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London’s Peace Monk Chants, Drums and Walks to Urge an End to War

August 30, 2025
in News
London’s Peace Monk Chants, Drums and Walks to Urge an End to War
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The Buddhist monk who lives alone in a storage-room-turned-temple behind London’s Peace Pagoda was doing dishes on a recent summer evening.

“There he is,” said Vilma Ramsay, a habitual visitor to the park where the pagoda stands, pointing at a small window through which the bald monk could be seen scrubbing away. “I’ve seen him go from young to old.”

The robed man waved.

The tree-huddled grounds surrounding the pagoda in Battersea Park are a popular place for picnics, but few if any of those sprawled on blankets around it knew its secret: The same monk has been responsible for caring for the pagoda the past 41 years.

For the monk, the Rev. Gyoro Nagase, 74, most of those four decades have been spent following a precise routine, day after day.

He prays for an hour at sunrise and then chants and drums as he circumnavigates the imposing white pagoda with tiered roofs overlooking the Thames. Only the hours differ — he starts at 5 a.m. in summer, later during winter.

He then deals with upkeep of the stupa. He removes overnight litter, cleans off graffiti, polishes Buddha statues, replaces roof tiles and removes moss — with his fingernails, as necessary.

When done with all of that, he pursues the more public-facing portion of his life’s mission: peace. He attends marches, chanting and beating his ever-present drum at demonstrations against nuclear weapons and protests over the Gaza war.

After returning to the temple, he embarks on another hour of praying, chanting the Odaimoku, or the Sacred Title, “namu myoho renge kyo,” (“Devotion to the Mystic Dharma of the Lotus Flower Sutra” is one translation). When followers or walk-ins show up to his door, he hands them a cushion and chanting sheet, but most days, he’s alone.

August is a particular busy time for him. Every Aug. 9, to commemorate the day an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, he organizes an interfaith walk from Westminster Cathedral, across the Thames on the Albert Bridge, finishing at the steps of the peace pagoda.

The pagoda was built in 1984 by Nipponzan Myohoji, a sect of Japanese Buddhism that embraces pacifism and has built similar temples dedicated to peace around the world. Ken Livingstone, leader of the Greater London Council, which ran the capital then, rode to the opening ceremony on an elephant.

On this year’s walk to commemorate the bombing of Nagasaki, a group of about 60 aging pacifists followed behind him.

Back at the temple, the speeches began: by a Roman Catholic priest, an Anglican priest, the president of the Buddhist Society and a member of the London Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

“Never in my life did I think I would end up living as a politician in a park,” the monk said the next day as he sipped tea from his favorite cup.

Born in 1951, the youngest of four in a small city near Nagoya, the monk came of age at a time when he said most people in Japan were “only interested in European and American things,” he said.

While he loved listening to all types of world folk music, the sound that upended his life was African drums.

That made him realize, he said, that “there was a different world out there.” And his life, until then unfocused, suddenly had a new purpose. “I had to go and find that sound,” he said.

Twenty years old and armed with a cassette recorder and a sketch pad, he and a friend in the early 1970s took a passenger boat to eastern Russia, rode on the Trans-Siberian Railway and made it to Sweden, where he took menial jobs.

When he’d saved enough money, he was finally able to make his way to Africa, touring and recording music in Sudan, Cameroon, Zaire and Kenya, but he was too restless to stay.

Ultimately, he made his way to India, and it was there, in Bihar, at 22, that he first encountered the message of world peace that was being promoted by Nipponzan Myohoji at a peace pagoda.

Again, it was the sound of a drum, this time a Buddhist one, that first captivated him, drawing him in and altering his path.

“Meet drum, change life,” he said in English, a language he hasn’t quite yet perfected.

That first day, on an empty stomach, “I chanted straight from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m.”

Hooked by the lifestyle at the temple, he stayed, fasting for a week.

When he heard that the order was building a temple at the top of Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka, he volunteered, carrying heavy concrete bags on his back on a climb known to be tough for even the unencumbered.

That experience deepened his attachment to both the beliefs and the fellow adherents of Nipponzan Myohoji, founded in 1917 by a Japanese monk heavily influenced by Gandhi’s pacifism. “It was so fun chanting with them, especially at night,” he said.

To him, the group felt “strong and wise like Superman,” he said. So when during the inauguration of the Sri Lankan temple, the founder and leader of the sect, the Rev. Nichidatsu Fujii, offered to ordain the volunteers, he thought it was now or never.

“When Reverend Fujii touched my head with his ancient shaving blade,” he said, “I became a monk.”

The roaming young man in search of drum sounds had finally found the right beat. From that moment on, traveling had a more focused purpose: to undertake long-distance walks in the name of peace.

He named a few. From New Orleans to New York City for the No Nukes march in 1982; from Durban, South Africa, to Johannesburg at the time of Nelson Mandela’s release; from Kyiv, Ukraine, to Chernobyl right after the nuclear accident. After 9/11, he walked with Pete Seeger between the order’s peace pagoda in Grafton, N.Y., and Ground Zero.

“Many, many more,” he said. “Now, feet very tired.”

It shows.

His walk is an unsteady waddle, his feet shuffle. His volunteers were worried about him doing the Nagasaki Day walk. “Didn’t fall,” he said. “So why stop?”

To those who interact with him, his childlike and giggly spirit is a big part of his London popularity.

“His life is so different than mine, I have very little understanding of how he lives but our values are aligned,” said Hannah Kemp-Welch, 37, a sound artist and vice chair of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, who invites him to chant at the event she organizes. “He is always smiley, kind and welcoming.”

The monk also has a practical side, and he knows he has a blessed deal. He is loved by London’s peace community, cared for by the neighborhood — a local business sends lunch, a nearby resident helps with I.T. — and protected by those in charge of the park’s upkeep.

“I am the only monk who lives in 200 acres in an English park,” he said.

On visits home to Japan, when he rides the subway and people ask him where he lives. “I say London and then they say, ‘Ooh, London,’” he said. “And then they ask, ‘Where?’ And I say in a park, and then they stop talking and walk away.”

There are a few dark clouds over his dreamy Xanadu nestled between a magnificent English garden and a cricket field. He said “vandals” show up from time to time and throw stones at his house. Drunks make fun of him, especially at night when the park police are gone.

His health is frail, and so is the pagoda, which needs structural repairs. In May, the park authorities fenced the entrance. The chances that his order will send a replacement are slim. The leaders of Nipponzan Myohoji are all in their 90s, and no young people are joining, said Shigeo Kobayashi, a fellow Japanese pacifist in London.

Asked if he thought all of his chanting, and walking, had ultimately contributed to world peace, the monk confessed he couldn’t be sure. “I don’t know,” he said, picking a plum from a bowl. “Maybe nothing.”

But he had no regrets about his dedication to the cause.

“Chanting for world peace,” he said, biting into the fruit, “is the best way to live.”

The post London’s Peace Monk Chants, Drums and Walks to Urge an End to War appeared first on New York Times.

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