Word: buddhist
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...Rajapaksa professes his buddhist faith, which is based on nonviolence. Yet, by some accounts, his army behaved like butchers. Is it wrong for the Tamils in Sri Lanka to save their language and their culture? The whole world watched as the Sri Lankan army racked up significant civilian casualties on the grounds that it was fighting terrorism. Even now, Rajapaksa does not allow international observers to visit and see for themselves what happened. The press is gagged there. But the dreams of the Tamils will remain undimmed and Rajapaksa's successors will still have to wrestle with that quest...
...stay back," says Lesley Fernando, who is Sinhalese and was brave enough to visit the shrine during the fragile truces in the war. (About 7% of Sri Lanka's population is Catholic, with adherents among both of the nation's major ethnicities: the Sinhalese, who are otherwise mostly Buddhist, and the Tamils, who are predominantly Hindu.) But never have pilgrims been seen in such numbers as they were last week. Numbering some 500,000, they still had to go through several security checkpoints to reach the shrine, though each stop was a formality compared to those during the stringent heights...
...peace and hope for all Sri Lankans, even during the darkest hours of war. "What you see is a miracle. The church has not been damaged; it has survived. So has the statue, and you see people from all religions flocking here," says the Rev. Mahavilachchiye Wimala Thero, a Buddhist monk from the central district of Anuradhapura. "This is the miracle, that this statue can bring together all Sri Lankans - that is the hope it gives these people." As the statue was paraded around the compound, many worshippers wept openly. Fathers lifted their young children on their shoulders to show...
...rebuild them, too. Morakot, which means "emerald" in Thai, has left 7,000 people homeless, most of them from aboriginal communities who make a living off the land. Many are now living in crowded shelters, like the one run by Cishan's Fo Guang Shan Association, a Buddhist organization. There, Lin Ai-tung, with a nine-month old baby strapped to her chest, tells reporters how she fed her baby with rain water and infant formula for two days before they were rescued from Minchu village. The hall is filled with stacks of donated drinks, crackers, new slippers, clothes, toothpaste...
...Census, but "we know that's not the right number," says Aung Naing, chairman of the Burmese Complete Count Committee, one of more than 10,000 such committees the Census helps form in order to bolster response rates. In Southern California alone, there are seven or eight Burmese Buddhist temples, he says. So since the fall, Naing has been traveling the country, explaining to Burmese groups that the Census counts everybody - citizen or not - and that the data collected aren't shared with other parts of the government, like immigration or taxing authorities (common fears that drive down response rates...