Hawaii FDP

Our visit to Hawaii was fairly short but it gave all of us some much needed time to stretch our legs off of the ship after about a week at sea. It was also a nice place to transition back into America. For two days, we didn’t have to think about exchange rates, deal with any language barriers, and our cell phones actually worked! Hawaii is the most diverse state in the country though and the culture there is a wonderful mixture composed from the indigenous people of the Hawaiian Islands, the American mainland, and other Pacific peoples.

One of the representations of this diverse culture that I was able to experience along with a group of about fifteen other SAS voyagers was a trip to a Korean Buddhist temple in Honolulu. It may seem surprising that a number of students chose to visit a Buddhist temple in Hawaii when we only had two days there, especially given the fact that we had just finished with a whirlwind trip through Asia. I can’t even count the number of temples I visited during the different excursions I went on.

However, our visit had a very specific purpose. The temple was a beautiful sanctuary in the hills overlooking Honolulu. Built with strong architectural influences from Tibet and Korea, the complex is actually quite large and we were told that it is among the largest in the world. It was founded in 1982 with a message of world peace. Monks from all over the world visit for up to ten months at a time to study there.

That was not why we were there though. We came to this spiritual center in the hills of Honolulu to talk about killing, or more specifically, how to work towards a “nonkilling world.” The term “nonkilling world” was coined by Dr. Glen Paige, our discussion leader and the founder of the Center for Global Nonkilling as well as the author of Nonkilling Global Political Science. He defined a nonkilling world for us as one where people did not kill one another, where there were no weapons, where there was no justification to kill another human, and where there was no fear of being killed.


We all wrote down whether or not we thought a world like this would ever exist and listed a few reasons to support our conclusions. Then we traded note cards amongst ourselves and read the opinions in anonymity. The ensuing discussion was largely a philosophical one that debated the possibility of a nonkilling world. Most of us felt that it a nonkilling world would be impossible to realize, however we all agreed that it was something to work towards.


This FDP was created by Professor Mark Shadle, who joins Semester at Sea from Eastern Oregon University. He teaches three courses aboard the MV Explorer on topics relating to literature, writing, and media. He brings extensive experience with him and expertise in multiple fields and his full bio can be found here.



Photos by SAS photographer, John Weakley