Monks

February 16, 2026

The Buddhist monks did not pass our way on their 108-day, 2,300-mile walk from Texas to Washington. They did travel through some small South Carolina towns on a due-east course to Columbia before pivoting north to Charlotte. At Greensboro they again turned sharply east then zigzagged northeast into Virginia, passing through Richmond.

They brushed by our old hometown, Lake Ridge, before a final sprint (at hiking pace) into Alexandria and Arlington and into Washington last week. At George Washington University last Wednesday the monks’ leader, Venerable Bhikkhu Pannakara, led a crowd in a “global loving-kindness meditation.” He made brief remarks:

“We are so deeply grateful for all the support we have received throughout this journey. Your love, your kindness, your presence—all of it has carried us forward. May we continue our walk for peace in our whole lives, not just for these 108 days, but forever. May we help peace bloom more in the world, one step at a time.

“This physical journey may be reaching its destination, but the walk for peace continues always—in each of us, through each of us, for all beings everywhere. Thank you so much for walking with us. May you and all beings be well, happy and at peace.”

I missed most of the news reports but picked up snippets here and there. The D.C. rally summoned memories of the 1968 antiwar marches, when crowds chanted “All We Are Saying Is Give Peace a Chance.”

The monks repeated probably hundreds of times on the walk the central message of their lives, which is the central mission of their Buddhist faith, the quest for enlightenment, the meaning of existence, release from suffering and human passion, nirvana. We translate all that readily in English as “peace.” Good enough for the monks, good enough for us.

For sure, most of the thousands who stood in the cold watching the 19 monks pass and fell in to walk with them aren’t Buddhists. The term “peace walk” struck a chord with Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, agnostics, and atheists, probably because they recognized in the monks’ crusade something they had been taught, maybe in Sunday school, or simply instinctively believed.

We don’t have to dig deep. As the ICE riot police arrest American citizens and non-citizens, as U.S. Navy aircraft blow up fishing boats in the Caribbean, as Russian missiles rain on Ukraine, Americans are beaten down by the pervasive bleakness of public life. News reports have found that Trump is down in the polls. The New York Times commentator Ross Douthat announced that “Trump has lost the country.”

Millions still fly Trump flags and wear those red hats. But then all those millions who followed and cheered the monks felt something, a sense that “peace,” serenity, relief from the rampages of the federal government against innocent human beings, isn’t a dream.   

Just over a month ago we hiked nearly a mile through Hamad International Airport at Doha in Qatar, a kind of fantasia of world travel. We stared at a glistening rainforest and massive sculptures of human and animal forms and other works of art, immaculate shops and restaurants and airport facilities. Separate prayer rooms were available for Muslim men and women. Doha supports operations by some 60 international airlines.

Hamad showed off something alien to us, a sense of Muslim culture, taste, a dazzling flair for the richness and excitement of international travel, an exotic, non-Western consciousness of joy at the experience of moving through the world.

Within a week we stood 9,000 miles from home before Buddhist memorials and stared at the elegant, glistening gold statuary and hulking stone forms of Buddha and his hierarchy of gods and prophets dating more to more than a thousand years ago, to which the monks of the Texas-to-D.C. peace walk owe their heritage. In Cambodia’s capital we removed our shoes and hiked the steep stairs of the Phnom Wat temple and inhaled the fragrance of incense burned in reverence for that ancient faith.

A few of us sat before three monks in the temple in the town of Oudong. We listened to their lyrical chanting as they conveyed a blessing and tossed lotus and jasmine blossoms over us. We climbed 400 steps to the summit of the temple and looked out at the vernal landscape, dotted with likenesses of Buddha and the farms and small villages he presides over in serenity and calm.

From those places we picked up, without truly understanding, a sense of the depth of Buddhist perceptions of the mystery of life. Then we listened to the Texas monks as they answered the same reporters’ questions over and over, about the need for peace, the search for peace, and come away baffled about their meaning, about the ultimate significance of peace—a state of mind, of purpose, of being, in our lives.

It may come to us more easily if we look again at the rage boiling over in the country, not just of political activists we see on TV every night, but also among the ordinary people who joined the Trump parade in the last election and now see what it has really done to them and to the country. 

So the monks who hiked half of America in the dead of winter may have left a mark for a while with the non-Buddhists in this non-Buddhist country. “Seek peace,” they said over and over, clearly and decisively, in the languages of all religions and creeds.  

Peace. How to discover it. Through hard weather huge crowds, thousands carrying signs, many in tears, received a message, both universal and intensely private. It will be, already has been dismissed by the hard-minded cynics, we know who they are; for others, it may penetrate to the soul.