The fortieth anniversary of the Assisi Prayer for Peace
Assisi, 25 to 27 October 2026
Forty years ago, on 27 October 1986, Pope John Paul II invited the leaders of the world’s religions and spiritual traditions to the small Umbrian town of Saint Francis. They did not come to negotiate, nor to blur their differences, but to do something far simpler and far more radical: to stand side by side and pray for peace. From that day onward, what came to be called the “Spirit of Assisi” has travelled the world.
This October, that spirit returned home. From 25 to 27 October 2026, the Community of Sant’Egidio gathered religious and spiritual leaders from more than fifty countries in Assisi for the International Meeting for Peace, under a title drawn from the first words of Pope Leo XIV: “Unarmed and Disarming Peace.” Among them, representing the contemplative heart of the dharmic traditions, was Lama Sherab Gyatso (Acharya).
A Gathering of the World’s Traditions
For three days, Assisi and the nearby town of Bastia Umbria became a meeting place of humanity’s great paths. The Inaugural Assembly filled a vast hall with robes of every colour: Orthodox patriarchs and Catholic cardinals, rabbis and imams, Sikh and Jain elders, monks of the Theravāda in saffron and of the Japanese schools in black, and teachers of India’s ancient traditions. On the following days, forums across Assisi explored what peace demands of us in a time of war.
On the final afternoon, before the Basilica of Saint Francis, the leaders gathered for the photograph that would travel the world, published the next day in Italy’s leading newspaper, the Corriere della Sera. In the front row stand Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, Patriarch Sahak II and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally. And on the right, in the deep red and white of the Indian tradition, stands Lama Sherab Gyatso, among the representatives of the dharmic religions.
Disarming the Self
Of all the voices heard in Assisi, few touched the heart of the contemplative path as directly as that of the Venerable Gijun Sugitani, Supreme Priest of the Tendai school of Japanese Buddhism and a faithful companion of the Spirit of Assisi for decades. Standing before the assembly, he spoke two sentences that might have come from any of the great masters of meditation:
“True religion never stands against humanity. It is always on its side.”
Ven. Gijun Sugitani
For practitioners of the Great Perfection, these words carry a particular resonance. The weapons that threaten the world are forged first in the mind: in grasping, aversion and the hard, defended sense of a separate self. The masters of Dzogchen teach that when awareness recognises its own nature, open, luminous and unobstructed, there is nothing left to defend. This is the disarmament of the self. It is not a renunciation of strength, but the discovery of a peace that was never absent, and from which genuine kindness flows of its own accord.
In the Garden of Saints
On the second day, Lama Sherab Gyatso (Acharya) was invited to the Global House of Friendship and Hope in Santa Maria degli Angeli, a house dedicated to the friendship of the world’s religions, which opened its doors in August 2026. There, in its Garden of Saints, he took part in a filmed conversation with Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe, Imam Yahya Pallavicini and Maureen Goodman of the Brahma Kumaris, reflecting together on what it means to receive inspiration from the saints of other traditions, and on the role of friendship in the spiritual life.
The Garden of Saints honours seven saints of the world’s religions as worthy of veneration by all. Among them stands Śāntideva, the great Indian master of Nālandā, whose Way of the Bodhisattva, the Bodhicaryāvatāra, has shaped the heart of the Mahāyāna for thirteen centuries and remains a cornerstone of practice in every Tibetan lineage, the Great Perfection included. To see Śāntideva honoured there, in the city of Saint Francis, is to see two kindred spirits side by side: the saint who called the sun and the moon his brother and sister, and the bodhisattva who prayed that he might become food for the hungry, medicine for the sick and a protector for those without protection.
Śāntideva now has a place in the Garden of Saints of the Global House of Friendship and Hope, Assisi, with his Dedication of Merit from the Way of the Bodhisattva.
The Word of the Pope
Pope Leo XIV had hoped to close the meeting in person, at the tomb of Saint Francis. Following his recent surgery, and on the advice of his doctors, he sent a video message instead, which was read before the assembled leaders. He expressed his regret at not being present to see their faces, and offered words of rare clarity: war can never be waged in the name of God. There is no holy war; only peace is holy.
Then he described what the Spirit of Assisi truly is: the rejection of any religious justification for war, a spirit of mediation and dialogue, and, in his own words, contemplative experience joined to creative action for a future of peace. He spoke of prayer as a school of dialogue, with God, with one another and with all creatures.
That the Pope himself should name contemplative experience as one of the pillars of peace is no small thing. Again and again in Assisi, in the forums, in the prayers and in conversations at the margins, the same insight returned: that peace in the world cannot be separated from the inner life, and that the great contemplative traditions of humanity hold a treasure the world urgently needs.
A Meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury
Among the many encounters of those days, one stood out. Lama Sherab Gyatso met the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, the first woman to lead the Church of England and the worldwide Anglican Communion. In a brief but warm conversation, they spoke about the connection between the spiritual and contemplative dimension, the religious and the moral: how ethics that are not rooted in contemplative experience risk becoming mere rules, how religion without inner realisation risks becoming mere identity, and how the contemplative path, when it is authentic, naturally flowers as moral sensitivity and care for others.
It was a conversation in the true Spirit of Assisi: not the meeting of two positions, but of two seekers who recognise in each other the same longing for what is real.
Prayer at the Heart of Peace
On the last afternoon, the leaders of each tradition prayed for peace in their own way, in different places around the Sacred Convent, before gathering in the Lower Square of Saint Francis for the closing ceremony. As the sun set over the ancient stones, turning them to gold, the appeal for peace was solemnly proclaimed, and the candles of peace were lit and passed on to children, a quiet gesture of hope for the generation to come.
Seated among monks in their saffron robes, Lama Sherab Gyatso joined in this prayer: that all beings may be free from the causes of suffering, and that the disarmament of the heart may one day become the disarmament of the world.
What Assisi Teaches Us
Forty years after John Paul II, Assisi reminded the world of something every practitioner knows in the silence of meditation. Peace is not first a treaty or a policy. It begins where a human being stops grasping and defending, and rests in the open nature of mind. From there, compassion is no longer an effort; it is simply what awareness does.
For the Dzogchen Nyingthig community, it is a source of deep joy that the voice of the contemplative traditions, and our Root-Teacher’s Great Perfection among them, was present in this historic place, at this historic moment. May the Spirit of Assisi, and the unconquerable peace of the nature of mind, continue to awaken in every heart.
