On Feb. 10, 20 Buddhist monks arrived in Washington, D.C., having walked 2,300 miles from Ft. Worth, Texas, over the course of more than three months. Their purpose? A pilgrimage for peace.

Although the Lehigh Valley is not on the monks’ route, local residents have been moved by their journey. Many are no strangers to the cultivation of peace. We spoke with Nancy Tate, a longtime member of LEPOCO, and with Buddhist scholars and practitioners about what it means to choose peace in troubled times.

Virtue as a magnet

The Tibetan Buddhist Learning Center at 93 Angen Road in Washington, N.J., was founded by Geshe Ngawang Wangyal as a place where monks and lay individuals could learn and pray. Current TBLC directors Joshua and Diana Cutler lived and worked with the center’s founder for years and have run the facility since his death in 1983.

Joshua Cutler explains why the peace walk is drawing such powerful reactions from people across the U.S.

“People understand that being peaceful and calm and loving and kind are virtues. …When they see others who are kind, it’s like a magnet.”

Commenting on the tenor of the typical news cycle, Cutler adds, “It’s not something you see in the news… [The news] doesn’t often report on somebody who is peaceful and kind.”

Indeed, for the first several weeks of the pilgrimage, most news about the monks spread via social media, but as they passed the halfway point of their journey, and crowds in the thousands began gathering to see and hear them, they drew national media attention. CNN’s Anderson Cooper featured them on a Jan. 14 broadcast. The monks told Cooper that their goal was to “raise awareness of loving kindness and compassion around the world.”

Kammie Takahashi is the director of Asian studies at Muhlenberg College, where she is also associate dean of academic life and associate professor of religion studies. She remarks that because she is not active on social media, her children were the ones who drew her attention to the monks. She notes that part of the monks’ appeal may be the boldness of acting in a world where people—particularly young people—are increasingly indoors and online.

“I see that there are a lot of middle-aged and older people and grandmas bringing their kids, in person,” Takahashi notes, “but I think there must be a whole unseen contingent of young people online, and I think that’s part of [why the peace walk is drawing so much interest].”

She continues, “Part of it is just that they’re showing up as they are, as people, but also the act of walking and going out and letting go of status, familiarity, safety and security is a pretty profound activity for a generation who is mostly in. And I think that must be inspiring to them in a way that other forms of manifested spirituality may not be so compelling.”

Walking for peace

Amy Miller, who has studied with both Cutler and Takahashi, has a doctorate in the history of religion, with an emphasis on Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. She suggests that one can view peace walks as dating back to the foundation of the Buddhist monastic order.

“When the Buddha established the Sangha,” she explains, “it was a state of homeless wandering and, according to some scriptures, Buddha asked them to ‘go forth’ to teach the doctrine for the welfare, benefit and happiness of others.”

On the other hand, Miller says, “Peace walks have become a modern Buddhist phenomenon.” She comments that some say this bringing together of social activism with Buddhist principles is something new—“socially engaged Buddhism”—while “others say that Buddhism has always been socially engaged.”

Miller recalls an important figure in the peace walk tradition, Maha Ghosananda. He was a monk who narrowly escaped the Cambodian genocide under Pol Pot in the 1970s and dedicated his life to the promotion of world peace and the rebuilding of Cambodia.

One component of Maha Ghosanada’s work, Miller explains, was the peace walk.

“The first of these was conducted in 1992 and was called a ‘Dhammayietra’ (Buddhist teachings and pilgrimage). …This first walk involved Cambodian monastics and laypeople walking across the Thai border into Cambodia, signaling the repatriation of refugees as well as the return of Buddhism to Cambodia. This was no easy walk, as they were passing through Khmer Rouge territory and areas laden with land mines, with no government permission to cross the border. Eventually, the walk went all the way to the border with Vietnam.”

Looking within,

doing the work

The challenge for people inspired by the peace walk in the U.S., Miller notes, is to do the hard work of strengthening virtues and de-emphasizing negative qualities within ourselves.

“It can’t just be a veneer of loving kindness,” she says. “You have to do the inner work.”

So what does it mean to choose peace?

“First of all,” Miller asserts, it means “remembering that I have some choice. Circumstances come your way, but how you respond—and in Buddhism, what kind of mind you are holding throughout the day—is in your own hands.”

“But that doesn’t make it easy,” she concedes, noting that “when you look within and see negative qualities and attitudes you’d rather not have, it can be very daunting.” However, she counters, “Working at becoming more peaceful within oneself, even though it requires facing many challenges, is rewarding in itself, because you get happier along the way” and become better able to help others.

“Buddhism is also about recognizing our interdependence,” Miller adds, “and turning away from focus on the self to improving the lives of others.”

Cutler adds, “Buddhist practice is working to reduce the strength of those unpeaceful states of mind and augment the peaceful states of mind. Then your mind … becomes peaceful, [and] when you make your mind peaceful, then you have the ability to think realistically, so your actions become peaceful and well-intended, well-thought-out.”

Takahashi notes that the changes may be difficult to perceive on a national scale. “It may be that it’s unquantifiable: those soft transitions, internal transitions.”

Working for peace

Cultivating compassion doesn’t mean ignoring harms done to others, Cutler says.

“What you have to be able to do,” he clarifies, “is distinguish the person from the actions of the person, and if the actions are bringing about harm to others, you can condemn such actions, but you don’t let it break your wish for the person to be happy and free from any suffering.”

Miller concurs, adding, “In order for social activism to be truly effective at establishing peace, you have to be a peaceful person yourself. The way to peace is for the individual to be working on transforming their inner attitudes and intentions alongside of whatever they’re doing [socially]. If you’re becoming more loving and kind yourself, that’s going to help the people around you, from your family to your community and outwards.”

One Lehigh Valley group that has stood for peace and against war for a very long time is LEPOCO. Founded in November 1965 by Valley residents who traveled to the national capital for the March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam, LEPOCO has steadfastly rejected the use of violence, from its roots in the Vietnam era through today’s conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine.

Longtime LEPOCO staffer Nancy Tate says there are many ways for people to get involved in the peace movement. Anyone is welcome to join the group’s weekly peace vigil held Thursdays from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. on the South Side of Bethlehem, at the corner of Wyandotte and South Third streets.

Tate notes that “LEPOCO provides a place to get together with other people of like minds.” Events at the group’s headquarters (53 East Lehigh St., Lower Level, Bethlehem) include educational programs, action meetings, and an annual gathering—scheduled for April—with a speaker focused on peace issues.

Although it’s easy for voters to be discouraged by available options, Tate says that progress does happen through elections and encourages people to get involved in political movements. “Sometimes you don’t know where it’s going to start,” she says. “I think the thing to do is to find other people … building community around issues is extremely important.”

In a statement to The Press at the October 2025 outset of the walk, the monks’ spiritual leader Bhikkhu Pannakara declared, “We walk not to protest, but to awaken the peace that already lives within each of us. The Walk for Peace is a simple yet meaningful reminder that unity and kindness begin within each of us and can radiate outward to families, communities, and society as a whole.”