May 11

Bob Marley, the Diamond Sutra, and Mother's Day

Author

David Barnhart
May 11, 2025

Last year’s cicada brood. Alabama, May, 2024. Own photo.

Today in 868, Wang Chieh printed the Diamond Sutra using woodcut blocks, making it the first work of printed literature in the world. Five hundred seventy-two years later, Gutenberg would invent movable type. 

Today marks the death, in 1981, of Bob Marley, reggae musician and activist. During his life he converted from Catholicism to Rastafarianism to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. His lyrics expressed pan-Africanism and liberation theology, and his songs have inspired generations of activists and leaders in movements for justice. 

Today is Mother’s Day, which was originally founded to promote women’s health and world peace. Anna Reeves Jarvis and Julia Ward Howe both promoted the holiday, but it would be Jarvis’s daughter, also named Anna Jarvis, who would get the holiday established in 1908. She later worked against its commercialization. 

Reflection: 

The Diamond Sutra ends with the following statement: 

“Reverently made for universal free distribution by Wang Chieh on behalf of his parents on the fifteenth of the fourth moon of the ninth year of Xian Long (May 11, 868)”

This makes the Diamond Sutra not only the first example we have of a printed book, but the first example of a public domain license. 

An excerpt from Julia Ward Howe’s “Mother’s Day Proclamation”:  

“Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.

“Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

Prayer: God of liberation, teach your children the way that leads to peace; to one love, one heart, and one shared world. Amen.