NEW YORK, Sept. 28 (Kyodo) - Ekan Ikeguchi, a Japanese Buddhist monk known for having visited Auschwitz and other sites of war atrocities, performed memorial rites Friday near the ruins of the World Trade Center in honor of the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.
Ikeguchi, a Shingon sect monk from Kagoshima Prefecture, recited the sutra in front of a make-shift Buddhist altar erected about 300 meters from the smoldering rubble where the twin towers once stood.
The ceremony lasted for about half an hour. Apart from reciting the sutra, Ikeguchi offered a prayer that the victims would become enlightened beings and that humanity would regain trust and wisdom.
Since the 1980s, Ikeguchi, an abbot at the Saifuku temple in Kagoshima Prefecture, has visited the Philippines, Siberia, Nanjing and other war crime sites from World War II to comfort the souls of the victims.
In September last year, he visited the site of the Nazi camp at Auschwitz in Poland where Jews and other minority groups were exterminated during the Holocaust.
AP-NY-09-28-01 1804EDT
Copyright 2001 The Kyodo News Service.