In article ,
escape wrote:

On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 07:59:45 -0600, Rusty Mase opined:

On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 05:49:22 GMT, jOhN
wrote:

"Buddhism, from its inception, enjoined treating all animals with
kindness and compassion as well as required the observance of a
vegeterian diet cannot be denied.

One of the groups espousing Buddhism are the Janists and as I recall
they extend this reverence for life to both plants and animals. In
their view, reincarnation can be in the form of both plants and
animals. So it is possible to be reincarnated as a turnip and,
egads!, end up in the produce section of your local super market.
Janists are thus relegated to finding their sustenance in the trash
can. It is not their fault that discarded food was prepared from a
living organism. Something like that, but I probably put some western
influence in the interpretation.

As gardeners, we are involved in growing plants. Many garden
vegetables and fruits have been genetically modified by selecting for
suitable food production and we end up creating real genetic
monstrosities like broccoli. Then we go out and eliminate a nice
native prairie and replace it with monocultures of these genetic
aberrations, then decapitate them when mature and haul them off, still
alive, to the local market where they are displayed, fatally injured,
waiting for someone to haul them off, cut them up, possibly boil them,
and eat them.

I have always been at a loss as to why this scenario is acceptable but
raising and then killing a chicken for food is not acceptable. It is
based on the fallible concept of "sentience", the human sense that a
living organisms mentally responds to you. The less you sense this
capacity to respond, the less you grant an organism the right to be
revered. This argument seems a little too self-serving to me and I
have always had difficulty conversing with people who espouse a more
or less religious view of vegetarianism.

As gardeners we are better off revering everything, whether we
considering it to be alive or not.

Rusty Mase

I assure you my Buddhist Teacher is an ordained Nun and she eats meat. Not
all
Buddhists are vegetarians. It is believed that the animal is already dead,
so
eat it, but say mantras and make offerings before eating it is always nice to
do.

If you don't believe, that's okay. Buddhism is the only "religion" which
does
not tell us to take Buddha's word for anything. He always said to go out
and
check for ourselves. It all works for me.

We are always killing things every second of every minute. We breath
organisms
in and out always. We walk, crushing sentient beings with each step,
wherever
we walk. Serious Buddhist practitioners do purification practices to
eliminate
those karmic seeds from ever ripening.

I don't say you should believe in Buddhist philosophy, but I do say that
hatred
is so unkind and celebrating the death of any living thing is awful, IMO.

Victoria


Victoria dear, I think you took his comment out of context. ;-)
I personally found it to be humourous and I think he meant it to be such!

While I would NEVER "celebrate" the untimely death of thousands of
grackles, he did have a point! In some areas there are far, FAR too many
of them and as a result, the population is none too healthy and they can
cause a health hazard to other species in those great numbers.

--
K.

Sprout the Mung Bean to reply...

There is no need to change the world. All we have to do is toilet train the world and we'll never have to change it again. -- Swami Beyondanada

,,Cat's Haven Hobby Farm,,Katraatcenturyteldotnet,,

http://cgi6.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...user id=katra