the lieutenant was only doing his duty.

The White House and Congress were flooded with protests over the sentence, if not the verdict. Gov. Jimmy Carter of Georgia called it “a blow to troop morale.” Governors in Utah, Indiana and Mississippi denounced the verdict. Legislatures in Arkansas, Kansas, Texas, New Jersey and South Carolina asked for clemency. Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama demanded a presidential pardon.

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Days after the sentencing, President Richard M. Nixon spared the lieutenant from prison, allowing him to remain in his bachelor apartment at Fort Benning, pending appeals. In an ensuing roller-coaster of legal maneuvers, the fort’s commanding general reduced the life term to 20 years, and Secretary of the Army Howard Callaway cut it to 10 years and said Mr. Calley would be paroled after only one-third of that term.

In 1974, a federal judge in Georgia, J. Robert Elliott, overturned the conviction, saying Mr. Calley had been denied a fair trial because of prejudicial publicity. The Army appealed, and Mr. Calley was confined to barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kans., for three months. He was then released on bail and never returned to custody.

In 1975, a federal appeals court in New Orleans reversed Judge Elliott and reinstated the conviction. And in 1976, the United States Supreme Court refused to review the case, letting the conviction stand and closing a bitter chapter of national history. By then, Mr. Calley had qualified for parole. His life term had been whittled down to slightly more than three years of house arrest and barracks confinement that had ended in 1974.

William Laws Calley Jr. was born on June 8, 1943, in Miami. His father was a machine salesman. The boy called Rusty did poorly in school, was caught cheating and repeated the seventh grade. Graduating from Miami Edison High School in 1963, he enrolled in Palm Beach Junior College, but quit after a semester with failing grades.

He worked as a bellhop, a restaurant dishwasher and a switchman for the Florida East Coast Railroad until he was arrested on charges of allowing a train to block five downtown intersections in Fort Lauderdale during rush hour. He moved west. His car broke down in Albuquerque, N.M., in 1966 and he enlisted in the Army.

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After basic training at Fort Bliss, Tex., and clerical training at Fort Lewis, Wash., he applied for Officers’ Candidate School, and despite low aptitude test scores and lack of command presence was accepted because the Army needed platoon leaders. He was commissioned in 1967 and assigned to C Company, First Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade of the 23rd (Americal) Division, and trained at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii for deployment to Vietnam.

Charlie Company arrived in Vietnam in December 1967 and saw no immediate combat. Typically, the men read comic books and smoked marijuana. But as the Tet Offensive began in early 1968 with enemy strikes across South Vietnam, the company suffered numerous casualties and five deaths. Increasingly aggressive counter-strikes against Vietcong forces in Quang Ngai Province preceded the My Lai Massacre.

In 1976, after the resolution of his case, Mr. Calley married Penny Vick, the daughter of a Columbus, Ga., jeweler, and worked for many years as a salesman for his father-in-law. The couple had a son, William Laws Calley III, and were divorced.

Mr. Calley, now bald and with a white mustache and goatee, stands behind a microphone to address a Kiwanis Club meeting. — In 2009, Mr. Calley expressed remorse for his actions at a meeting of the Kiwanis Club in Columbus, Ga.Credit...Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, via Associated Press

A list of his survivors was not available. His death record was found through data shared from the Social Security Death Master File to Lexis Nexis.

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The massacre at My Lai was the subject of books, films and documentaries. Mr. Calley gave his version in “Lieutenant Calley: His Own Story” (1971, with John Sack). For decades he said nothing more publicly about what happened. But in 2009, addressing a Kiwanis Club meeting in Columbus, he offered an apology.

“There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai,” he said. “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.”