By Carlo Luyckx<\/p>\n\n
One of the most enriching experiences of my eighteen years as deputy mayor of Saint-Gilles, one of the towns that are part of the Brussels Capital Region, was the creation in 2010 of the roundtable of interconvictional dialogue. About forty representatives of all the churches, mosques, synagogues, temples and other places of worship as well as the freethinkers met twice a year to discuss and better know each other. The Saint-Gilles roundtable was first launched at the townhall in the presence of the mayor.<\/p>\n\n
Afterwards we were welcomed each time in another of the emblematic places of each spiritual or philosophical tradition. Saint-Gilles being host to over 140 different nationalities, this initiative was an exceptional way of building bridges between the communities which compose the multicultural richness of the town. I had already understood that a culture can only be enriched by encountering other cultures. This roundtable experience has largely proved that the same counts for religions and philosophies.<\/p>\n\n
Having thus established longstanding relationships of trust, one day in 2018 the Rabbi of the local synagogue, member of the roundtable, phoned me to propose becoming, as president of the Belgian Buddhist Union, one of the founding members of Emouna Belgium, following the French example where the successful initiative of Rabbi Pauline Bebe had been launched in partnership with the Science Po University in Paris. Together with the representatives in Belgium of the catholic, protestant, anglican and orthodox churches, of islam and of Judaism, Emouna Belgium was launched in 2019 as a training program for priests, rabbis, imams, buddhists and people with responsibilities in faith-based or philosophical organizations.<\/p>\n\n
Each academic year of Emouna Belgium, a group of 20 to 30 participants meets twice a month to listen to speakers on different topics that are of special interest for their activities, but also take part in in role-playing games, debates on themes that are usually avoided in traditional interfaith dialogue, art workshops, etc. At the end of each year starting in October and finishing in June, the students must present projects that are developed in small groups composed of different convictions. The result is that, as the training progresses, lasting bonds of friendship have been forged between people who normally rarely meet each other. At the end of the experience, the participants regret that the programme has already ended, and often find themselves active in projects that they had developed together.<\/p>\n\n
Another important aspect is that for each of the participants, the fact of having to confront their faith or philosophy with the beliefs of the others could be seen as a significant challenge. Among the few hundreds who already had the Emouna experience in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and since this year also in Italy, nobody has lost his or her faith or converted to another conviction. On the contrary, having to discover and try to understand the beliefs of others has proven to be a stimulus to better understand and deepen one\u2019s own tradition, while going beyond the limited principle of tolerance to develop an authentic interest and respect for all other beliefs and philosophies.<\/p>\n\n
Carlo Luyckx became Buddhist in 1971 in Samye Ling, Scotland, the first Tibetan monastery in the West founded in 1967 by Chogyam Trungpa and Akong Tulku Rinpoche. He has since then been studying and practising in the Karma Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. Having obtained in 1988 university degrees in Political Sciences and International Relations as well as in International Law at the Universit\u00e9 Libre de Bruxelles, he became Deputy Director of BIPAR (Bureau International des Producteurs d\u2019Assurances), a position which allowed him to have a concrete experience of the functioning of the European institutions in Brussels. Carlo is president of Belgian Buddhist Union since 2014 and responsible for the negotiations with the federal government and the regional authorities in the process of the official recognition of Buddhism in Belgium. Since 2021, he represents the European Buddhist Union to the European institutions in Brussels.<\/p>\n\n
This article first appeared in EBU Magazine #13 \u2013 Buddhism & Modern Europe<\/a> (Winter 2024). 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