camerata

I recall that at Ajahn Brahm's temple in Western Australia, the lay council in charge of the temple's affairs encourages people to offer the monks vegetarian food. But it's no simple matter to get enough B12 from a vegetarian diet, so I guess the monks' health benefits from a small amount of meat.

On 10/6/2017 at 8:50 PM, VincentRJ said:

 

I see a contradiction here, Camerata. The Buddha might well have speculated or surmised that there existed smaller creatures than the eye can see, but to claim that he 'must have been well aware that there were living beings smaller than the eye can see', is a bit like claiming the Buddha must have been well aware that there existed an almighty, creator God. 

 

I was just talking about logical extrapolation here. If we see creatures that vary in size down to what old eyes can see, and remember there are smaller creatures that only our young eyes can see, it's logical to assume there are creatures too small for anyone to see.

On 10/6/2017 at 8:50 PM, VincentRJ said:

Again, I see this as contradictory and confusing, as indeed the founder of the Santi Asoke movement must have. Mammals such as cows, sheep, rabbits, kangaroos, and so on, are closer on the evolutionary scale to human beings. Such creatures can express in their braying, moaning and screeching, what we humans would interpret as suffering.

Sure, but the Buddha warned against the killing, not the eating, even though that is a result of killing. The bad karmic result land on the killer. Regarding the killing, orthodox Buddhism regards the killing of larger animals as karmically worse, because greater effort is required to do it. I think this comes from the Commentaries rather than the suttas. A modern rationalist would see it differently, perhaps arguing that it is worse to kill a more intelligent animal or an animal with a longer lifespan, or as you say, an animal that seems to suffer more. Fortunately - for Buddhists anyway - we are OK as long as we don't kill the animals.

On 10/6/2017 at 8:50 PM, VincentRJ said:

However, if one is aware that tilling the soil, or digging a hole with a spade in order to plant something, is very likely to result in the killing of worms or other soil organisms, then perhaps unwittingly is not the best word, and a degree of intention is involved.

Yeah, I remember that scene in Seven Years in Tibet where the monks don't want to dig the foundation for a building because they might kill insects and worms in the soil. This question of whether bad karmic results attach to what we would call "negligence" has always intrigued me. If I drive while very tired or very stressed, and hit a pedestrian, is that bad karma? Since there was no intent, Buddhism says no. But a modern, rationalist perspective would be, "Yes, you are responsible because of your negligence."

The author of the book has written an article, Is Mindfulness Meditation BS? 

A couple of quotes:

" It was a very strange thing to have an unpleasant feeling cease to be unpleasant without it really going away. "

" The not-self experience isn’t strictly binary. You don’t have to think of it as a threshold that you either manage to finally cross, to transformative effect, or forever fall short of, getting no edification whatsoever. As strange as it may sound, you can, with even a fairly modest daily meditation practice, experience a little bit of not-self. "

The Buddha must have been well aware that there were living beings smaller than the eye can see but I think he would have laughed at the idea of trying to figure out whether they were sentient or breathing, or how to avoid killing these unseen creatures. It's just the kind of distraction that has no practical value in reaching enlightenment, and that he was at pains to avoid discussing.

It's the same with the monastic rule about not eating meat that you know has been killed specifically for you. All meat we eat is - indirectly - killed for us, yet we know he rejected mandatory vegetarianism. He had to draw a line somewhere that takes into account intent and control of the situation, and that was it.

The lay precept not to kill and the monastic rule about eating meat were in fact practical guidelines for achieving a specific objective.

As I am sure know, unwittingly killing worms in the ground is not bad kamma in Buddhism because there is no intent. There are several puzzling monastic rules (i.e. not growing food) that were devised because Buddhists were criticized by their over-zealous rivals, the Jains.

You might want to have a look at the Buddhism Forum guidelines:

All are welcome "provided what you have to say is relevant to Buddhism." In answer to your question, yes, most of the regular posters in the Buddhism forum over the years have been Buddhists discussing Buddhism.

On 10/3/2017 at 11:48 AM, VincentRJ said:

 

 

This situation highlights the problem of strictly adhering to all the precepts of a religion that was founded many centuries ago when the general understanding of the environment around us, our biology, our planet and the universe, was so different or so limited compared with our modern scientific understanding.

 

 

Now it's obvious that 2,500 years ago, during the life of the Buddha, there was no knowledge of bacteria, microbes and viruses. The microscope did not exist in those times. It would therefore be impossible for the original Buddhist precepts to even mention such life forms as bacteria and microbes.

 

 

Don't forget that the Buddha was not setting down a collection of absolutes written in stone by God. The precepts were practical training rules to facilitate attaining enlightenment. The actual word used in the Pali Canon is either "living" or "breathing" (as in "Abandoning onslaught on breathing beings..."). Presumably it is easier to know if a creature is living and breathing than if it is "sentient." Perhaps because of this, in his commentary, Buddhaghosa says that to violate the precept one must "perceive the being to be living," which would be impossible in the case of bacteria.

IMO, and in line with Ven Buddhadhasa's thinking, what's important is the effect of actions on one's mental states. Would we really care much about killing an invisible microbe compared to, say, a kitten? The Canon says that the reason for not killing is that all creatures fear suffering and death, but that is not the observable behaviour of bacteria.

Quote

 

I interpret the Buddha's message here as, 'Do not kill or harm sentient creatures unnecessarily, or wantonly, or without compassionate regard to their suffering.'

 

It is possible to kill animals humanely.

 

I don't think that's what he really meant. As Ven Thannissaro says about the lay precepts:

" The precepts are formulated with no ifs, ands, or buts. This means that they give very clear guidance, with no room for waffling or less-than-honest rationalizations. An action either fits in with the precepts or it doesn't. Again, standards of this sort are very healthy to live by. Anyone who has raised children has found that, although they may complain about hard and fast rules, they actually feel more secure with them than with rules that are vague and always open to negotiation. Clear-cut rules don't allow for unspoken agendas to come sneaking in the back door of the mind. If, for example, the precept against killing allowed you to kill living beings when their presence is inconvenient, that would place your convenience on a higher level than your compassion for life.

Convenience would become your unspoken standard — and as we all know, unspoken standards provide huge tracts of fertile ground for hypocrisy and denial to grow. If, however, you stick by the standards of the precepts, then as the Buddha says, you are providing unlimited safety for the lives of all. There are no conditions under which you would take the lives of any living beings, no matter how inconvenient they might be. "

IMO, the message is that not killing/harming at all is the most skillful way to live life and attain enlightenment. But the Buddha recognized that this would not be possible some of the time, and that negative kamma would attach to the killing according to various factors (the intention, the relative virtue of a human victim, the size of a creature, etc).

At a Dhamma talk I attended, Ajahn Pasanno said that a major function of the precepts is to create mindfulness. i.e. The stopping and thinking when about to swat a mosquito cultivates mindfulness. I personally catch mossies in a plastic box and release them outside, but I don't have any problem spraying the place when the neighbour's cats bring fleas in because I can't see them and I can't catch them.

5 hours ago, oldhippy said:

 

PS Are bacteria, microbes and virusses considered to be animals? Can a buddhist kill them?

 

No, they aren't considered animals and aren't included in the precept on killing.

Several off-topic posts have been deleted.

Some good tips in this article...

How to Get Rid of Pests and Bugs the Buddhist Way

Kill that impulse! Here are compassionate Buddhist solutions for your favorite pests, without killing them.

By Allan Badiner

Ants

If you have an ant infestation, use your vacuum to quickly get rid of the invaders, and then immediately empty the vacuum bag in the outdoor compost pile or at some distance from your house.

Do not use ant bait, or poison sprays like Raid that continue in the toxic waste stream from their point of manufacture to their ultimate destination in landfills or via runoff or sewage into our waterways and oceans.

It is important to quickly erase the scent trail that the ants have laid down. First, wash with soapy water and then use a citrus-based repellant, or spray countertops and affected areas with a mixture of juiced lemon, tea tree oil, grapefruit seed extract, and a little mint tea.

The key to ant control is cleanliness: wipe up food spills immediately, wipe down food preparation surfaces with soapy water, remove garbage frequently, clean food debris out of sinks, rinse well any dirty dishes left in the sink, and sweep and mop floors regularly.

Store the food most attractive to ants (honey, sugar, sweet liqueurs, cough syrup, etc.) in the fridge or in jars with rubber gaskets and lids that close with a metal clamp, or zip-lock bags. Unless the lid of a screw-top jar has a rubber seal, ants will follow the threads right into the jar. A few layers of waxed paper (not plastic wrap) between the jar and the lid, if screwed down tightly, will work well as a barrier. Transfer other foods, such as cookies, cereals, crackers, etc in paper boxes, to containers with tight-fitting lids or zip locks; and keep butter in the fridge. Paper and cardboard boxes are not ant-proof.

Full article at Tricycle.

Metaphors are rarely perfect. In this case the rubber sandals represent mental cultivation, so there is no cost and it is available to all.

The Buddha's teachings are available to all. If I lose a leg in an accident there is nothing I can do to regain my former physical wholeness, but there is a lot I can do (using the Dhamma) to deal with the resulting mental anguish.

Not really. A practising Buddhist would teach others how to put on the rubber sandals.

In Buddhism the "seatbelt" is the cultivation of the mind. It isn't a different plan for every possible contingency, it's a readjustment of the mind to handle all contingencies.

As Ajahn Chah once said, if your feet hurt because of rocky ground, you don't attempt to cover the entire world surface with rubber, you put on a pair of rubber sandals.

17 hours ago, VincentRJ said:

If I were to start thinking that I shall suffer at some time in the future, then such a thought, in the present, would actually be itself a form of suffering.

 

Accepting the fact that unexpected accidents can happen at any time and planning for them does not mean you worry about them all the time. You have home insurance but I'm sure you don't worry about the possibility of a fire all the time.

19 hours ago, VincentRJ said:

I would then have the time to read all the e-books on my Kindle. 

 

Anyway, isn't it a major Buddhist principle that only the present moment exists. Worrying about what might happen in the future is ridiculous. Trying to be mindful all the time is good advice and should reduce the risk of accidents occurring. That's all one can do, and avoid taking unnecessary risks of course.

What the Buddha said was that good intentions/actions in the present result in a better future. This doesn't mean that doing good now will enable you to dodge future disasters, but it will prepare you to deal with them and suffer less as a result.

What I was getting at - based on my own experience - is that practising the dhamma has a slow, but cumulative effect on one's mental states. If one has been practising for a decade and then gets hit by a bus, the preparation has already been done and the suffering will be less. Taking up the dhamma after the accident would be less effective. This is quite different from, say, being converted to Christianity by some Billy Graham style evangelist, where there is a radical transformation of mental orientation in a very short time.

To anyone who says "I don't suffer" I would say, "But you will in the future," if not from an accident, then from health problems in old age. So the dhamma is a form of insurance. You have home insurance, right? But your home isn't on fire right this minute, is it?

But what if you are run over by a bus tomorrow and become a paraplegic?

Try Bhikkhu Bodhi's In the Buddha's Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon (The Teachings of the Buddha). He orders the teachings by topic, each followed by an explanation in plain English.

Pretty standard stuff in Thailand. The ruler of the underworld is Lord Yama, originally a Hindu god, but also mentioned in the Pali Canon.

The people stuck on poles looks more like a European torture to me. At least, I don't recall seeing it in Thailand.

I think it is just a literary device. Richard Preston uses it in his books about viruses to make non-sentient globs of protein sound extremely sinister.

The book is available on Kindle, so I will definitely be buying it.

Interesting idea: that natural selection is our Creator.

The book is a New York Times best-seller, which I guess means that non-Buddhists find it interesting.

There's an interview with the author on the Secular Buddhism website.

Off-topic posts have been deleted.

Why Buddhism is True (And Why You Can Blame Natural Selection for Your Suffering)

In this adaptation from his new book, Why Buddhism is True, Robert Wright explains how evolutionary psychology supports the Buddhist diagnosis of the human predicament.

By Robert Wright

The Matrix is sometimes said to be a “dharma movie” because it allegorically captures the human predicament as Buddhism depicts it: Life as ordinarily lived is a kind of illusion, and you can’t be truly free until you pierce the illusion and look into the heart of things. Until you “see it for yourself,” as one character explains to Neo, you will remain in “bondage.”

That robot overlords are behind the illusion afflicting Neo is in one sense a blessing. They give him something to rebel against—and rebellions are energizing! An oppressive enemy focuses the mind and steels you for the struggle ahead.

That would come in handy with the Buddhist struggle against illusion, because meditation, a big part of that struggle, can be hard to sustain—getting on the cushion every day, even when you don’t feel like it, and then carrying the insights from meditation into everyday life. Too bad that in Buddhism there’s no evil perpetrator of delusion to fight!

In traditional Buddhism, actually, there is: the Satan-like supernatural being named Mara, who unsuccessfully tempted the Buddha during the epic meditation session that led to his great awakening. Mara, though, has no place in the more secular Buddhism that has been spreading through the west in recent years. Kind of disappointing.

But there’s good news on this front. If you would like to think of meditation practice as being a rebellion against an oppressive overlord, there’s a way to do that: just think of yourself as fighting your creator, natural selection.

Full article:

https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/why-buddhism-is-true/

When my son became a monk

There’s a saying I’ve heard among some Western Buddhists: to lose yourself, either meditate or travel. What about doing both at once, while keeping pace with your 28-year-old son, whom you named Nathan Dale at birth but who is now Tan Nisabho, a Thai Forest monk? Long gone is the wavy cap of nut-brown hair and thick eyebrows; his gleaming skull appears and disappears like stages of the moon between his fortnightly shavings.

On those just-shaved full moon days, Tan Nisabho (Tan Po for short) looks a lot like the infant whose newborn eyes gazed unflinchingly into mine, prompting me to say aloud something utterly unexpected after he was cleaned and swaddled: “Oh! This one’s not going the normal route! A monastic!”

Full article: https://tricycle.org/magazine/son-became-monk/

You’re just not getting it, Trd. You are the one pushing Vedanta and making claims about what the Buddha really taught, yet declining to support those claims. If non-Buddhists turn up in a Buddhist forum pushing their personal beliefs or dubious claims they can expect to be challenged, and it’s ridiculous to then play the victim and cite censorship, sectism, orthodoxy, or narrow-mindedness.

This is a forum for the discussion of Buddhism, so we aren’t obliged to dilute the content by accommodating non-Buddhists who feel the need to have their own personal belief system validated. We do have a responsibility to newcomers to give them factual information and a solid foundation to work with rather than confusing and contradictory arguments. If you - or anyone else - has a problem with this, PM myself or Sabaijai or feel free to request a Spirituality-Religion forum that is broader in scope than this one. Don’t bring it up in forum topics

It's been said before, as long as a decade ago by my co-mod, but if all we do is offer unsupported opinions on what the Buddha taught, there won't be much meaningful discussion. There has to be a reference point and the obvious (though not perfect) one is the early suttas and vinaya of the Pali Canon.

The Mahayana scriptures are not a good reference point because of their diverse teachings and because scholars tell us they were created hundreds of years after the Buddha died.

I suggest the non-dualism issue be opened as a new topic instead of letting it hijack this one.

Sent on the move with my mobile phone. Please excuse the brevity.

My social security number also begins with a 6. I guess it never occurred to me that it could/should be the Citizen's ID number. I suppose I ought to ask about changing it.