Thanksgiving

 

Today it's Thanksgiving Day in the US.

A day to visit family and to feel grateful for the good things we have: the freedom to travel to see distant loved ones, to eat the foods we like, to say our thanks to God or to Buddha or whatever being we wish to thank. We may have a great deal to be thankful for or we may be grateful that someone cared enough to simply be kind in a world that often forgets kindness.

It's also a day to regret that our good things came at the expense of others: the people who lived here centuries ago who did not know their way of life was about to be destroyed, the turkeys that were raised on factory farms who never got to see the sky over the sheds they spent their entire lives in, the people who live in the Congo who are being systematically wiped out so mining companies can dig up the minerals we need to run the remote to watch the parades and football games.

Thanksgiving—a time to feel profound appreciation and an opportunity to decide to live in a manner that will enable more beings to be grateful next year.

A Buddhist Perspective on Animal Rights

The following is an excerpt from a talk by Professor Ronald Epstein given at San Francisco State University at a conference called "Animal Rights and Our Human Relationship to the Biosphere" held March 29-April 1, 1990. The talk was called "A Buddhist Perspective on Animal Rights".
 

NEWS

I want to relate to you two striking examples of animals acting with more humanity than most humans. My point is not that animals are more humane than humans, but that there is dramatic evidence that animals can act in ways that do not support certain Western stereotypes about their capacities.

About fifteen years ago there was an Associated Press article with a dateline from a northern Japanese fishing village. Several people from a fishing vessel were washed overboard in a storm far at sea. One of the women was found still alive on a beach near her village three days later. At the time a giant sea turtle was briefly seen swimming just offshore. The woman said that when she was about to drown the turtle had come to rescue her and had carried her on its back for three days to the place where she was found.

In February of this year, also according to the Associated Press a man lost at sea was saved by a giant stingray:

A man claims he rode 450 miles on the back of a stingray to safety after his boat capsized three weeks ago, a radio station reported yesterday.

Radio Vanuatu said 18-year-old Lottie Stevens washed up Wednesday in New Caladonia. It said Stevens' boat capsized January 15 while he and a friend were on a fishing trip.

The friend died and after four days spent drifting with the overturned boat, Stevens decided to try to swim to safety, Radio vanuatu reported. There were sharks in the area, but a stingray came to Steven's rescue and carried him on its back for 13 days and nights to New Caladonia, the radio said. (AP, San Francisco Chroncicle, Feb. 8, 1990)

BASIC BUDDHIST PRINCIPLES

Unlike the Judeo-Christian tradition, Buddhism affirms the unity of all living beings, all equally posses the Buddha-nature, and all have the potential to become Buddhas, that is, to become fully and perfectly enlightened. Among the sentient, there are no second-class citizens.

According to Buddhist teaching, human beings do not have a privileged, special place above and beyond that of the rest of life. The world is not a creation specifically for the benefit and pleasure of human beings. Furthermore, in some circumstances according with their karma, humans can be reborn as humans and animals can be reborn as humans.

In Buddhism the most fundamental guideline for conduct is ahimsa—the prohibition against the bringing of harm and/or death to any living being. Why should one refrain from killing? It is because all beings have lives; they love their lives and do not wish to die. Even one of the smallest creatures, the mosquito, when it approaches to bite you, will fly away if you make the slightest motion. Why does it fly away? Because it fears death. It figures that if it drinks your blood, you will take its life. . . .

We should nurture compassionate thought. Since we wish to live, we should not kill any other living being. Furthermore, the karma of killing is understood as the root of all suffering and the fundamental cause of sickness and war, and the forces of killing are explicitly identified with the demonic. The highest and most universal ideal of Buddhism is to work unceasingly for permanent end to the suffering of all living beings, not just humans.

A Change of Heart

 

At the moment of death, there are two things that count: whatever we have done in our lives, and what state of mind we are in at that very moment. Even if we have accumulated a lot of negative karma, if we are able to make a real change of heart at the moment of death, it can decisively influence our future, and transform our karma, for the moment of death is an exceptionally powerful opportunity to purify karma.

~ Sogyal Rinpoche

When is Chanting Effective?

Question: Must people know who Amitabha is for the recitation to be effective, or does it have power regardless?

Response: To attain rebirth in the Pure Land, we need to have faith, vows, and practice. Basically, faith means that we believe what the Buddha taught us, vows means that we make the vow to be reborn in the Pure Land, and practice means we live a moral life and chant “Amituofo.”

Sakyamuni Buddha told us that at the end of the Dharma-ending age, the age we are now in, as his teachings are gradually lost to us; the last sutra to remain will be the Larger Amitabha Sutra, also called the Infinite Life Sutra. This sutra “will remain for another hundred years to rescue sentient beings and lead them to the Western Pure Land.” After that, only the name of Amitabha Buddha will remain for a final one hundred years.

From this, we can see that just chanting “Amituofo” benefits us. How much depends on our good roots, good fortune, and causal conditions. But, at the very least, chanting “Amituofo” will plant more seeds in our Alaya (most subtle) consciousness. So while we do not know when we will benefit from our chanting, we can be assured that at some time we will.

For our sake—and the sake of all those we have vowed to help—the sooner we attain the ultimate benefit and achieve rebirth in the Pure Land, the better.

Trying to meet non-material needs by material means

 

I've written about happiness several times; about how less is more and life is like a soap opera, and when people have asked what attachments are.

Happiness is an inner state. An inner state cannot be brought about by external circumstances. An inner state arises from our mind. From our perceptions and thoughts. From the conclusions we draw and the things we tell ourselves. So happiness does not come from more things or experiences. And it certainly does not come from believing the advertising we are assailed with everywhere we look.

The Buddha warned us about the three poisons of greed, anger, and ignorance. Our greed can destroy our practice. And as we are now beginning to realize, greed can destroy our world. It can do this in many ways. We desire power, we crave revenge, we yearn for love—the list is endless. But the bottom line is: “I want.” And the unspoken thought following this declaration is…and I’m just not going to think about the consequences.

Today I read Use less or use better?. The entry, the excerpt below from a New Yorker article, and the comments were equally good. 

"I asked [Amory] Lovins how his plan to save the world through energy efficiency could accommodate the open-ended nature of human desire. If, as he claims, conservation is profitable, what was to stop the profits from going straight toward more consumption?

"It doesn't automatically prevent that," he said. But, he added, "you might plow the money back into more efficiency rather than more powerboats and helicopter skiing. After all, you don't rewash your clean clothes in the cheaper-to-run washing machine, because your clothes are already clean. At some point, I think you get jaded by continuous trips to Bali.

"Your neighbors might point out that what you're doing is increasingly antisocial," he continued. "On a moral or spiritual level, at some point you may discover you're not all that happy having more stuff or more travel. Trying to meet non-material needs by material means is stupid and futile. Every faith tradition that I know decries materialism.

"Markets are meant to be greedy, not fair. Efficient, not sufficient. They're very good at short-term allocation of scarce resources, but that's all they're good at. They were never meant to tell you how much is enough or how to fulfill the higher purpose of a human being."

We need to figure out where happiness comes from, what our preoccupation with self-gratification is doing to our world and the less fortunate beings we share it with, and how we are going to change.

And as we know from our practice of Buddhism, change starts with ourself.

* "Mr. Green: Environmentalism's Most Optimistic Guru," January, 2007 New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert with Amory Lovins