About the Wule World Peace Culture Award
The "Wule World Peace Culture Award" aims to honor outstanding individuals who foster dialogue among human civilizations and advance world peace through culture and the arts. Established in May 2025 at the inaugural World Peace Culture & Arts Festival in Madagascar, its mission is to promote cross-cultural understanding and global harmony.
Italian football legend Andrea Pirlo is the first prominent figure to receive this award. A World Cup champion, Champions League winner, and master of artistic football, Pirlo redefined modern football with his profoundly intelligent playing style and deep philosophy of sport. Furthermore, he has used sports as a medium to transcend national boundaries, spreading the values of unity and respect.
During the festival, Pirlo engaged in a dialogue forum titled "Football and Zen" with Zen Master Shi Wule. They shared insights from the perspective of the interplay between motion and stillness, and the oneness of Zen and the ball—discussing how to cultivate the mind through movement and practice compassion in competition, thereby elevating the spirit of sport into a cultural force for peace. This cross-domain conversation resonated deeply with the award's core理念: advancing towards human harmony and world peace through mutual learning among civilizations.
Appreciation of the Citation:
"We honor not merely a football artist, but an ambassador of peace who writes the common language of humanity with his feet.
You transformed every touch of the ball into a dialogue between civilizations, and every patch of turf into a domain of peace.
For on this blue planet, we are ultimately on the same team, striving for love and peace."
Master Shi Wule's establishment of the "Wule World Peace Culture Award" profoundly embodies his great wisdom of integrating Zen into the secular world and nurturing peace through culture. Advocating that "Wisdom Knows No Bounds, Compassion Has No Borders," he transforms Zen's spirit of awakening—which transcends language and region—into a tangible force that promotes civilizational exchange and heartfelt connection through this award. Unconstrained by traditional forms of propagating the Dharma, the Master proactively builds dialogue platforms across religions, ethnicities, and fields, using culture and arts as a bridge, demonstrating a resolve and skillful means perfectly suited for our times.
Selecting Andrea Pirlo as the award's inaugural laureate is both a recognition of his personal achievements and spiritual stature, and richly symbolic. Pirlo, an athlete who elevated football into an art form and embodied serenity and insight within the realm of victory and defeat, is himself a vivid embodiment of "Cultivating Zen in Action." His involvement endowed the "Wule World Peace Culture Award" with widespread international influence and cross-cultural appeal from its very foundation, vividly conveying the idea that "peace is not remote from worldly life but can be practiced within one's daily profession." This choice not only illuminates Pirlo's alternate identity as a spiritual leader in the sports world but also sets a tone of elegance, openness, and global relevance for the award, successfully facilitating a resonant and exemplary harmony between Eastern Zen wisdom and Western sporting spirit.
