The Real Ambassador for Peace
Bertil Persson
UPF, Sweden

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. So (says) is the world famous author Rudyard Kipling saying is in his poem “The Ballad of East and West “around 100 years ago. This prophecy is not of current interest any more. Instead, today we can travesty: Oh, East is East, and West is West, and now the twain have met.

Today East and West are in a dialogue, foremost through the technical development. In this dialogue between East and West we find Rev. Dr Sun Myung Moon. With a fascinating active purposefulness and incredible devotion to realize God’s will in words and deed, he has through decades been striving to seek constructive solutions to critical global problems. In these efforts he has succeeded in bringing together leaders from East and West, from all fields of the world, including academia, arts, civil society, government and religion.

Principally, there are four ideologies that have created the prophet, the spiritual visionary Rev. Moon.

He was born into the atmosphere of Confucianism. In the ninth century Confucianism came from China. Actually, it was a combination of ideas of two contemporary philosophers. They lived at the turn of the century 500/400 BC. K’ung Fu Tzu (Confucius in Latin) was a government official and spoke about “the good society.” Somebody asked him: “Is there one word that alone can serve as a principle of conduct for life? The Master said: It is the word shu—reciprocity: Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you.” One of the Master’s disciples has developed this answer: “The basis for the world is laid in the state. The basis for the state is in the family. The basis for the family is in the individual.” This is the ethical code for a peaceful and qualitative society and world. This ethical spirit that should dominate the citizen’s mind and generate “the good society” is called tao, which means the way or the way of life.

The other philosopher, Lao Tzu, the supposed founder of Taoism, completed tao by including the cosmic life-energy, spirituality, life. It is the knowledge about life which defines the life-affirming and life-promoting ethical values. If K’ung Fu Tzu was an atheistic social democrat, Lao Tzu was a consciously spiritual environmentalist. The naturalist Lao Tzu analyzed life and its inherent “scientific” biological characteristics. Later on, some of his disciples came to the conclusion that the cosmic life that gives life to vegetation, animals and human beings is made up of two opposite principles or characteristics or natures, on the one side the male and positive principle, yang, and on the other side the female and negative principle, yin. They are not opposites but complements. “Life is the amalgamated harmony of yin and yang,” one contemporary interpreter says. A close teaching material is our brain. When the right side and left side are in balance, the human being feels well and is harmonious. This condition is called tao. According to K’ung Fu Tzu and Lao Tzu the human being who incarnates tao on a higher level of consciousness is on the level of the sage. The sage, the sublime one, is “the harmonious human being,” the ideal human being.

One ideology which has been smuggled into Confucianism and which Rev. Moon came into contact with at an early age was Buddhism, in the version of the syncretistic Mahayana-Buddhism. Basically, it shares the view of life with K’ung Fu Tzu and Lao Tzu but emphasizes the automatic consequences of the human being’s relationship to spirituality and tao. Simply but correctly, we can say that the main teaching of Buddhism is about the human being’s relationship to life and its consequences, about the connection between cause and effect. The entire history of mankind is built on series of interactions between cause and effect. In order to create “the good society” and “the harmonious human being,” we have to begin to find out the ultimate cause for the initial position and from there start the rehabilitating measures.

At the age of eleven, Rev. Moon met Christianity. His whole family was converted. As Christianity is a diffuse concept, I want to explain that on his way to be an independent spiritual visionary Rev. Moon encountered two versions of Christianity. Methodism was founded by the Anglican clergyman John Wesley in England. Wesley talked about the method as sanctification—found its place at(in) the intellectually perspicacious Rev. Moon. Sanctification is about absorbing the qualities of God in one’s life—self-training—so you will become what Mahayana-Buddhism calls a boddhisatva, or a “saint.” The home atmosphere of Rev. Moon was also impressed by the words of K’ung Fu Tzu: “The Sublime One seeks to accomplish goodness in human beings.” Presbyterians taught about God as the Almighty, God as life, to which we have to submit. All individuals have equal, spiritually determined value because just as the Psalmist said: “You are gods; all of you are children of the most High” (Psalm 82:6). God is the life within everyone. The awareness about this view about God and every individual is the way to peace, to a mankind free from imperialism and wars, a mankind in unity and agreement.

But Rev. Moon did not stop here. His favorite reading became the so-called stories of the creation in Genesis in the Bible. He studied them, impressed by the spirit of K’ung Fu Tzu and Lao Tzu. Spirituality and life are the same as God and the Holy Spirit in the Bible. He read: “God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). Every human being should reflect and incarnate God in his life. Both sexes, Adam and Eve, reflect God’s inherent dispositions yang-yin and incarnate them in the family, the reflection of God, the source of “the good society.” But then the Fall of Man happened—and mass media and every day life show us that the Fall has continued ever since. The Fall occurs when we do not submit the will of God, when we do not follow our God-given inherent nature.

When Rev. Moon started to read the Gospels, he understood Jesus as the sage, the sublime one, the ideal human being, who used all his wisdom in the true prophetic spirit to reveal the Fall and fight to restore the harmonious creation as it was in the very beginning. This ideal original state is described in the Bible as the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven. Here is the ideal liaison to God, to every individual and to the ecological laws prevailing. The words prophet and messiah and spiritual visionary are in this sense synonymous. Rev. Moon looks upon Jesus in the same way as upon the other religious prophets K’ung Fu Tzu, Lao Tzu, Moses, Buddha, Muhammad, etc. There is only one God and they are all his prophets. Well, everyone who is God’s ambassador is a God’s prophet, a God’s messiah, a God’s visionary.