"Jizos for Peace" was an initiative by the community of Great Vow Zen Monastery in Oregon to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The people at Great Vow began creating cloth panels decorated with images of jizo (bodhisattva of lost causes). They planned to sew together the panels and take them to Japan in Summer of 2005 as a peace offering to the people of Japan. The goal was to accumulate 270,000 images of jizo--and each cloth panel contained as many jizos as its creator could muster. Great Vow Monastery could not complete the task alone, so they invited all interested people to help out by making a cloth panel.

If you want to know more about the project, please visit www.jizosforpeace.org

Children at a local school work on panels for the Jizos for Peace Project.