The first African Buddhist monk

I was born in Rwanda, a tiny country in the heart of Africa. There is no single Buddhist temple, no monastery and no monks in Rwanda, where the percentage of Buddhist population is 0%.

My childhood was a happy one, until the passing away of my father, which occurred when I was eight years old. One year later, a civil war broke up in the country and it culminated in the 1994 genocide, in which over eight hundred thousand people were killed in less than three months.

Everyone ran away in order to save his life. I was one of the many kids who were alienated from their families in that confusion.

Homeless, I walked over 200 kilometres and settled in a place where many people had gathered. Sometime after, one side of the warring soldiers laid siege to that camp.

Unexpectedly, they opened fire on defenceless men, women, children and old, frail people. For several hours, rockets made the earth quake, bullets whistled and mortars blasted like a million thunderclaps, spreading deadly fragments in all directions.

The scared crowds screamed and ran in disarray as a frantic stampede and crumbling walls that resulted from the shooting caused many horrific deaths. But the bombs and the bullets accounted for the larger toll of life losses. I stood by a wall to avoid the stampede and waited for my fate. I had a feeling that it was the Doom’s Day that I had heard of. It was my longest day.

From early morning until far beyond noontime, the sound of guns roared. There were moments of respite, followed by resumed firing. They fired and fired until there was no single person running anymore.

All that was left were the snoring of wounded and dying people, cries of kids, barking dogs on hills, hurling flames of burning things, dark smokes in the air and a sickening smell of fresh blood. A thousand things in a ghastly, dirty and dusty chaos — broken pots, half-burnt tents, torn-up clothes, coins, shoes, blankets, utensils…were scattered all over the place.

Sitting among innumerable lifeless bodies in a puddle of fresh blood, I looked around, not really realising the gravity of what had just happened. The silence that followed the firing was not the end of it, for the worst was lurking:

After the soldiers had shot, they came closer to kill with machetes and axe those who had survived. They stubbed them with bayonets attached on their guns. The fear of death made me shiver with an icy dread inside the bone marrow, knowing that I was not going to escape. I knelt and silently prayed for a miracle. I prayed the most vehement prayer of my life, that they shoot me, but do not butcher me with machetes.

That uproar of people running in all directions, those cries of kids, those puddles of blood, those bombs that blasted like thunderclaps and the agonies of dying people never left me ever since, but a particular thing that was going to linger in my memory for a long time was a one or two years old child, who was crying, a few dozens of yards away from me.

He must have cried until his last drop of tear. He was sucking milk from his mother’s breast, not knowing that she was dead. The soldiers came along the crying baby and hit his head with something, maybe an ax or a hammer.

On several occasions they came near the building where I was, but it was as if a divine shield was protecting me. The massive manslaughter went on for several hours until the night’s darkness made the butchers retire.

It was a cold and dark night of an April’s third week. There were distant voices that disturbed an eerily silence. They came from. the tents of soldiers in the hills that surrounded the bloodbath place. The soldiers still lay siege, waiting for the dawn to carry on with the killing spree. I sat in disbelief, appalled to be still alive after seeing so many deaths.

I looked up in the starless sky and silently cried out, “God, where are you? Oh God! Where are you?” However, as I received no divine response, I decided to be as composed as the night. Then gradually, I realised the depth of the horrible situation I was in: I had fallen into a place that looked like a bottomless pale abyss.

I wondered: “Where am I? Who am I? What have I done to deserve this? Why is life unjust? “ In sheer confusion and helpless panic, I began to doubt my own existence. I wondered if I was still a human being or a ghost, if I had crossed the frontier that separates life from death or not. All that was around me was a very strange realm.

I wondered if the tragedy that I had just witnessed was a nightmare, from which I could ever awake, or never. The faint sounds of pain of some wounded people around me made me know that it was not a nightmare, alas.

At the hour of my utmost pain, at the zenith of my most sinister moment, surrounded by uncountable dead bodies and some wounded people dying, I realised that life is so fickle and fleeting like a candle in a windstorm, so ephemeral like a passing cloud, now here, gone and forgotten just after now.

Time after time, I tried to consoled myself, to no avail. I reflected: “Well, it is useless to panic now. The end is close and tomorrow. is surely my final day. They will kill me and I will find. timeless rest at last…” At the same time, a heavy and cold knot in my stomach made me realise that dying was not as simple as that.

I convinced myself that it was the last night of my life. I had heard people say that a man’s hardship ends with death. There was nothing else to do save welcoming my fate without resistance. After I had finally said yes to death, all fears faded completely, and I felt a strange calmness. I extended my body amidst corpses and clotting blood and waited for the inevitable end for the next day.

The next day, I was exactly 14 years old minus one day. I was woken up by Australian Blue Helmet soldiers who were piling corpses in order to bury them, occasionally discovering people who were still breathing.

Over seven thousand people died on that Saturday afternoon. I was one of the very few who survived. A flock of vultures, crows and dogs had gathered to feast over the free meat. I was not afraid, anymore. I have not been afraid of anything ever since.

After the war, I was reunited with my family, but life was never the same again. With all of our possessions looted, we had to start afresh. It was no longer war and destruction that were terrible to me but the utter meaninglessness of peace.

I sank into a deep sadness, into a state of complete despair where only suicidal thoughts assailed my mind continuously. Life was hollow, darkness and sorrow, devoid of hope and purpose. I envied the dead, who were at peace now. I thought that I did not deserve to live any longer. I wondered what I had done to deserve the torment of living, whereas hundreds of thousands of others had gone to rest.

The cradle of love into which I had grown up had wrapped me in a candid naivety that kept me from noticing that the earth is not a paradise, but a valley of tears and lamentations. That brutal encounter with reality made me want to be dead, for. I no longer wanted to live in a cold and loveless world.

As the gauge of the will to live approached zero and life remained held by a tiny thread, I lost interest from everything and spent days in bed, unable to do anything. I could not even cry, although I wanted to. Only my mother felt the intensity of my distress and did something about it.

There is no love like a mother’s for her ailing and dying child. In some cases, such a love is stronger than death. Just as she had given life to me in the first place, she made me believe in life again. She told me that I had survived not because I was any special at all, but because there was a special reason, which I had to find and live up to.

She nursed me with tenderness and she gave me thoughts to reflect. Despite her busy schedule and work as the only family’s breadwinner, she found enough time to sit by my bedside, to talk to me with gentleness, listening to me with full attention and concern, consoling me as we both cried out our pain. I discovered that there is so much power in allowing ourselves to be vulnerable.

Her intense presence and understanding were balms to my emotional wounds. I realized that love, not time, heals the wounds of the heart. It was not her words and advices that healed me, but her caring silence and intense loving-kindness.

Gradually, I gained some strength and began to take interest in life again; it was like waking from a long sleep, or a coma. I reflected on the causes of my plights. By then, my immediate answer was at I had suffered because I was weak and unable to defend myself and my loved ones.

As a result, a vehement and extreme loathing for weakness arose in me; I determined to be strong, so that no one would ever abuse me or abuse those who are dear to me. As anger replaced despair, the will to live resurrected and soon, it reached the peak.

It was a rebirth in one lifetime.

I vowed to live every remaining moment of my life with intensity, as if it was my last minute. I vowed to never forget the cries of the innocent child who was sucking the breast of his dead mother, to live in the place of all those whose lives were unjustly wasted, to give them a dignity that they were denied. I began to practice martial arts with an aim to take revenge someday. I poured my time-bomb anger and rage to live into the Karate practice and study.

Two years later, I was awarded a Black Belt and subsequently selected in the senior National Team and attended a few international competitions.

The practice of meditation reduced my nocturnal nightmares and diurnal flashbacks considerably. It became my refuge and drug. I learnt Transcendental Meditation and Raja Yoga.

Around the age of 18, my mother died. A friend and an English teacher called Ben Pollit gave me a book to help me through the mourning. The book’s title was “Siddhartha” by Herman Hesse.

After reading that book, my path became clear: sometime in the future I would become a Samana. Later, when I went at the university, I met my T’ai chi master, who taught me Nei gong meditation techniques as described in Kayagatisati sutta in the Majjhima Nikaya.

A voracious reader, I discovered Vipassana thanks to the writings of an Indian Catholic Jesuit priest, Anthony de Mello, who was a student of S.N Goenka.

At the same time, I learned the Causal Link Law (Paticcasamuppadda) under the direct guidance of Claudia Rainville, a Canadian Dharma teacher, author and speaker, who is a long-time student of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Day after day, as I read Buddhist Scriptures, my inner peace increased considerably. Nothing else mattered. I did not need faith to accept the First Noble Truth as a fact. My experiences had validated it unquestionably. All I wanted was to experience other Noble Truths, not just to read about them.

I kept on practicing meditation without a breach ever since. Gradually and naturally the practice of meditation helped me to release all burdens of grudge and to heal my inner wounds. But that was not the case for many people in my country who still had bleeding wounds from the war. I tried to help them. First, I led small meditation groups with a Christian nun called Maria Bakarere.

I wrote a book on forgiveness to help people with issues of trauma, anger, hopelessness, hatred and thoughts of revenge. I taught that the problem is not the person who, out of hatred kills or hurts others. The problem is the energy of ‘hatred’ itself.

I said that hatred is like the water cycle, which is in lakes and rivers, then becomes steam and clouds at the contact of the sun, then becomes the rain which turns into rivers and lakes and so on. Just like water, hatred is impersonal. When we hate people who hurt us, we have exactly the same energy that caused them to hurt us and we are creating conditions to hurt them in return or to be hurt in the future.

In such a case, the aggressors and the victims have the same mindsets, only that they are like a bar with different poles, but not really different. Seeking revenge is like running after a demented arsonist who has just set fire to our house.

Sometimes we may not even catch up with him and we often end up seeming as demented as him. The wise thing to do is to extinguish our house to save items and things that we value. Forgiveness cools off the fire of hatred, while thoughts of revenge add fuel to it.

Hatred is a burning coal which hurts the one who holds it, not the one to whom it is intended to burn. If someone gives as you a burning iron bar, the wise decision is to drop it as quickly as you can. Holding onto it tightly and blaming the one who has given it to you is absurd.

Either way, whether you keep it or drop it, it will cool off, eventually. Enduring unnecessary pain is not patience. It is folly. There is no reward to gain by indulging in an emotional pain.

By forgiving all those who hurt us, we are not doing anyone a favour, but ourselves. I taught that even pain has a meaning, a lesson to teach, because there is a silver lining behind every dark cloud.

I taught the importance of seeing beyond sugar-coated or bitter appearances, because everything on earth has a purpose, every disease an herb to cure it and every person a mission.

I said that tragedies are the best teachers and allow us to be real and humble and said that what seems to be a blessing like health, wealth, beauty and love can turn out to be a curse.

I taught the law of karma and rebirth, as the only plausible explanations to the unspeakable horror that my country had crossed and the boomerang karmic effects, which may not necessarily happen in the present lifetime, but in subsequent ones.

I taught that the best revenge to those who hurt us is to move on, be at peace and let karma do the rest, understanding that to hold anger against someone is like swallowing poison and expect him to die.

I said that forgiveness rejuvenates, like a snake that sheds off an old skin. By letting go our grudges, we become renewed and light.

I taught that each person has a choice to be crushed by a tragedy or to emerge from it stronger, because life is like a ball or a pot. When tragedies crush it down without pity, it can break like a clay pot or bounce up like a tennis ball. Combined with these teachings, I added meditation, yoga and T’ai chi chuan as supplements to experiment real peace of mind and contentment.

Those practices that are completely alien in the African Christian thought rang a bell of dangerous heresies to be fought. In spite of fierce opposition from the “born-again” Christian movements who defined meditation as a satanic practice, my books, retreats and seminars became popular. It made religious authorities and politicians insecure and the popularity hit back hard.

One day as I had just finished addressing a group of people, the members of the secret police in my country abducted me and imprisoned me incommunicado, in solitary confinement for 42 days. They kept me in a small dump cell, where I had to sleep on a cold floor. During all this time, they did not allow me to wash my body, change my clothes or brush the teeth or even see the sun. For the first twenty three days, my arms were handcuffed day and night.

They fed me a meagre food of beans and maize once a day. I used an empty water bottle to urinate, because I had exactly three minutes per day to defecate and urinate.

The cell’s floor which never saw the sunlight was cold, especially before dawn. I had to practice a body-warming Nei gong technique to stay alive.

At the end of the corridor in the building where I was detained, there was an interrogation and torture cell, where they executed and electrocuted prisoners. I was waiting my turn.

The officer who interrogated me reminded me several times that it was only a question of time and I would bathe in my own blood soon. Although I knew that he was not just threatening me, I had no other response but to smile. I was deeply at peace.

Nothing could break me, ever again. No torture could go deeper than the psychological abyss out of which I had emerged after the war. No threat could override the panic I had felt during my first witnessing of chilling massacre when I was but a boy.

Sensing death, I sent vibrations of loving-kindness continually to the police officers and to all beings. I knew that any thought of ill-will could break me, and I did not allow negativity in my mind.

Although that incarceration marked the worst times for my body, they were my life’s best times for the mind. The only thing that interrupted my meditations was the countless lice that had infested my clothes.

Facing physical annihilation again, in total isolation, I had the best conditions to meditate. I experienced deep states of peace that I had never experienced before.

I made a determination that if I were to come out of that hell alive, I would become a monk in order to prolong that peace, and maybe attain the final Emancipation in this life. After sometime however, despite the practice of Qi gong, my health deteriorated. I had an acute pneumonia, and they released me. They did not intend to kill me, but to break me psychologically. They had just done the opposite.

They ordered me to abstain myself from disclosing my incarceration details to the press.

Sometime after, I contacted Venerable Buddharakkhita, the Abbot of the Uganda Buddhist Centre. After four months as an Anagarika, he sent me to Sri Lanka for ordination. I ordained as a novice (Samanera) in November 2015 at Na Uyana Forest Hermitage.

In June 2016, the first seema on the African continent was consecrated by Theravada senior monks from Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, Germany, Mexico and the USA, and I received the first Higher Ordination (Upasampada) on the Continent in the Theravada History.