In the Vedas and other sacred texts, India’s ancient sages conveyed a view of the cosmos so complex and compelling that it survives vibrantly today. Enriched but never overtaken by newer religions over the centuries and by its encounters with the clamoring “isms” of our own time, Hindu civilization pervades the life of modern India. From deep within it, PANDURANG SHASTRI ATHAVALE is drawing strength for his country’s spiritual renewal and material uplift.

Born to a family of Brahmin religious scholars in Maharashtra, ATHAVALE mastered Sanskrit as a youth and absorbed the wisdom of the Hindu classics. In Japan to attend a world religions conference in 1954, he asserted confidently the salience of Vedic teachings and way of life. Someone asked: In your country, is there a single community that lives by these ideals? Disturbed by this question, ATHAVALE returned home and pondered frankly the grim realities of contemporary Indian life.

Having founded a school combining India’s sacred knowledge with Western learning, he began meeting regularly with a group of earnest young truth seekers, entrepreneurs, doctors, engineers, lawyers. He led them to cultivate self-awareness (swadhyaya) and to devote a portion of their free time to acts of devotion and gratitude to God. Taking up the call in 1958, ATHAVALE, s middle-class disciples ventured into rural villages to propagate swadhyaya and to advance their teacher’s belief that barriers of caste, gender, and religion must be transcended in order to recognize the true equality of all people.

In the ensuing decades, ATHAVALE’s volunteers swelled to hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands. Today, ATHAVALE or Dada (elder brother), as he is popularly known, guides a huge spiritual movement that courses through thousands of villages and touches millions of urban and rural Indians. Although emphatically spiritual, the swadhyaya movement has brought striking social and material benefits to its adherents.

In hundreds of villages, swadhyaya devotees have abandoned drunkenness, gambling, wife-beating, and petty crime to devote themselves to community betterment. Fisherfolk, chanting Sanskrit hymns, ply “boat temples” whose daily catch is reserved for the local hungry. Villagers plant multi-hectare “tree temples” to restore degraded land and to make their habitats green again. Farmers cultivate the common fields of “God’s farm” to grow food to share with needy neighbors. Swadhyaya-imbued villages are clean, tidy, and prosperous. Children faithfully attend school. Villagers of all castes, men and women, worship side by side. Untouchability is not recognized. Moreover, communal strife is rare in swadhyaya communities and, in some places, Muslims, Hindus, and Christians share the same place of worship.

Even so, ATHAVALE often reminds people that swadhyaya has nothing to do with politics and is not undertaken to solve the problems of the world. “We are merely planting a bouquet of flowers,” he says, “of love, compassion, selflessness, and peace.”

A small organization of volunteers gives some coordination to ATHAVALE’s vast “family” and guides the work of swadhyaya schools. But it is largely through teaching that ATHAVALE leads the movement. His pithy, conversational sermons hold multitudes in rapt attention and circulate widely in print and on cassette.

In them, ATHAVALE teaches that “God resides in everyone” and that achieving “spiritual oneness” will bring with it solutions for worldly problems. Calling upon the oldest of Hindu teachings, but alluding to Western thinkers as well, seventy-five-year-old ATHAVALE exhorts his listeners to liberate themselves from preconceived ideas and “baseless beliefs.” “The basic revolution,” he asserts, “should be of the human mind.”

In electing PANDURANG SHASTRI ATHAVALE to receive the 1996 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his tapping the ancient wellsprings of Hindu civilization to inspire spiritual renewal and social transformation in modern India.

I accept most gratefully the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership. I am honored because this award carried the name and the spirit of a truly great Asian of the twentieth century. The late Ramon Magsaysay was a step ahead of others and he lived for his ideas. He tried to cultivate a sense of self-respect and self-esteem in the people of his republic.

I too have been trying to live and work for similar objectives. However, my philosophy is based on the principles of the indwelling God and devotion to Him. Human beings can feel close to each other if we accept the idea of “the indwelling God generating and operating everyone’s body.” Consciousness of the nearness of God helps in developing self-respect in individuals and overcoming human pains and problems. I consider devotion to God a “social force.” The expression of gratitude to God by way of offering one’s time and efficiency can result in collective activities, which in turn create community resources and their just distribution for the common good. However, we, Swadhyayees, undertake these activities to reorient individual perspective towards life and collective existence that builds self-esteem and confidence. Without this, one can neither achieve individual development nor ensure a healthy community life.

In conferring the award on me, you have appreciated the importance and relevance of my philosophy in the modern times and the selfless work carried on by Swadhyayees the world over.

Once again, I express my gratefulness to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, personally and on behalf of the millions Swadhyayees around the world.

Born in Manila just seventeen years into the century, NICK JOAQUIN witnessed as a boy the slow metamorphosis of his home city as it awakened from three hundred years of languorous Spanish dominion and quickened to the newer rhythms of America and the modern age. Schooled in the neighborhood of Paco and, for two or three years, at Mapa High School in the old city of Intramuros, he set out early on a life of his own. While working as a typesetter for the Tribune newspaper at the age of seventeen, he submitted a poem to the editors. It was published and thus began his life as a writer.

Years of menial work and wartime followed, but in 1945 a JOAQUIN short story won first prize in a Philippines Free Press fiction contest. The next several years yielded brilliant short stories such as “Guardia de Honor” and “The Summer Solstice” and JOAQUIN’s classic play “A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino,” set in a faded and beaten post-war Intramuros. In these and other early masterworks, JOAQUIN revealed his preoccupation with the Spain-and-America-infused Filipino psyche and its deep roots in a pre-Christian past, for in NICK JOAQUIN’s Philippines, the past always haunts the present.

Following two years at St. Albert’s College in Hong Kong, in 1950 JOAQUIN joined the Philippines Free Press and rose eventually to associate editor. As Quijano de Manila, his now famous nom de plume, he chronicled the high life and low life of Manila’s politicos and crooks, starlets and famous lovers and, in trenchant essays and articles, examined intimately the mores and passions of the city. Prizes and fellowships permitted him to travel widely and return to fiction. He concluded his signature novel, The Woman Who Had Two Navels, with the postscript: “Madrid-Mallorca-Manhattan-Mexico-Manila, 1960.”

Siding with workers in a labor dispute in 1970, JOAQUIN left the Free Press for the Asia Philippines Leader, where he served as editor-in-chief until the Marcos dictatorship shut it down two years later. Working independently now, JOAQUIN brought out several collections of articles and wrote three new plays, several children’s stories, and a detective novel, Cave and Shadows. In 1976, the year he was named National Artist of the Philippines, he also published lyrical translations from Spanish of the poems of Jose Rizal. And beginning in 1979, he launched a new series of narrative oral histories about Philippine notables; today, twelve volumes later, he is the country’s most prolific biographer.

JOAQUIN also mastered the Philippines’ most popular and widely-read literary form, the newspaper column. In offerings titled “Jottings,” “Small Beer,” and such, he dished out regular rounds of history, opinion, and gossip with such flair, candor, and intelligence that he managed to raise this quotidian newspaper exercise to an art.

Long recognized as the Philippines’ premier literary artist, JOAQUIN has influenced and inspired generations of aspiring writers. English is his preferred metier and he uses the language masterfully to convey his own quintessentially Filipino persona. As he explains, “Whether it is in Tagalog or English, because I am Filipino, every single line I write is in Filipino.”

Notoriously publicity shy, JOAQUIN prefers a life of anonymity, camaraderie, and work. Today at seventy-eight, his days are busy, still, with writing. When asked once if he ever intended to retire, JOAQUIN is said to have responded, with typical verbal mischief, “I’m not retiring and I’m not resigned.” He was sixty-five at the time, twenty-three books ago.

In electing NICK JOAQUIN to receive the 1996 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, the board of trustees recognizes his exploring the mysteries of the Filipino body and soul in sixty inspired years as a writer.

To all of you here: peace. And God loves you.

Tonight’s award, this one, is such a high for me because I am supposed to be already down, down, over the hill, and out, out, on the way out. But I look at this prize and you know what it says to me, what it shouts to me? Hear it hooraying: “Hey, guy, you’re not finished yet, you’re not yet for retiring, you’re still where the action is. Yes, man, you’re right here where they run races and give out prizes.”

That is what this award is saying.

Some people say I should have got it long ago. I don’t agree. I think the timing is perfect, as is. I should, by now, be in a rocking chair, hugging the shadows, or worse, in a wheelchair, ready to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Instead, here I am in the limelight, still winning prizes, thanks to this award.

Not that my writing career hasn’t been one steady harvest of laurels. I enjoyed winning them, of course, but all the time I was also nervous. Even as I exulted, I kept warning myself: “This is hubris, this is hubris, you’ll end up kaput.” Well, I may end up kaput, but what the heck: at the moment, this moment, I find myself on still another high. Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be! Whoever said that must have been a previous me.

For today, even with so much to be thankful for in the past, I can still say in utter astonishment: “But thou hast kept the good wine until now!” Happy is the senior who can say that.

Thank you. I have spoken.

“Everyone dreams of a good life,” says Father JOHN OH WOONG-JIN. And in today’s South Korea, many can achieve it. Yet as some are swept up into Korea’s surging prosperity, others fall to the side and live needily on its fringes. And what of them, he asks? What of Korea’s abandoned children? What of the poor who beg for food, who dwell in squalid makeshift shelters, who die by the roadside? Father OH says the answer lies in the simplest moral dictum: We must love them.

Born in August 1945, OH witnessed as a child the cruelty and suffering of the Korean War. He determined upon a life of service and, inspired by a Catholic priest who aided poor children, chose the Church.

In 1976, as a newly assigned parish priest in the town of Kumwang in south central Korea, OH noticed an old, ragged beggar limping past his church. He followed him to a nearby hovel and watched as the old man shared his food with a destitute family. Once prosperous and happily married, Grandpa Choi—as OH came to know this remarkable old man—had many years before been conscripted, tortured, and forced by the Japanese military to toil in the frigid Hokkaido coal mines. Physically and mentally broken, he later settled under a bridge in Kumwang. Now, at seventy, Choi begged food for others too weak to beg and performed countless other deeds of kindness—clearing shards of broken glass from the playgrounds and, despite his own severe infirmities, rescuing homeless drifters from winter’s killing cold.

Electrified by Grandpa Choi’s example, OH persuaded his parishioners to build a five-room charity house for Grandpa Choi and a few others. As word of OH’s little project spread, other homeless people began to arrive. Rejecting local fears that Kumwang might be overrun with undesirables, OH decided to dedicate himself wholly to helping the needy. To do so, he founded a new congregation of religious men and women and, enlisting the support of Korea’s Catholic hierarchy and thousands of contributors, established in 1983 a sanatorium for beggars: Kkottongnae, or Flower Village.

Like the Biblical loaves and fishes, Kkottongnae quickly blossomed with additional residence halls and services for Korea’s have-nots: in 1985, for the mentally ill; in 1986, for tuberculosis sufferers; in 1987, for the homeless elderly; in 1988, for alcoholics; and, in the early 1990s, for physically and mentally handicapped adults and children. In 1988, a 140-bed charity hospital also rose at Kkottongnae.

Today, more than 2,700 people live in Kkottongnae’s two-hundred-hectare hillside campus, where they are cared for by religious brothers and nuns and by hundreds of lay volunteers who arrive daily by the busload. Father OH has also launched two new Kkottongnae complexes, one in the north, another in the south, each one designed to care for thousands more.

Although Father OH has received a few large donations and assistance from government and the army, most of his endeavors are funded by scrupulously-accounted-for contributions from 700,000 individuals, each of whom pledges a small sum each month. Indeed, OH limits the amounts of regular gifts so that as many people as possible can “experience the happiness of helping others.”

Love, says OH, is the root of happiness. In its absence, the weak are left to fend for themselves, families collapse, societies degenerate. But with it, decency is restored to human relations. Some people say that Kkottongnae is a miracle. Yes, says fifty-one-year-old Father OH, but a miracle of a special kind. “Only those who practice love will understand it.”

In electing JOHN OH WOONGLIN to receive the 1996 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the board of trustees recognizes his arousing in Korea a compassion for the poor by personifying the scriptural injunction to Love Thy Neighbor.

Kkottongnae is a social welfare complex that heartily welcomes Korea’s abandoned people, protecting, curing, and guiding them so that they may go to heaven in peace. These are the people who are starving or freezing to death, who are lying sick beside the road or under bridges, who have no place to live nor strength to beg for food. Kkotongnae was established and is being operated by 720,000 donors; annually 200,000 people volunteer for service; and about 300 members of both the Congregations of Kkottongnae Brothers and Sisters of Jesus also serve. In addition, there are the supportive efforts and love from the Korean government. A special source of great power was the love bestowed upon all of us by the Korean Catholic Church, the diocese of Cheongju, and the Most Reverend Nicholas Jung Jin Seok. In accepting this award, I would like to stress that it should be awarded to the above-mentioned individuals.

What of beggars? Beggars know how to beg but not how to give. The reason why there are beggars is due to lack of love, not lack of material things, knowledge, skill, or health. What Kkottongnae must do is to cure simultaneously the causes of human misery and to warmly welcome, protect, and cure those who live in misery. That is, to tech love to all the people throughout the country. When people love each other, never shall the diseased and the weak be cast into the streets.

God is love. Let us love one another. We must make God’s love known to this world.

For more than twenty years, I have been going around churches, government offices, and companies and have visited students all over the country to teach love by preaching and lecturing. After seeing more than 200,000 people from all walks of life visit Kkottongnae every year—practicing and learning love—I decided to launch the Institute of Love. The institute is the very place where love “of the people, by the people, and for the people” is taught.

The institute is now under construction and will be completed on October 10, 1996. There we will teach the love of God, which can lead to happy individuals, a happy family, a happy nation, and a happy mankind.

For those who need love most, those who have no place to lean on nor energy to beg, those who are abandoned by their families, and those who are treated with contempt, I live as their servant. I would like to thank all who have given immeasurable love and service to Kkottongnae. On all of their behalf, I humbly accept this award. I am convinced that this award will be of great comfort to help those who are abandoned and need love. I thank all of them. God really loves us.

Thank you.

Will democracy prevail in modern Asia? Many of the region’s power holders doubt it, insisting that their countries are too young, too poor, too diverse to open the political process to citizens with a free voice and a free vote. Democracy of the free voice and the free vote, they say, sows discord, stymies economic growth, and violates hallowed traditions of consensus. But Indians feel differently. In their nation of 900 million souls, Asia’s most diverse democracy reigns. In India, voters—590 million of them in a recent national election—decide who will govern and who will not.

Yet, says TIRUNELLAI NARAYANAIYER SESHAN, India’s democracy has grave flaws. It is, he says, government of some people, for some people, by some people. Its sacred ritual, the election; has been sullied by vote buying, fraud, thuggery, and partisan appeals to caste and creed. All this was the norm, at least until 1990, when T. N. SESHAN was named India’s Chief Election Commissioner.

SESHAN, born in 1933 and educated at Madras Christian College and, later, Harvard University, rose brightly through India’s elite Indian Administrative Service. He held several senior posts, including cabinet secretary under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, before assuming responsibility for conducting India’s myriad state and national elections.

SESHAN’s initial analysis of his country’s electoral system revealed 150 specific abuses. When India’s politicians proved reluctant to legislate reforms, he launched a crusade of his own. Interpreting the constitutional mandate of the Election Commission as broadly as possible and stretching its legal powers to their maximum possible limits, SESHAN set about cleansing the Augean stables of Indian democracy—one election after another.

He dispatched Central Police Forces to suppress local goons end prevent theft of ballot boxes. He insisted that all polling stations be accessible and private. He took stern measures to prevent vote buying. He banned ostentatious campaign displays and noisy rallies and required candidates to clean up walls and buildings defaced with their slogans. He enforced spending limits and required contestants to submit full accounts of their expenses for scrutiny by independent government inspectors. He exposed politicians who made illicit use of public resources for electioneering and prohibited election-eve bonanzas for government workers. He banned the sale of liquor and seized unlicensed firearms at election time. He prohibited election propaganda based on religion. He urged that every voter be required to possess a special election identification card. And all the while, he conducted a spirited campaign to educate Indian citizens about their rights and responsibilities as voters.

In asserting the authority and independence of the Election Commission, SESHAN locked horns with India’s Supreme Court and has feuded bitterly with the country’s politicians, leading to more than one attempt to impeach him. His critics call him arrogant and abrasive. But others see him as the iron man of Indian democracy, who has cowed the high and mighty and restored credibility to the electoral system. Because of him, they say, Indian elections are cleaner and safer today and more truly reflect the will of the people. As a consequence, more Indians are voting.

Deeply religious, sixty-three-year-old SESHAN lives modestly with his wife, Jayalakshmi. He engages in few diversions but broods incessantly about the fate of India. Elections, in his view, constitute only one element of modern Indian life that needs “cleaning up.” His thoughts about India’s regeneration are complex but the essential element, he says, must be absolute tolerance.

In electing T. N. SESHAN to receive the 1996 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the board of trustees recognizes his resolute actions to bring order, fairness, and integrity to elections in India, the world’s largest democracy.

It is for me a very great honor to receive this Award and I most sincerely thank you for the Award and this opportunity.

Ever since mankind has known civilization and has striven to achieve a form of governance that is the most benign, democracy has evolved as the mainstay. In the most simplified terms, democracy is government of the people. And when there is a difference of opinion, the will of the majority prevails, but it is never forced down on the minority but is carried out with the consent of the minority. Even when and where beloved king was the head of the state, the will of the people was ascertained and respected. In a democracy, expression of the will of the people is ultimately what elections are about. This is because the vast majority of the people cannot directly deliberate on matters of the state. And they select their representative to represent their views, their aspirations, their desires, and the will of the people through such elected representatives. It is this process which constitutes an election.

Of all the countries in the world, and especially of those which obtained freedom after the Second World War in 1945, India stands out as the most shining example where democracy has come to prevail. In approximately 45 years after the Constitution was adopted, free India has held 11 elections to its national parliament. Each of these elections in 1996, 590 million people exercised their free will to elect 543 representatives. Voting was by adult franchise without distinction of sex, religion, caste or creed. Even after years of development, we still have a tremendous backlog of illiterate people and people who live in poverty. But none of these have daunted the exercise of the democratic will where the most powerful Governments have been set aside to bring in new parties and new ideas. India has steadfastly worked for the freedom of its people and their human rights and it alone among the many countries which attained independence after the Second World War has been able repeatedly to ensure the exercise the will of the people. It bears repetition to say that these are conducted under the most arduous conditions are truly gigantic in size and yet still they have passed off without serious flaw.

Not that attempts at damaging the process have been wanting. But every such attempt has been met and successfully overcome by the will of the people and by instrumentalities of State determined to prevent abuse.

I deemed this Award a tribute to the process of democracy throughout the free world, to the wisdom of millions of India’s electorate not always necessarily formally educated, to the millions of Indian voters who have overcome disabilities of economic status, social disability, poverty, and prejudice to walk into the ballot booth and use that little marking stamp to decidedly say who they want to rule over them. The Indian elections were conducted by over five million civilian employees, two million policemen keeping guard and everyone of them has acquitted himself with a tremendous sense of duty that not one whisper of doubt on the freedom of the election process has been uttered. This is a tribute to everyone concerned and a demonstration, to the free world, that reiteration of democracy is possible under the most difficult conditions.

In accepting this Award, I do so humbly on behalf of the entire people of India and of the electoral structure, with the millions who worked hard in order to make the process a resounding success recently. This Award will only reiterate our resolve to stick to democracy and continue to be a source of inspiration to all people who love freedom.

I want to thank all of the people concerned for having bestowed this Award on me. While this Award will be treated as a symbol of recognition of the extraordinary work of millions of people, I personally shall treat it as a challenge to ensure that what remains of my energies is utilized in the advancement of the great human values of free thinking and free living.

Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you.

As a Christian pastor assigned to a disaster relief project twenty-five years ago, TOSHIHIRO TAKAMI witnessed the desperate survival struggle in Bangladesh that followed the murdering floods of 1970. Discerning a dearth of capable and committed local leaders, he determined to establish an institute dedicated to filling this need. In 1973, “in response to God’s calling,” he says, “we moved to found the Asian Rural Institute,” or ARI.

TAKAMI’s youth was marked by hardship and war. To educate him beyond grammar school, his impoverished parents apprenticed TAKAMI to a Zen monastery in Kyoto. At the age of eighteen, just months before the end of World War II, he enlisted in the Japanese navy and briefly attended radar school. Hard times followed as he fended for himself and his family in post-war Japan, mostly as a manual laborer. But in 1951, TAKAMI found work as a cook for a Christian missionary. He began studying Christianity. Soon he was baptized. A youth organization in the United States then sponsored him for college in Nebraska. By 1960 he had earned his bachelor’s degree, graduated from Yale Divinity School, and become an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ.

Back in Japan, for ten years TAKAMI taught practical theology and directed a Christian Rural Leaders’ course at Rural Evangelical Seminary in Tokyo, work that led to his eye-opening field assignment in Bangladesh and the founding of the Asian Rural Institute.

TAKAMI designed the institute’s curriculum around intensive, small-scale, organic farming and animal husbandry linked to exercises in collective community life. All participants, including TAKAMI, engage daily in dirty-hands chores at the institute and on neighboring farms. And all take their turns preparing food for the group’s common meals. “Sharing food is sharing life,” he says. ARI participators also share in decision making. The difficult process of achieving consensus among a group of strong-minded, quick-to-action people, TAKAMI believes, helps ARI’s rural leaders become more effective change-makers in poor communities. Field tours in Thailand and the Philippines provide exposure to tropical farming conditions.

Christian in inspiration, ARI is ecumenical in practice. All faiths are welcome. Its first class included participants from Bangladesh, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Korea, and Japan. In subsequent years, as the institute’s six-hectare campus north of Tokyo burgeoned with new facilities, men and women from virtually every country in Asia, and eventually many in Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas, joined its unique nine-month rural leaders course. TAKAMI deliberately kept ARI small, accepting only thirty participants a year. Yet he cast the institute’s net so widely that today its nearly eight hundred graduates are spread across the entire developing world. Graduate study tours, refresher courses in Japan, and newsletters keep their ties with the institute fresh.

ARI applicants pledge to return to work in their local communities. Today, over 80 percent of the graduates do so—as rural extension workers, teachers, pastors, and church and social workers.

TAKAMI resigned as ARI director in 1990 but still contributes as a teacher and board member. In recent years, he worked to raise the effectiveness and status of nongovernmental organizations as chairperson of the Japan NGO Center for International Cooperation. TAKAMI believes that global economic trends do not bode well for the self-sufficiency and independence of rural people, nor for the conservation of the environment and natural resources. In this impending crisis, he says, “public welfare cannot be left to government.” Local communities must speak and act for themselves. “To me,” says TAKAMI, “the local level is the highest level.”

In electing TOSHIHIRO TAKAMI to receive the 1996 Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Understanding, the board of trustees recognizes his enlisting community leaders from fifty countries in the common cause of secure, sustainable, and equitable livelihoods for the world’s rural people.

I wish to express my deepest appreciation for this great honor. I appreciate this Award particularly because it recognizes the importance of doing common ordinary things by ordinary people everyday. I appreciate it also because the honor comes from the Philippines, where people are involved in a constant flowing process of self-renewal with a deep sense of humor.

What I have been doing is what common people have been doing for centuries: to cherish Life and food which sustains life. Life and food are inseparable. The reverence of Life leads to the reverence of food and nature.

When my friends, ARI graduates and NGO workers and their partners heard the news, hundreds of them sent messages rejoicing the occasion. They said they share the joy. They felt they are honored also. I share exactly the same feeling. This sharing relationship gives us hope and joy. Common people like us find our lives enriched when we share what little we have and work to sustain lives of others, of the present and future, by producing healthy food.

This sharing of life in our time requires us to live a simple life. Simply live a simple style of life.

I have the honor to recognize the presence among us of Mother Teresita Villaluz and other Augustinian sisters of the La Consolacion Convent. For many years they have been a source of inspiration for us to maintain a simple life. And today’s honor inspires us to keep on living by simply serving others, especially those who are in need.

Thank you very much for the encouragement and inspiration.