Paula Green’s passing last week was a deep loss. Just when we need more conflict resolution and deep listening in the world, Paula is asking us to carry on without her. Perhaps we can see this not as a time for grief but as an opening for memories of her life and teachings.
I met Paula in the 1990s as I interviewed socially engaged Buddhists around the world. Two of the most revered figures in the movement eventually lived in Franklin County — Bernie Glassman, founder of the Zen Peacemakers in Montague, and Paula Green, founder of the Karuna Center in Leverett. As a new neighbor in the 2000s, I considered it a rare privilege to become their friend.
By now you may know of Paula’s background as a clinical psychologist, an early activist in the women’s and peace movements, and a veteran of vipassana retreats at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre. You may have read about the hundreds of international activists who studied in her Conflict Transformation Across Cultures program at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, and the Hands Across the Hills dialogues she organized between distant neighbors from Western Massachusetts and eastern Kentucky. And you may know that the Japanese monks who built the New England Peace Pagoda stayed in her house for months as the land was cleared and the neighbors got used to the idea of a monastery in their back yard.
In 2000, Paula wrote a chapter about the peacemaker monks, “Walking for Peace: Nipponzan Myohoji,” in a collection of essays, Engaged Buddhism in the West — a dramatic story worth reading again, 20 years later. In the same volume Susan Moon, editor of Turning Wheel, the journal of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, wrote a profile of Paula Green in the chapter, “Activist Women in American Buddhism.” Here are two incidents that Paula related to Susan for the article.
Working in international conflict resolution, Paula recalled a time in 1990 when she joined an observation team from the International Network of Engaged Buddhists to monitor refugee and troop movements on the Thai-Myanmar border. Suddenly the team came under fierce shelling from Myanmar government troops. Her companion, a lifelong Quaker activist in his seventies, commented, “This might not be a bad way to go.” But Paula was engaged to marry Jim Perkins, another peace activist who was recently paroled after serving prison time for his participation in the Ploughshares nuclear weapons protests. “Dying now would be a dirty trick on Jim,” she reflected, and persuaded her friends to beat a hasty retreat.
Paula described subsequent trips to war-torn central Africa, the former Yugoslavia, the Palestinian settlements on the West Bank in Israel, and the front lines in the Buddhist-Tamil civil war in Sri Lanka. In Zaire, she conducted nonviolence training in a refugee camp on the Rwanda border, among the 200,000 Hutus who lived in makeshift shelters supplied by the U.N. “I looked around, and as far as I could see in all directions there were these little blue plastic tents. And I thought, here I am, with three other trainers, teaching for a few weeks in the world’s largest refugee camp, with people whose lives have reached a state of unimaginable misery because they or their kinsmen have recently used machetes to kill their Tutsi neighbors. This task is as absurd as scratching at a mountain with a toothpick. But we taught every day, all day, under our own blue-sheeted tent.”
Invited back a year later, Paula and her colleagues found to their amazement that participants had translated into French all the materials she had brought the year before. And there were 17 tents in the camp with a sign in front of each saying, “Center for the Study of Nonviolence.” It was heartwarming to see the stream of visitors to Paula and Jim’s home last week, many bearing gifts of food and tokens of love for Jim and feeling grateful for the opportunity to exchange a hug with Paula’s beloved companion. At a time when war is flaring up in a place Paula never visited, we can hope that the skills of listening and love she taught will find their way into the hearts of Russians, Ukrainians and the others who will be confronted and harmed by this latest conflict. She has left for us much work to do.
Christopher Queen lives in Wendell and writes on socially engaged Buddhism.