Nothing is what it appears to be. This beautiful royal building is made of polystyrene and is part of a Thai film set near Kanchanaburi, the place best known for its bridge and the River Kwai..
First I would like to thank the hundreds of people who spend more than half an hour reading my posts each day. I can recommend some stories I have posted in January and February.
.
Someone asked me what question I would ask the Dalai Lama if I was granted a personal audience with him. I said: “I would ask the Dalai Lama if he had a question which he would like to find an answer to. After that I would ask him a lot of questions about karma, especially regarding killing living beings.”
1.2 million of 6 million Tibetans perished after the Chinese invaded their country, during the initial war, during the Great Leap Forward, the Great Famine and Cultural Revolution, and in addition 20 to 30 million Chinese died. There were only few people who were responsible for this devastation, only few people who ordered the soldiers to kill and torture, and let people starve. Would a person create bad karma for himself if he were to kill someone who is responsible for so much misery? If I had lived and killed Adolf Hilter in 1940, would I have created bad karma for myself?
I agree, these issues are difficult to answer.
I love Thailand but even when you live in an urban area, whether it be a shack or a high-rise condominium, everybody has to deal with ant armies. It is impossible to eat inside your home and leave out a plate with some leftovers for more than a minute, as the ant army will march in to take anything away. Even a sugar-coated birth control pill will be taken away by the army. I had one of those pills taken out of its packing and left it next to the sink for a few moments in order to fill up a glass with water. To my surprise, the pill turned black and started moving away towards the power socket.
Perhaps that is why most Thai houses are spotless. You just can’t afford to leave anything around that appeals to the tiny Thai ants that are even interested in birth control pills. Our domestic ants live in a nest behind a power socket in the master bathroom. We leave the ant nest untouched. I could ask our staff to clear the house of ants, but would I create extra bad karma by asking other people to kill living beings, no matter whether they are ants or not? Don’t ants deserve a good life and no suffering?
I was able to get rid of a nest that had found shelter inside my laptop computer. I decided to get them all out by putting some sweet strawberry flavoured chewing gum on top of the computer. Within minutes all the little ants had come out of the interior and had gotten stuck to the chewing gum. I was able to dispose of the entire nest.
The computer ants made up just a small platoon, but I still haven’t taken any measure to get rid of the large regiment in the bathroom’s power socket, nor the battalion that is creating a highway from a lamp on the wall towards the aircon-unit a few metres to the left. I have considered spraying the area with anti-ant poison, but I am not bothered enough by them to start taking such drastic measures. They may nest in the aircon unit and screw it up, but…what about karma.
I don’t mind flushing a few ants through the sink when I am washing my hands or cleaning my teeth with my fancy electric Braun Oral B- toothbrush. I consider that those ants were just unlucky, they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. I do feel bad about them because would you want to be flushed away through a sink…in Bangkok? I said 108 prayers to counterbalance my bad merit of killing small sentient beings every day.
The first vow I took as a Bodhisattva was not to kill any sentient being. Killing hundreds or even thousands of ants would give me bad karma, wouldn’t it?
But what to do with the living parasites in our intestines? This is Asia and a few times a year it happens to all of us that our arses start to itch and then everybody knows that their intestines are infested by worms. They take a few pills that can be bought at any pharmacy for only 30 baht to kill those little wormy creatures.
So how does this work? As a Buddhist I am not allowed to kill living beings, but how kicks karma in when I am killing creatures that may harm me and my loved ones? If I can avert danger to humans by killing parasitic creatures, malaria mosquitoes, or even another human being, will that create bad karma for me?
The Tibetans are very practical people and we often spoke about this. They consider the life of a human being more precious than the life of an intestinal worm, thus killing the worms would save the life of the human. The same thing applies to malaria mosquitoes. I vaguely remember a story told to me by a lama. There was a ship with 500 men aboard. One of them was the captain who received news that one of the crew was a crazy lunatic who had plans to kill everybody on board the next day. The captain couldn’t change the crazy man’s plan to kill the entire crew and passengers. The captain decided to kill the crazy man, saving the lives of 499 people, and preventing the crazy man from creating bad merit, as he would not be able to kill 499 people, thus be reborn with better karmic conditions. (Long sentence: read it again!) Did the captain create bad merit? I don’t think so. He saved the lives of many men.
In Tibet it is very difficult to grow fruit and vegetables and their diets are poor. They have their yaks and sheep and barley flower but that is about it. So they need to eat meat. In order to eat meat, one must slaughter an animal. The Tibetans rather have one large animal killed than many small animals, as they consider taking the life of one large animal adding less bad merit to their account than killing many small living beings. In the old Tibet there were Chinese Muslim butchers who would slaughter yaks for the Tibetans, as no Tibetan would want to create bad merit by slaughtering a yak themselve.
I used to have long debates about this solution. “If the Tibetans would refuse to eat yak meat in the first place, the Muslims wouldn't need to kill yaks...for them. Don’t you think this way of avoiding bad karma is flawed?”
Even the Tibetan lamas would shake their heads, smiling and often rely on silence. They didn’t have a clear cut answer to this matter. Their reasoning was: “Well, when the butcher slaughters a yak, the animal is already dead. So when you buy that meat and eat it, it doesn’t give you bad merit. It’s a waste to throw the meat away.”
And with such answers I had to retreat to my room and meditate on what I would allow myself to think, say, or do. I do believe in karma, I do believe in the law of cause and effect.
1.2 million of 6 million Tibetans perished after the Chinese invaded their country, during the initial war, during the Great Leap Forward, the Great Famine and Cultural Revolution, and in addition 20 to 30 million Chinese died. There were only few people who were responsible for this devastation, only few people who ordered the soldiers to kill and torture, and let people starve. Would a person create bad karma for himself if he were to kill someone who is responsible for so much misery? If I had lived and killed Adolf Hilter in 1940, would I have created bad karma for myself?
I agree, these issues are difficult to answer.
I love Thailand but even when you live in an urban area, whether it be a shack or a high-rise condominium, everybody has to deal with ant armies. It is impossible to eat inside your home and leave out a plate with some leftovers for more than a minute, as the ant army will march in to take anything away. Even a sugar-coated birth control pill will be taken away by the army. I had one of those pills taken out of its packing and left it next to the sink for a few moments in order to fill up a glass with water. To my surprise, the pill turned black and started moving away towards the power socket.
Perhaps that is why most Thai houses are spotless. You just can’t afford to leave anything around that appeals to the tiny Thai ants that are even interested in birth control pills. Our domestic ants live in a nest behind a power socket in the master bathroom. We leave the ant nest untouched. I could ask our staff to clear the house of ants, but would I create extra bad karma by asking other people to kill living beings, no matter whether they are ants or not? Don’t ants deserve a good life and no suffering?
I was able to get rid of a nest that had found shelter inside my laptop computer. I decided to get them all out by putting some sweet strawberry flavoured chewing gum on top of the computer. Within minutes all the little ants had come out of the interior and had gotten stuck to the chewing gum. I was able to dispose of the entire nest.
The computer ants made up just a small platoon, but I still haven’t taken any measure to get rid of the large regiment in the bathroom’s power socket, nor the battalion that is creating a highway from a lamp on the wall towards the aircon-unit a few metres to the left. I have considered spraying the area with anti-ant poison, but I am not bothered enough by them to start taking such drastic measures. They may nest in the aircon unit and screw it up, but…what about karma.
I don’t mind flushing a few ants through the sink when I am washing my hands or cleaning my teeth with my fancy electric Braun Oral B- toothbrush. I consider that those ants were just unlucky, they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. I do feel bad about them because would you want to be flushed away through a sink…in Bangkok? I said 108 prayers to counterbalance my bad merit of killing small sentient beings every day.
The first vow I took as a Bodhisattva was not to kill any sentient being. Killing hundreds or even thousands of ants would give me bad karma, wouldn’t it?
But what to do with the living parasites in our intestines? This is Asia and a few times a year it happens to all of us that our arses start to itch and then everybody knows that their intestines are infested by worms. They take a few pills that can be bought at any pharmacy for only 30 baht to kill those little wormy creatures.
So how does this work? As a Buddhist I am not allowed to kill living beings, but how kicks karma in when I am killing creatures that may harm me and my loved ones? If I can avert danger to humans by killing parasitic creatures, malaria mosquitoes, or even another human being, will that create bad karma for me?
The Tibetans are very practical people and we often spoke about this. They consider the life of a human being more precious than the life of an intestinal worm, thus killing the worms would save the life of the human. The same thing applies to malaria mosquitoes. I vaguely remember a story told to me by a lama. There was a ship with 500 men aboard. One of them was the captain who received news that one of the crew was a crazy lunatic who had plans to kill everybody on board the next day. The captain couldn’t change the crazy man’s plan to kill the entire crew and passengers. The captain decided to kill the crazy man, saving the lives of 499 people, and preventing the crazy man from creating bad merit, as he would not be able to kill 499 people, thus be reborn with better karmic conditions. (Long sentence: read it again!) Did the captain create bad merit? I don’t think so. He saved the lives of many men.
In Tibet it is very difficult to grow fruit and vegetables and their diets are poor. They have their yaks and sheep and barley flower but that is about it. So they need to eat meat. In order to eat meat, one must slaughter an animal. The Tibetans rather have one large animal killed than many small animals, as they consider taking the life of one large animal adding less bad merit to their account than killing many small living beings. In the old Tibet there were Chinese Muslim butchers who would slaughter yaks for the Tibetans, as no Tibetan would want to create bad merit by slaughtering a yak themselve.
I used to have long debates about this solution. “If the Tibetans would refuse to eat yak meat in the first place, the Muslims wouldn't need to kill yaks...for them. Don’t you think this way of avoiding bad karma is flawed?”
Even the Tibetan lamas would shake their heads, smiling and often rely on silence. They didn’t have a clear cut answer to this matter. Their reasoning was: “Well, when the butcher slaughters a yak, the animal is already dead. So when you buy that meat and eat it, it doesn’t give you bad merit. It’s a waste to throw the meat away.”
And with such answers I had to retreat to my room and meditate on what I would allow myself to think, say, or do. I do believe in karma, I do believe in the law of cause and effect.
Posts
So I guess no mater what we do, we're going to acquire some varying degree of bad karma. Thus I guess I should meditate on how to acquire less bad and more good Karma.
ReplyDeleteExactly. Helping other people is a very good way of accumulating a lot of good merit. Just meditating on how to be good is not good enough. Thought, word, action is the formula. There is something going on up there and it's like a computer. It counts are good and bad deeds, good and bad according to the laws of the universe, not our worldly laws. And I feel that by helping other people, one creates good merit and start to have fewer problems. The persons often start to feel happier.
ReplyDelete